The Grey Zone (2001)

Great Film overall

Am i the only one who thinks........Average?

Very interesting film. Was caught on the premise when seeing the trailer but unsure as to what the outcome would be for the showing. As it turns out, it was a very good film.

It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

I had a hard time getting to sleep after watching The Grey Zone. It is the darkest film I have ever seen. It is a stark contrast to Schindler's List in the fact that it is focused on the experience of the great majority of the people who were sent to the death camps and died. Nobody helped them. It is also raw in its presentation of the gas chambers, crematoria and the Sonderkommandos, Jews who volunteered to do the dirty work of processing the people who arrived at the camps and then their dead bodies afterwards in exchange for a few more months of life.That takes nothing away from the extraordinary Schindler's List, as it is very important to show the deeds of people like Oskar Schindler. His story and the story of many others like him is also true. In my opinion watching both films makes for an effective portrayal of the Holocaust on film, and an exploration of the nature of evil and humanity.Although the Grey Zone is a bleak story of utter human depravity, the darkness is not total. In an extraordinary turn of events that actually happened in October 1944, the very people who at first abandoned their morality to keep themselves alive threw the Nazis' deal back in their faces and sacrificed themselves, taking a part of the Auschwitz death factory with them. Their actions suggest that even though it flickers, the eternal flame that makes us greater than what we may appear to be is always present within.

The Grey Zone furnishes soul and significance for an episode that's little more than a postscript in history books, the story of the Jewish work units in the Auschwitz concentration camp. These prisoners were made to assist the camp's guards in shepherding their victims to the gas chambers, then disposing of their bodies in the ovens. Nelson attempts to utilize the past to remind us of the fragile vagueness of our own principles, that most of us will never have to know what we might have the capacity for in particular conditions.And yet Nelson's dialogue is like a horse race. It sounds like American slang and divulges its theatrical roots, which works against the potent acting and the intrinsic impact of the subject matter. His screenplay needs to show more of the catch-22, instead of have his characters put on hostile debates about it. No doubt there is much tension created through all the tug of war, but characters are too graceful and fluent while speaking under pressure and in conflict. I don't feel anyone's true nature comes through in their words, except perhaps Harvey Keitel's surprisingly becoming SS officer. You can virtually hear the components of his principled device stirring as characters rap their adages and aphorisms. There's an affected purpleness to everything. Sometimes it works and sometimes shrieks of pretension. Nelson takes an emotionally inconceivable situation and comes close to sterilizing it with self-conscious technique. But ultimately, these are defects that, ironically, make fodder for subsequent discourse.Nelson, an actor himself, knows experientially how to stimulate and inspire his cast, which is comprised of other strong performances than just Keitel's. Needless to say he must also know how to make an actor seem not to act, how to put him or her at their ease, bring them to that state of relaxation where their creative faculties are released. I think for every time that's done successfully here, there are just as many instances where we see through the baroque artifice.Whether its sense of style seems to trivialize the authenticity of its situations, that's not to say it aims for the heart and misses. There are nevertheless many extraordinarily bleak and, most significantly, unflinchingly emotional scenes and moments that it's out of the question that you'd not be moved by the film. The violent rebellion, played not for hero worship but with somber fatalism, using minor key tonality in its score. If this story must be told and retold, and to be sure it must, then The Grey Zone is to be praised for discovering a new approach. The film's feeling for images gives it a grave intensity, but it's thrust by the acting, self-conscious or not. And not like many mainstream Holocaust films, even great, monumental ones, The Grey Zone is actually frank enough to renounce the prospect of hopefulness in Auschwitz. Or the world.The film sneers at how we, most of us, more than we'd like to know, feel we can generalize about groups of people, races, nations, ethnic and religious groups, how in the bleakest of examples of this shameful human weakness gone to the extreme, it is all self-fulfilling prophecy. When you take away the rights of people, when you dehumanize them, they will of course work as corruptly and extremely as you to survive your oppression. One day sit down and make a list of groups of people in any or all countries, not least of which ours, that can be equated to this, and you may see a less distilled, less explicit holocaust that may or may not end.

If it weren't such great story, i would give rate this movie as a 2. The cast has many great actors (Keitel, Buscemi), but they are overshadowed by the range of terrible popcorn comedy actors (Arquette, Sorvino). The casting overall was terrible. The acting, surprisingly even from the good actors, was mediocre at best. I blame this mostly on the directing as the lines ALL seem to be forced. It is no wonder that this movie went almost straight to DVD. Its just too bad that they had waste such a great story, and disgrace the people who committed such brave acts during one of the most barbaric acts in the history of the world. If you want to learn about a great rebellion that took place in Auschwitz and you don't want to read a book about it, then watch this movie. But just beware that the movie sucks.

Having long since ashcanned organized religion for the ethical content of movies, I strongly recommend this one and "Out of the Ashes" for something other than the ordinary Holocaust movies.You see these Jewish prisoners pushing the carts holding the bodies of their fellow Jewish prisoners into the furnaces. In one instance, a man is pushing the cart holding the bodies of his wife and three children. When I later, a staunch capital punishment foe, saw them pushing a live Nazi soldier into the furnace, I was happy........shows you the effect of the movie. I went instantly from 'Forgive 70 times 7" to "An eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth." So thin is the patina of civilization.The most heroic act I saw here, which reminded me of Jean Moulin's attempt at suicide so that he wouldn't divulge secrets of the French Resistance, was the female prisoner impaling herself on the electric wires of Auschwitz. She had stood and watched as the Nazi officer executes one after the other of her fellow female prisoners. One note that stands out is physical...the arching shiny steel fence-posts look much like some of the statuary I've seen elsewhere, perhaps meant to evoke memories of those inhuman extermination camps. Last night I saw the map of the 'work camps' and the 'extermination camps'...I didn't realize how many of them there were.Another reason this film is good for a discussion group is that it somewhat contradicts the idea that 'The Jews went submissively to the ovens." To watch the efforts made to make bombs within those prisons and the continual arguing among the prisoners as they try to come up with a way to liberation is wonderfully enlightening. Nothing is allowed to be 'easy', not even the uniting of these prisoners for a common cause....to save their lives.As I watched the Nazis, and thought about the dehumanizing of the enemy du jour, that has to happen for our good children to kill others, I wondered, "Have there been any memoirs written by Nazi soldiers in those camps, any that would give us some insight into how they turned into murderous barbarians?" Although this movie was not given high marks because of it's stylized format, I found that this artifice help me to take in what ..if done realistically...would have been too much to bear.