Film review

  • Atonement

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Joe Wright (2007)

    I stopped reading Ian McEwan’s fiction years ago:  his self-importance got too much for me, especially when it extended beyond the narrative proper.  Enduring Love (1997) has a couple of appendices, the first purporting to be an academic paper, reprinted from the British Review of Psychiatry, about the medical condition that afflicts one of the novel’s main characters.  The paper is the work of two scientists whose surnames, Wenn and Camia, add up to an anagram of the names of its actual author, bowling us over with his scientific literacy and cunning.  The ballyhoo surrounding the publication of Saturday (2005), whose protagonist is a neurosurgeon, majored on McEwan’s lengthy eye-witness research in the operating theatre at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery.  That novel’s timeframe spans a single day – 15 February 2003, the date of the largest public demonstration in British history, against the prospective invasion of Iraq.  Eight years later, McEwan told Channel 4 News that ‘prior to the 2003 invasion he had hoped to be able to seek an audience with Tony Blair to persuade him not to go ahead with the war’ (Wikipedia).  Yes, if that meeting had happened it would have made all the difference – though shouldn’t it have been Tony Blair seeking an audience with Ian McEwan?

    Among the four McEwan novel(la)s I did read, Atonement was much better than the two above-mentioned and On Chesil Beach.  Each of Atonement’s three main parts is written in the third person; a ‘Postscript’, in the first person, reveals that Briony Tallis, one of the principals in the preceding story, is actually the author of all three of its parts.  That revelation causes the novel to dwindle rather – into a more academic exercise about the business of writing fiction, the use of unreliable narrators and so on.  Even so, the twist-in-the-tail is more than clever:  when Briony admits she has not been telling the whole truth, the reader really knows how it feels to be on the receiving end of unreliable narration – on McEwan’s part, as well as Briony’s.  On the face of it, Christopher Hampton’s screenplay for Joe Wright’s film of Atonement is faithful to the novel.  It begins with events at an English country house in the mid-1930s, culminating in the perhaps wilfully mistaken testimony of the young-teenage Briony (Saoirse Ronan) that sends an innocent man to prison.  It continues into World War II, when the innocent man, Robbie Turner (James McAvoy), is fighting for the British army in the Battle of France and Briony’s elder sister Cecilia (Keira Knightley), who loves Robbie and is loved by him, is a nurse; and into the early post-war years, as Briony (now Romola Garai) tries and fails to ‘atone’ for her teenage error.  It ends with the elderly Briony (Vanessa Redgrave) giving a television interview about her autobiographical novel ‘Atonement’, in which she makes clear that novel’s departures from what actually happened in her life and to Robbie and Cecilia.  As a scenarist, Christopher Hampton is much superior to Ian McEwan (whose screenplays for later film versions of two of his books – On Chesil Beach and The Children Act, both released in 2017 – were ridiculous) but Hampton had an insoluble problem on his hands.  The film of Atonement can’t be faithful to its source material in reproducing the significance of the concluding reveal because Briony can’t meaningfully be, as she could be on the printed page, responsible for the narrative’s earlier parts.

    This weakness – in terms of both the lack of immediate impact of Briony’s revelation on screen and what difference it makes to the audience’s retrospective view of preceding events – is far from Atonement‘s only one.  Other defects are more blatant.  The film’s air of self-approval might seem a fitting tribute to McEwan (who was one of its executive producers) but, with Joe Wright at the helm, the virtuosity is less sophisticated – Wright always has an eye on the box office.  For as long as the action is happening at the Tallis family pile, he pushes the sunlit luxury of the period settings for all they’re worth; once country-house costume drama turns into wartime romance, he does the same with that.  Dario Marianelli’s music duly makes emphatically clear the fraught emotions simmering behind the sunshine before morphing into love-story-for-the-ages mode.  Wright’s approach was vindicated – and not just because Atonement, which cost $30m to make, took $131m (Wikipedia figures in February 2024).  The film’s most conspicuously flamboyant elements were also among its most admired.  Marianelli’s insistent score won Atonement its only Oscar.  The outstanding highlight, for many, is DP Seamus McGarvey’s five-minute tracking shot along the sea front at Dunkirk.  Robbie, separated from his army unit, makes his way there on foot, observing the terrible carnage on the beach – and more.  These five minutes are pure showing off by Joe Wright.  One’s sense of the Dunkirk sequence as a performance is reinforced especially by a group of British soldiers on the prom singing ‘Dear Lord and Father of Mankind’:  once they get to the end of the last verse, the soldiers go back to the start of the first verse – as if on a loop.

    As the doubly doomed romantic leads, Keira Knightley and James McAvoy are unsatisfying in different ways.  In the first part, Knightley’s rat-a-tat delivery and temperamental brittleness are effective enough.  Later on, her portrait of Cecilia feels hollow though she’s hardly helped by Wright’s taste for kitschy overkill.  As Cecilia tends a mortally wounded French soldier (a cameo from Jérémie Renier), a single teardrop rolls down his cheek, to the accompaniment not of Dario Marianelli but of Claude Debussy (Clair de lune, of course) – after all, the soldier is French … An actress more capable of finding emotional truth than Keira Knightley would struggle to authenticate Cecilia’s reaction to this.  James McAvoy is less comfortable than his co-star with an RP English accent.  That might seem right:  although Robbie, like Cecilia, has recently graduated from Cambridge, he’s the son of the Tallises’ housekeeper (Brenda Blethyn) and his higher education was paid for by Cecilia’s father.  But McAvoy gives the impression of disguising his own Scottish accent rather than his character’s humble origins.  When he expresses emotion, the posh voice slips a bit; when he concentrates on getting the voice right, his line readings tend to lose expression.  Despite this, McAvoy, as usual, acts intelligently and conscientiously.  Also as usual, he lacks dynamism. 

    There are lots of other well-known – or soon to be well-known – faces on the screen – Benedict Cumberbatch (as the real culprit in the sexual assault for which Robbie takes the rap), Juno Temple (as Briony’s older cousin, the victim of the assault), Harriet Walter (the Tallis family matriarch), Gina McKee (bizarrely miscast as a no-nonsense nursing sister), Daniel Mays (a fellow soldier in Robbie’s unit).  The acting is really elevated, though, only by the three ages of Briony.  In only her second film role, Saoirse Ronan is a wonder – emotionally precise, effortlessly eccentric, utterly natural.  Ronan’s performance in effect sets Romola Garai a follow-that challenge that Garai meets very well, particularly in capturing the young adult Briony’s ambivalence.  Vanessa Redgrave has much less screen time but great presence as the elderly, terminally ill Briony.  As she speaks to her briefly glimpsed TV interviewer (played by Anthony Minghella, who died only a few months after the release of Atonement), Briony faces the camera.  She explains that her post-war meeting with Robbie and Cecilia never happened:  he died from his wounds at Dunkirk; later in 1940, Cecilia was among the fatalities when a bomb hit Balham tube station, causing a fractured water main to flood the station and drown civilians using it as an air raid shelter.  Speaking to camera in a calm, purposeful voice, Redgrave is compelling; it’s a bad mistake to interrupt her with flashbacks to Robbie’s and Cecilia’s deaths.  Wright’s spectacular, bombastic flooding of the tube station is phony enough to eclipse any of the fictional inventions that Briony is admitting.

    Sally and I saw Atonement in the cinema on its original release.  Watching it again now on television was a reminder not just of the mostly over-enthusiastic reception of the film back in 2007 but also of the excited predictions made then, in the British media at least, for the bright young stars involved, on both sides of the camera.  Joe Wright was in only his mid-thirties, James McAvoy in his mid-twenties and Keira Knightley just twenty-one; Saoirse Ronan was twelve.  In the years since, none of these four has sunk without trace but only one has come to be recognised as a real screen artist – the right one, thank goodness.  If Atonement hadn’t supplied Saoirse Ronan’s breakthrough role something else probably would have, and soon.  You can’t be sure, though.  The film that launched this brilliant actress is, whatever its shortcomings, a film to be grateful for.

    8 February 2024

  • The Zone of Interest

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Jonathan Glazer (2023)

    Martin Amis’s 2014 novel The Zone of Interest takes its name from the Nazis’ euphemistic term for Auschwitz and its environs.  It makes sense that Jonathan Glazer uses this title – dispassionate understatement is essential to his film’s shock tactics – but Glazer, if Wikipedia’s summary of the novel is to be believed, hasn’t retained much more of Amis’s source material, in terms of either plot or even character names.  In the novel, the Auschwitz camp commandant and his wife may be based on real individuals but are called Paul and Hannah Doll.  Glazer dispenses with pseudonyms:  his protagonists are Rudolf Höss, Auschwitz’s longest-serving commandant (from May 1940 to November 1943 and from May 1944 to January 1945), and his wife Hedwig.  Glazer announces the grimness and gravity of his subject matter from the start.  The film’s title appears in white characters on a black screen and stays there for what feels like several minutes.  The four words are accompanied by a combination of musical and non-musical sounds the more disturbing for being, as yet, uninterpretable.

    The first shot in the narrative proper is also held for some time but the image is tonally quite different from the lead-in to it.  Glazer shows a group of grown-ups and children in swimming costumes beside a lake; the water is calm, the sky blue with small white clouds.  The soundtrack changes, too, except in one respect.  In the interstices of the prologue’s loud discordance you could just about make out snatches of birdsong.  Now the sounds of birds in the trees near the lake are as audible as the chatter of the people on the screen, who are closer to the water’s edge and further away from the camera.  This long shot is a sign of things to come.  Glazer and his cinematographer, Łukasz Żal, are sparing with close-ups throughout, as if to acknowledge that it’s hard to get near to – impossible to comprehend – the characters in the film.

    The first half hour or so of The Zone of Interest (which runs 105 minutes all told) comprises almost plotless description of the home life of the Höss family, who were at the centre of that lakeside gathering.  Rudolf (Christian Friedel), Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) and their five children have a spacious home with a staff that, under Hedwig’s strict supervision, keeps it spotless.  Hedwig also takes pleasure in the large, well-tended garden.  On a sunny morning, she carries her youngest child, still a babe in arms, along the flower beds, holding the baby over the flowers to get a scent of phlox, a closer look at a ladybird.  Everything in the garden is lovely – or will be once the ivy growing has covered more of the high, abutting wall of the concentration camp.  When Hedwig’s mother, Linna (Imogen Kogge), arrives on a visit, her proud daughter conducts Linna on a tour of the grounds and mentions that ‘the Jews are over the wall’.  That side of the wall is mostly out of bounds to Glazer’s camera except for shots of the Auschwitz guard tower and smoke in the sky.

    Glazer’s approach makes it inevitable that much of The Zone of Interest consists of repeated illustrations of the same point – and nearly inevitable that plenty of reviewers will use ‘the banality of evil’ as a label for what the film sets out to demonstrate.  Watching (just a couple of years ago) a documentary about the Adolf Eichmann trial left me puzzled as never before by Hannah Arendt’s notorious phrase.  Enclosed in bulletproof glass in the dock of the Jerusalem courtroom, Eichmann came across as more vigorously nasty than the frighteningly shallow bureaucrat that Arendt saw and heard; especially when he spoke, the defendant evinced savage contempt for the trial, the prosecutors and witnesses speaking on behalf of the huge numbers of people whose deaths he had organised.  But questionable as Arendt’s term (and lazy as wheeling it out again) may be, it’s hardly inaccurate in relation to Glazer’s film, although Jonathan Romney, writing in Sight and Sound (Winter 2023), does well to move beyond it to ‘the domesticity of evil’.  At one point Glazer cross-cuts between conversations in different parts of the Höss house.  In one room, Rudolf is in discussion with the designers of a new, more streamlined crematorium system.  In a different room, Hedwig serves coffee to the wives of other SS officers.  The women’s anti-semitism, though casual and, compared with the men’s conversation, trivial, is no easier to listen to.

    The film’s timeframe extends from mid-1943 to early 1944; the action begins, in other words, a few months after the end of the Battle of Stalingrad.  In keeping with Glazer’s central idea, the crisis that he eventually introduces is particular to the Höss family rather than a reflection of Germany’s declining hopes of winning World War II.  Rudolf’s successful career has meant that he and Hedwig have done very well for themselves.  When he’s promoted to the role of deputy inspector for all German concentration camps (‘seeing where improvements can be made – their yield, that kind of thing’), the appointment entails relocating to Oranienburg, near Berlin, and thus threatens to destroy the home life that he and his wife have painstakingly built for the family.  Rudolf hesitates for several days before putting Hedwig in the picture, during a garden party that the couple is hosting.  This viewer shared her astonishment that he chooses such a moment to break the news:  given the narrative’s tempo and uneventfulness up to this point, the timing of the revelation and the row that instantly erupts between the Hösses feel artificially melodramatic.

    Yet they’re also a means to an end both dramatically effective and quickly realised.  Rudolf, who tries to slip his bombshell into small talk about a pair of sandals that may have been left by the lake, escapes his wife’s fury by going to look for these.  She soon follows:  Glazer shows her walking down a road, past camp buildings reduced to background to the image of Hedwig, who is on the warpath but thinking hard.  By the time she reaches the landing stage, where Rudolf has found the missing sandals, she has worked out what to say to her husband:  of course he must accept the new posting but on condition that she and the children stay put.  A snatch of earlier conversation with her mother suggests that Hedwig’s social origins are humble:  her remark about the ‘Jews … over the wall’ gets Linna wondering if they might include a wealthy woman she used to clean for.  (Linna rattles on resentfully about the woman:  ‘She was the one who had the book readings … Bolshevik stuff, Jewish stuff … And I got outbid on her curtains at the street auction.  Her, opposite, she got them – I loved those curtains…’)  The daughter has attained a standard of living beyond her mother’s and her own wildest dreams; Hedwig is determined not to let her hard work go to waste.  This strength of feeling is hardly banal but renders her blinkered priorities all the more shocking.  In the overall scheme of the film, such feeling involves the viewer at a relatively normal, human level:  part of what’s shocking is one’s realising a degree of sympathy with this benighted homemaker.

    Höss’s superiors agree to let his wife and children remain at Auschwitz after the new commandant, Arthur Liebehenschel (Sascha Maaz), arrives there but Glazer uses Rudolf’s promotion as a catalyst for showing fissures in  the domestic order and new examples of moral aberrance in the title location, as well as for moving beyond it to describe Höss’s work in Oranienburg.  Despite her anti-semitism, Hedwig’s mother can’t stand the crematorium flames at night and departs suddenly.  (She leaves a note of explanation for her daughter, who burns it.)  We’ve already seen the Hösses’ sons playing with toy soldiers and wearing Nazi armbands.  Now the older boy (Johann Karthaus) locks the younger (Luis Noah Witte) in a greenhouse then sits on the garden wall, imitating the sound of hissing gas.  We may well have taken a liking to the family’s friendly, skittering black dog and admired Rudolf’s bay mare (even if they bring to mind lines from Auden’s ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’:  ‘… the dreadful martyrdom must run its course/Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot/Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse/Scratches its innocent behind on a tree’); we’ll certainly have noticed that Höss and his wife share a bedroom but have single beds.  Now we see Rudolf, about to leave for Berlin, bid a much more heartfelt farewell to his mare than to his wife[1].  We also see a young female prisoner report to his office, where she prepares to undress; in the next sequence, he’s in the bathroom washing his genitals.  The Oranienburg sequences, in presenting the administrative efficiency of the Final Solution project, don’t exactly cover new ground but a smoothly-run committee meeting – complete with apologies for absence from two Sturmbannführer and a run-through of agenda items regarding ‘the Hungarian action’ – still makes the point strongly.

    Although splitting the action between two places doesn’t distract from or dilute Glazer’s theme, one small group of scenes within the ‘zone of interest’ does.  Shooting in thermal night vision, Glazer shows the after-dark routine of a young Polish girl (Julia Polaczek), who goes round Auschwitz work sites leaving partly-hidden apples for prisoners to eat.  On one occasion, she finds a hand-written sheet of music, written by a prisoner called Joseph Wulf.  The girl subsequently plays tentative notes from Wulf’s composition on a piano, while a recording of Wulf’s own voice reads the optimistic lyrics that he wrote along with the melody.  (Wulf reads in Yiddish:  most of the dialogue is, of course, German, with a few bits of Polish.)  According to Wikipedia, the girl:

    ‘ … is inspired by a woman named Alexandria, whom Glazer met during his research.  As a 12-year-old member of the Polish resistance, she used to cycle to the camp to leave apples for the starving prisoners.  As in the film, she discovered a piece of music written by a prisoner. The prisoner, named Joseph Wulf, survived the war.  Alexandria was 90 years old when she met Glazer and died shortly after.  The bike the film uses and the dress the actress wears both belonged to her.’

    It’s understandable that Glazer felt the need somehow to commemorate Alexandria but The Zone of Interest’s sudden lurch into Playing for Time territory[2] is forced – a hopeful, humanitarian interruption to the main narrative and hardly enough to raise audience spirits.

    Does Glazer also misjudge the sequencing of the final scenes, which deliver a kind of grotesque happy ending for Rudolf Höss?  The ‘Hungarian action’ refers to the transport to Auschwitz of hundreds of thousands of Hungary’s Jews.  Nazi top brass reckons Liebehenschel isn’t capable of handling such a large-scale operation but that Höss is:  he will therefore resume his former role as camp commandant.   In Berlin, Rudolf attends a grand party to mark this new phase in the genocide.  When he telephones Hedwig, she asks who attended the event; he says he didn’t really notice, preoccupied as he was with thoughts of whether it would be possible to gas people in the party venue because of the high ceilings there.  As he leaves his Oranienburg office and descends a staircase, Rudolf starts to retch.  Glazer then cuts to the present day and a group of Polish cleaners working in what is now the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Oświęcim.  One of the cleaning women wipes the glass of a display case containing piles of children’s shoes; another does the same for a case exhibiting a mound of crutches and prosthetic limbs.  Glazer then cuts back to Höss, who has stopped retching and, after a pause, resumes his downstairs journey with renewed purpose.  That pause seems to suggest that he, too, has flashed forward across the decades; and the spring in his step that the vision appears to produce suddenly presents Höss as a different kind of villain, a buoyant sadist rather than a barbaric bureaucrat.  This may be intentional on Glazer’s part but it makes for a puzzling parting shot.

    Jonathan Romney’s S&S piece incorporates an interview with Christian Friedel and Sandra Hüller, who discussed with Romney ‘the challenges and discomfort faced by German actors in depicting such characters’.  Hüller also provides a fine insight into the challenge of playing someone whom she saw as ‘just boring and evil’.  This, she tells Romney:

    ‘… is something that goes against the natural impulse of an actor … we want to play interesting people and make ourselves more interesting through playing them.  It’s a very vain thing that we normally do, and it didn’t work here.  It would have been a fatal decision to put [sic] any sort of interesting character development that people usually look for.’

    Yet Sandra Hüller does a superb job, albeit she’ll be especially impressive to viewers who (like me) have very recently seen her in Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall portraying a person neither boring or evil – we can thereby appreciate her versatility more keenly.  Hüller interprets Hedwig Höss with complete integrity:  she never reveals a trace of her personal antipathy to the woman she’s playing yet Hedwig’s blunt manner of speaking and inelegant walk serve as an unsettling clue to deeper gracelessness.  (She’s charmless and self-absorbed to the last.  You’d think Hedwig would be delighted that Rudolf is coming home from Berlin but, when he telephones her late at night to talk about it, she’s impatient to end the conversation, telling him she needs her sleep.)  I was less impressed by Christian Friedel (who made an auspicious cinema debut in Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon (2009):  I’ve not seen him since except on television in Babylon Berlin).  Friedel makes Rudolf Höss’s disengagement too comprehensive.  He doesn’t convince as a man well equipped to impress the Nazi high command.

    This is only the fourth feature that Jonathan Glazer has made in more than twenty years and the first in ten.  Like Under the Skin (2013), this new work is formidable and troubling – both, inevitably, on a larger scale than its sci-fi predecessor – because of Glazer’s directorial choices.  The New Yorker‘s Richard Brody is offensively wrong to dismiss The Zone of Interest as ‘Holokitsch’ and, as such, as ‘this year’s Jojo Rabbit‘ but Glazer does reiterate his central premise too often.  At the same time, his occasional departures from the prevailing style and tone of the film – a fade into a blood-red screen, the Alexandria-Joseph Wulf episode, Höss’s bizarrely invigorating closing vision of his terrible legacy – are consistently jarring.  Under the Skin and The Zone of Interest also have in common music by Mica Levi and an ingenious sound design by Johnnie Burn yet the combination of sonic elements epitomises what makes The Zone of Interest, as well as exceptionally compelling, disquieting in the wrong way.  The noise from the Auschwitz furnaces – a gross, stentorian belching – is hideously powerful.  The cries of terror and pain occasionally audible in the Höss family garden are distressing.  But the semi-musical sounds devised to suggest subterranean screams are aestheticised overkill – and yet another way of Jonathan Glazer saying the same thing.  The Zone of Interest, for all its skill, is a film with a one-track mind.

    7 February 2024

    [1] This is an odd evocation of the bad joke that even Hitler was nice to his dogs – although the bad joke is rooted in historical fact:  the Nazi regime was big on non-human animal welfare.

    [2] Playing for Time (a 1980 CBS television film) was a dramatisation by Arthur Miller of Fania Fénelon’s memoir The Musicians of Auschwitz (with Vanessa Redgrave as Fénelon).

Posts navigation