→ January 28, 2023
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All Quiet on the Western Front.

All Quiet on the Western Front took home nine nominations for this year’s Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best international Feature (as Germany’s submission). It is, as you might know, adapted from Erich Maria Remarque’s 1929 novel of World War I. It’s big, and epic, and certainly lets you know where everyone involves stands on the subject of war. (They think it’s bad.) It’s also a film that doesn’t have any good reason to exist.

Paul Bäumer (Felix Kammerer) is our protagonist, an idealistic and nationalistic 17-year-old in Germany who signs up to fight for the fatherland in 1917, more than halfway through World War I. He and his schoolmates are quickly disabused of any notions of war as heroic or noble, as they’re thrown right into trench warfare and find one of their number dead before they can fire their first shot. We follow them through the next eighteen or so months, till the Armistice, as one by one they’re killed in battle, often in circumstances that might be ridiculous if they weren’t so tragic. Along the way, we see them hungry, disillusioned, bored, and filthy, along with occasional reminders of the use of chemical weapons that marked World War I for particular brutality. The film cuts away to scenes of negotiations between German and French leaders or discussions among German brass, all of which take place in relative luxury – and clean, dry conditions – compared to the sodden trenches in which Paul and his mates fight and die.

I had to read Remarque’s novel in high school and hated it, yet somehow, despite looking incredible, this film doesn’t do the book justice. There’s a key passage in the book where Paul goes home to visit family from the front and finds that he’s already changed enough that he can’t relate to his relatives and friends any more. They don’t understand what he’s been through, and he’s not the same person they knew before he went to fight. The film omits it entirely, in favor of those stolid scenes of generals and diplomats. The latter provides that strong contrast – there’s a scene where one of the men is upset because the croissants were clearly not baked that same morning – but it also wrecks any momentum the war story has, and it doesn’t help the character development in the way that the book’s scene where Paul goes home would have, something he doesn’t really get until a bit much later in the film when he’s trapped in no man’s land with a French soldier.

The movie does look fantastic, though, even when it’s gruesome. There are tremendous aerial shots of the battlefields, tight shots of the men in battle that put you uncomfortably close to the action, and trenches that I assume they just reused from 1917. One of the Oscar nominations came for Makeup and Hairstyling, and you can see why; these men look disgusting. There’s a clear commitment here to verisimilitude, and while I can’t say this is what World War I really looked like, it’s definitely what I think World War I really looked like.

All Quiet on the Western Front is about two and a half hours long, and not brisk, which gave me a lot of time to think about the bigger picture (pun intended), and I couldn’t escape the conclusion that this film doesn’t need to exist. We don’t really need an anti-war movie, not of this sort, at least, when war hasn’t looked like this in a hundred years, and so much fighting today is done via drones that separate killer from victim. We don’t need another World War I movie, especially since we just had one four years ago, and that war doesn’t have the more enduring lessons to impart that World War II or Vietnam or Iraq (the second one) do. And this movie has nothing new to say about war or the book, which has been filmed at least twice before, including the 1930 American version that won Best Picture. New takes on existing films should bring something new, and this one can only offer better cinematography and makeup.

I can’t believe this film got nine nominations while Decision to Leave, South Korea’s submission for the Best International Feature Film award, was shut out. There’s no comparison here – Decision is an original story, a better story, better acted, and with more to say. Argentina, 1985 is better. La Caja, which didn’t even make the shortlist, is better. All Quiet is more technically ambitious, but it’s nowhere near as compelling as those films, and I don’t think the point of the Best International Feature award, where countries from all over the world should be competing on equal footing, is to reward the film with the biggest budget. This is a big movie, and a fine one, but it is absolutely not a great one.

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→ July 18, 2019
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Never Look Away.

Never Look Away (iTunes • amazon) was the last film for me to see from this year’s Oscar batch; I like to try to see all of the films nominated in major categories, including acting and directing, which is often a challenge for the five films nominated in Best Foreign Language Film. Never Look Away, Germany’s submission for last year, took one of those nominations but also earned a nod for Best Cinematography, and writer/director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck had won the foreign film award previously for the acclaimed 2006 film The Lives of Others, which I need to see (and is streaming on Netflix at the moment). The particular catch with Never Look Away is that the movie is 189 minutes long, which is well beyond what I think I can handle in a single sitting in the theater, so I missed its run in the art theaters of Philly. It’s really tremendous, in hindsight one of my top ten movies of 2018, and certainly deserved its spot in the Best Foreign Language Film category. I wonder if, had it been shorter and a bit easier to see, it would have had a little buzz for Best Picture, because it’s such a beautiful, high-minded film, anchored by two very strong performances.

Never Look Away is based loosely on the life of Gerhard Richter, a German painter best known for a particular style of painting photographs on canvas, hewing closely to real events of his childhood and his professional life. The protagonist here, renamed Kurt Barnert, is born just as the Nazis are gaining power in Germany, and is traumatized by seeing his favorite aunt, who encouraged his interest in art, suffer a mental health breakdown, after which the Nazis forcibly commit her and then put her to death in a concentration camp. In art school, he meets a young woman named Ellie – who reminds him of his deceased aunt – and falls in love with her, not realizing that her father, a gynecologist, had an important role in the Nazi regime. Kurt and Ellie survive the war, but in postwar East Germany he only gets to paint scenes of Socialist Realism, so the two defect shortly before the Berlin Wall goes up, allowing him to secure a place in an important art school in West Berlin, where he eventually has his creative breakthrough. The love story between the two characters, which is the movie’s major fictional aspect, is woven into the lead character’s artistic narrative, as the saintly Ellie serves both as the great love of Kurt’s life and also a major inspiration for his eventual success as an artist.

Never Look Away moves along shockingly well for a movie of this length and scope, in part because von Donnersmarck doesn’t linger too long over most scenes, especially after the fairly extended prologue of scenes just before and during World War II, which serve primarily to set up Kurt’s character and the ensuing drama with Ellie’s father. Schilling is very compelling as Kurt, appropriately brooding and intense, never truly at ease even with Ellie, while Sebastian Koch (who reminds me of the late Austrian singer Falco) is perfectly insidious as Ellie’s father, whose professional demeanor hides his machinations and drive for self-preservation.

Paula Beer plays Ellie as well as she can, but the character’s primary function is to stand still and look pretty, which is arguably the movie’s biggest flaw – there are no female characters here of any depth. There are various women who play critical roles in Kurt’s life, from his aunt Elizabeth to Ellie to Ellie’s mother (Ina Weisse, looking a lot like Cate Blanchett from Carol), but they’re all at the story’s periphery, and Ellie – who I think is a pastiche of Richter’s wives, but is clearly not a real, single character – gets virtually no exposition, no explanation of why she’s in love with Kurt, no description of her life outside of his view, and no function in the plot beyond the connection to her father and her trouble getting pregnant.

Once a film gets past 130-140 minutes, the question of need becomes salient – did the movie have to be this long? Did Never Look Away need to run a shade over three hours, and does it make sufficient use of that time? The answer is rarely yes, but in this case, von Donnersmarck doesn’t waste a minute; the pace is consistent, never dragging, but of course never rushing, and he uses some of the space he’s allotted to himself to express the struggle of an artist looking for his voice without boring the viewer. (The film has very little humor, but the scenes of Kurt trying out new ideas, and getting reactions from his colleague Günther, are the closest this movie comes to comedy.) The cinematography that garnered such praise is a function of different camera angles and shifting shots to compare the scope of art to the world around it, rather than the lingering landscape scenes I tend to associate with Best Cinematography nominees.

Roma was obviously going to win the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, but in the competition for second place behind it, Never Look Away was clearly worthy of one of the four other nominations, and I think if the film were shorter it might have at least gained support in another category – perhaps Best Director, where Pawe? Pawlikowski got a nod for the Polish-language Cold War. I’d put Never Look Away over Cold War for a more credible story and its stronger exploration of the meaning of art, both to the public and to the artist himself, although I can’t put it above Burning, my #1 movie of last year, or Roma. Even with the lack of definition around the women in the film, it’s still riveting, and for me to say that about a movie of this length is more evidence of just how compelling it was.

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→ May 3, 2018
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In the Fade.

The German film In the Fade won the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film this year, and made the Oscars shortlist of nine candidates before falling short of the final five. This revenge fantasy drama follows Katja (Diane Kruger) through the aftermath of a neo-Nazi terrorist attack that kills her Turkish husband and their son, including a trial of the two suspects, but ultimately is carried by Kruger even when the plot is a little predictable and the secondary characters far too hackneyed for what the film is trying to say.

The story opens with a long cold open that runs us quickly through Katja’s marriage to Nuri and a glimpse of their current life, with Nuri running a small business in a Turkish area of Hamburg. Katja drops their son Rocco off at Nuri’s office for the afternoon so she can visit with her pregnant friend, but when she returns to pick them up, she finds a crime scene: a bomb went off in front of the office, killing Nuri and Rocco and damaging their bodies beyond recognition.

We get all of this before the opening credits, in less than ten minutes, so the focus of the film truly is on Katja’s reactions and how the system seems to fail her at every turn. Nuri had been jailed for drug distribution, so the officer investigating the crime immediately assumes that he had resumed those activities and blames the victim; a subsequent search of the house finds drugs Katja had used to ‘numb the pain,’ but no evidence Nuri had been dealing again. Katja’s almost impossibly perfect description of one of the suspects helps lead to an arrest, but at the trial, the lawyer for the two bombers – who looks like an emaciated John Malkovich – suborns perjury and tears into Katja, saying her testimony isn’t credible because she’s a drug user. Despite fairly compelling evidence, the two are acquitted as the judges find reasonable doubt as to their guilt, which leads Katja feeling abandoned and seeking revenge any way she can find it.

In the Fade is gripping to watch, primarily because Kruger – who won best Actress at Cannes last year for this role – is such a dominant presence on the screen. She’s forced to carry all the weight because there isn’t another three-dimensional character to be found anywhere in the film: her mother is a racist train wreck, her mother-in-law blames her for her son’s and grandsons’ deaths, her own lawyer is kind of perfect in his own way, and so on. The script is tight, but it’s about as nuanced as a sledgehammer to the forehead.

And what is this film trying to say? It ends with a note about the number of terrorist incidents linked to neo-Nazis in Germany in recent years … but we knew they were bad, and it’s not like In the Fade explores the rise of these movements, or how they recruit, or what Germany might do to fight them. The two suspects are unrepentant sociopaths – although I did like that the one detail we get on them is that they enjoy jogging. It works better as a portrait of one woman’s grief, and her question of whether she can go on living without her husband and son, and with no real support from her own parents.

Kruger is up to the task, veering from shock to grief to rage to despair, and giving us every reason to believe her resolve when she sets out to avenge her family’s deaths, with an ending that’s only partly satisfying and entirely unsettling. Perhaps the idea here was to show how the system revictimizes those already hurt by terror attacks, but the script here is too lopsided to make that point effectively. I do think making the surviving victim of a terror attack aimed at immigrants a white, blonde, German woman does make the point that these killings don’t just affect the ‘other,’ and that many immigrants have already assimilated somewhat or totally into western societies.

If Kruger hadn’t delivered such a compelling performance as Woman on the Verge, however, none of the screenwriter’s points would have landed anyway. I wouldn’t have given this a nomination over any of the four Oscar-nominated foreign films I’ve seen from 2017, but between Kruger’s performance, the tight pacing, and the strong soundtrack & score from Josh Homme (the movie takes its title from a Queens of the Stone Age song), I’d still recommend it to a lot of people over a weird, scattershot art film like The Square or a movie as grim as Loveless, both of which are definitely not crowd-pleasers.

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→ June 25, 2017
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Land of Mine.

The Danish-German drama Land of Mine (Under Sandet) was one of five nominees for the Best Foreign Language film at the most recent Academy Awards ceremony and swept the Robert Awards, the Danish equivalent of the Oscars, last year. The story is fictional but is based on the real-life effort after World War II where 2000 German POWs, many of them teenagers or elderly men, were forced to come to Denmark to clear the up to two million landmines the Nazis had planted along the country’s western coast. Half the Germans either died or were maimed in the work, and the question of whether this constituted a war crime still hangs over Danish history. Land of Mine is sparse and taut, rarely sentimental until the very end, and doesn’t let the Danes off the hook one bit for the choice to force children to pay for the sins of their fathers. (It’s available to rent/buy on amazon and iTunes.)

The kids forced to clear the mines arrive at a Danish beach under the command of Captain Ebbe and Sgt. Carl Rasmussen, both of whom appear to be completely unconcerned with their charges’ welfare – they are human fodder for clearing the mines, and if they die in the effort, that’s the Germans’ fault for placing the mines there in the first place. One boy doesn’t even make it out of the initial training. The group includes Helmut Morbach, who is either the most realistic kid of the group or just an asshole, depending on your view; Sebastian Schumm, who is the de facto leader of the troop; Wilhelm Hahn, a naive kid oblivious to what’s ahead of him either in Denmark or after a return home; and the twins Werner and Ernst Lessner, who plan to go home and become bricklayers to help rebuild Germany now that the war is over. There’s no question over their volition here: the boys are barricaded in their little hut at the end of each work day and aren’t even fed for the first few days at the beach.

The kids don’t stand out much as individual characters, but are vehicles for telling the greater story, including how Sgt. Carl (Herr Feldwebel to the kids) ends up caring about their welfare in spite of his own misgivings and the commands from above to treat them like slaves. I don’t think I’m spoiling anything to mention that some of the 14 kids in the original group aren’t going to live to the end of the movie – they’re crawling on a beach looking for and defusing land mines, so of course there will be casualties. The movie’s impact comes more from how they’re injured or killed than how many, such as the effects of failing to feed the kids adequately, and in some of the cases we don’t really know the characters well enough to feel their losses as individuals.

Sgt. Carl, played by a relative novice actor in Roland Møller, is the moral center of the film, and his evolution over the course of the film becomes the movie’s conscience – he doesn’t want to think of the boys as people, comes to see them that way once the suffering and death begin, then is reminded of how they all ended up in this situation in the first place before he has to make one final decision to do the ‘right’ thing. Møller’s performance is dominant because most of it is so understated, and because his character gets the emotional complexity Ebbe’s and even the boys’ characters lack. That makes the ending of the film a little harder for me to accept – it’s the one true moment of sentiment, and the only part of the script that didn’t ring true. When he develops a little camaraderie with the boys, it seems only natural; he’s with them all day and starts to see them as real people, and struggles to transfer his hatred of the Nazis or the Germans over to them once he knows them. Whether the end works may depend on how much you buy into his personal transformation from the initial scene of abject hatred to the last day of work on the beach.

The characters of the POWs aren’t that well defined, but the young actors playing them at least give them depth in their emotional responses to the series of catastrophes that follow their assignment to the beach. They’re afraid every day, and every time the script seems like it’s giving them a few moments of calm, another mine explodes, setting off a new chain of emotional reactions in the survivors. Joel Basman delivers a strong performance as Helmut, the least likable of all of the boy soldiers, while the twins, Emil and Oskar Belton, playing Ernst and Werner get a small subplot of their own that gives Emil in particular a powerful scene in the back half of the film. The script also adds little details, like Sebastian answering a question about whether his father’s still alive with a long pause followed by a remote “I don’t know,” to flesh out the emotional states of these children even without giving us much in the way of biographical details.

Land of Mine is almost old-fashioned in its anti-nationalism; the easy thing to do in any historical drama about World War II is make any German characters the villains and move outward from there, but the protagonists of this movie are all Germans and don’t show the slightest hint of Nazi sympathies or even of German nationalism. They’re just kids, and all they want to do is survive and go home. The Danes are the nationalists, carrying forward their rage at the Nazi atrocities on to prisoners of war who had nothing to do with the mistreatment of Denmark. Sgt. Carl has to face the reality that the kids who’ve been conscripted to clear these mines are victims of the Nazi regime too, and the difficult decisions that the script gives him could apply to any conflict and any attempts at postwar reconciliation too.

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→ May 4, 2017
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Toni Erdmann.

My first book, Smart Baseball, is out now!

The German film Toni Erdmann (amazon • iTunes) was critically acclaimed all over Europe and here when it first appeared last year, winning the German equivalent of the Oscar for Best Picture and earning a nomination here for Best Foreign Language Film (which it lost to The Salesman). The 165-minute movie has been widely described as a comedy, but it is anything but. It is a truly unpleasant movie to watch, an extended, pointless exercise in misanthropy and the humiliation of its characters.

Winifred is a divorced and apparently retired German man, probably around 70, who appears to be unable to stop himself from playing juvenile pranks on people, most of which involve the use of a set of false teeth. His daughter, Ines, is an ambitious, hard-working management consultant who is working in Bucharest on a difficult project involving a Romanian oil company. Winifred tries to connect with her for some quality time, showing up in Bucharest unannounced for a weekend, but the effort fails as she prioritizes work over her father. As a result, he decides to play a huge prank, posing as Toni Erdmann, a life coach to the oil company’s CEO, with an utterly ridiculous shaggy wig of black hair and those same false teeth. Every plot description says he’s doing this to spend time near his daughter, but I think he does it because he’s a giant asshole who doesn’t care what damage he does to anyone else as long as he gets a laugh.

I said as long as he gets a laugh, because we don’t. This movie isn’t funny, and I don’t think the script was trying to be funny most of the time. I suppose the brunch scene at the end may have been intended as humor, but it is so unrealistic that it doesn’t even get the cringe comic effect of the excruciatingly awkward. If Toni Erdmann had some charisma – say, as a platitude-spouting new age thinker, or a parody of the consultant who borrows your watch to tell you the time – he could have been hilarious. Instead, he’s just constantly in the way, and the script is totally unable to achieve the comic effect of the bumbler or the walking satire.

It doesn’t help that neither Winifred (outside of Toni) nor Ines is a particularly sympathetic character. We’re almost forced to believe that Winifred misses his daughter, but without any context for their past relationship, it’s hard to imagine why she’d suddenly want to be closer to him when he’s still unapproachable. Ines’ character is written as the woman who has to work twice as hard as the men around her to get the same respect, and has the awful habit of deferring to men in meetings even when they’ve disagreed with her or even undercut her points, but the script gives us nothing to hang on to in support of her character – no evidence of inner strength, or even something to explain her sheer competence, some reason to root for her against the dimwits and chauvinists around her.

(I also felt that the look of Ines, played by Sandra Hüller, didn’t work. Here’s a character who, again, we’re supposed to accept as a strong, hard-working, sharp woman in a male-dominated workplace. Yet she’s almost sickly looking at times – her hair, makeup, even her clothing all work against the character, and Hüller being so pale unfortunately plays into it as well. It was a chance to reveal something more about Ines by exaggerating her physical appearance. Perhaps this is a woman unconcerned with her appearance, but that would contradict a scene near the end where she seems overly concerned with it instead.)

So much of this movie just does not work on screen, in ways it’s hard to fathom would have worked on the page. What begins as an unconvincing sex scene between Ines and the coworker she’s sleeping with turns into an utterly gross non-joke, as if she’s playing a bizarre prank on her partner (who may have had it coming – but I liked almost no one in this movie anyway). Somehow Ines and Winifred end up at a Romanian family’s Easter dinner, where Winifred volunteers Ines to sing a song, which she does, and then runs off, after which the whole event is simply forgotten by all participants. At one point, a few of the characters, including Ines, do lines of coke, which seems completely out of character for her given everything that came before. And the brunch scene … well, without spoiling it, I’ll just say the whole thing was so preposterous I couldn’t buy into any aspect of it.

I tend to think that English-language remakes of foreign films always lose something from the original. But with word coming that there’s an American version of Toni Erdmann in the works starring Jack Nicholson and Kristen Wiig, I wonder if it could be any worse than the German film; if nothing else, it will at least be shorter, as there’s no way they could expect American audiences to endure nearly three hours of this. And Wiig is truly too funny for the original script. I can only hope they rework it from scratch and see if there’s actually something good to be found in this premise.

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