Roman Polanski’s The Pianist may have been showered with Oscar glory a couple of months ago, but the best Holocaust film of 2002 was actually The Grey Zone, which is being presented as part of this month’s Charlotte Film Society series (call 704-414-2355 for details). Writer-director Tim Blake Nelson, the fine actor from O Brother, Where Art Thou? and the current Holes, adapted his own stage play, which in turn was based on actual events that, Nelson contends, have never been explored on screen before.
Nelson’s film goes one step further than The Pianist, which itself went one step further than the traditional Holocaust epic. Whereas Polanski’s protagonist was painted not so much as a hero but as a valiant survivalist, many of the Jewish characters in The Grey Zone are painted as morally compromised survivalists, men (and women) who will do almost anything to stave off death for just a while longer. As Hoffman (David Arquette), one of the most torn characters in the movie, puts it, “How can you know what you’d do to stay alive until you’re really asked?… For most of us, the answer is, anything.”
The Grey Zone centers on a remarkable tidbit of history: the only successful uprising that ever occurred at the Nazi death camps during World War II. Its primary players are members of the Sonderkommando, a special squad of Jewish prisoners who helped the Germans usher the rest of the Jews into the crematoriums in exchange for special privileges and a few extra months of life.
Some of them, like Rosenthal (David Chandler) and Schlermer (Daniel Benzali), maintain a stiff upper lip while secretly working in tandem with a few female prisoners (one played by Mira Sorvino) to secure weapons. Others, like Abramowics (Steve Buscemi), work the camp like it was a casino, coming up with all the angles while dreaming of escaping. Still others, like the aforementioned Hoffman, are more outwardly emotional, nagged by a crushing sense of guilt over what they’re doing to their fellow countrymen (in the film’s most horrific sequence, Hoffman permanently silences a middle-aged Jew who refuses to march peacefully into the showers). And then there’s the case of Dr. Miklos Nyiszli (Topsy-Turvy‘s Allan Corduner, ably handling the most complex role), a Jewish doctor who aids the infamous Josef Mengele in his monstrous experiments and who enters into a strained relationship with a top-ranking Auschwitz official, the murderous Erich Muhsfeldt (Harvey Keitel).
It can be argued that, despite all the atrocities on view, most Holocaust pictures are ultimately about the triumph of the human spirit. Befitting its title, The Grey Zone is more cloudy than that, not only in exploring the murky mindset of its characters but also in depicting the circumstances surrounding their master scheme. The revolt itself isn’t presented as some brilliantly orchestrated plot that resulted in liberation for all, but rather as an almost haphazard happening that seemed to end almost as quickly as it began, with death doled out to practically all its participants. Yet a coda reveals the positive ramifications of the revolt, and for all their compromises, the members of the Sonderkommando never grew complacent about their own lives, with many of them choosing to thwart the enemy right up to their final breath. Suddenly, the line between survivalist and hero grows as gray as anything else on view in this trenchant motion picture.
As for the month’s other CFS titles, Real Women Have Curves (
) features terrific performances by Lupe Ontiveros and America Ferrera, who shared a special acting prize at Sundance. Ontiveros plays an overbearing Mexican-American mother whose old-fashioned way of thinking threatens to stifle her overweight daughter’s dreams of going to college and making something of herself. Ferrera plays said daughter, a beautiful girl who learns to grow comfortable in her own skin and who draws much of her strength from her family members even as she’s going toe-to-toe with them. And Take Care of My Cat (1/2) is an amiable if somewhat undistinguished ensemble piece about five Korean girls who struggle to maintain their camaraderie after graduating from high school.
This article appears in May 7-13, 2003.
