Receiving a wider release this week, Jonathan Glazer’s “The Zone of Interest” has officially entered the cinematic arena of the Holocaust picture. Walking a not-so-fine line of pretentiousness and examination of a tragic time in world history, the film takes too long to achieve its impact, but does so quite beautifully in its final act. When Glazer cuts through the self-aggrandizing manner in which he crafts the picture, the final 30 or so minutes have an impact that should have been felt throughout the entire film, given the subject matter. Unfortunately, the path the audience must travel to reach the powerful message is overly artsy and causes too hollow a center.
“Art” cinema is successful when a filmmaker colors the project with an artistic edge, enhancing their story. Fellini, Bergman, and Bertolucci crafted their uniquely artful eyes around the stories they were telling and would never allow their narrative to become lost in the visual. It is misguided when a director sets out to make an “Art film”, just for the sake of doing so. If directorial flourishes can enhance a project, so be it. If a story is powerful enough, let the tale tell itself. Glazer seems disinterested in the psychological, as he relies too heavily on the aural. With the screenplay and in the film’s design, Glazer made the conscious decision to drown the soul of Martin Amis’s 2014 novel in cinematic affectation.
While the writer/director too freely felt the need to whittle down Amis’s work to its bare bones, he smartly kept the contrast between the horrors of the camps and the matter-of-fact family lives of the the men who ran them. Christian Friedel is Rudolf Höss, the commander of the Auschwitz camp, whose family lives with him in a big house complete with a well-groomed yard and a swimming pool. A wall surrounds their property. On the other side exists the savagery of the Nazi camp. Too much screen time is given to the daily routines in and around the Höss home. Most modern filmmakers cannot seem to find much to do when filming the mundane. Watching characters mull around isn’t an artistic slice of life. It is dull and lazy filmmaking.
Beginning the film with three minutes of black screen as Mica Levi’s “score” plays over it, tells the viewer all they need to know. The darkness. The eerie sounds. What horrors await! This is pedestrian first-year film school nonsense and Jonathan Glazer is a better director than that. Levi’s score (winner at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, which is unfathomable) is nowhere near as impactful as his work for Glazer’s “Under the Skin” or Pablo Larraín’s “Jackie”. Here, the bursts of askew notes and rumblings become mere noise, adding nothing but annoyance to most of the film.
After an opening picnic which goes on and on and signifies nothing (long interrupted takes can be a good thing if one has something to say), Glazer gets to the house where Rudolf’s children play while his wife, Hedwig (Sandra Hüller), rules with a cold fist. She reins over the household, being more than unpleasant to the “help”. As the sounds of death echo from over the wall, Hedwig is more concerned with keeping her garden pristine. From their point of view, the Höss family has it made. For the audience (as Rudolph oversees rationalized daily murder) these people are the personification of very real and present monsters.
A promotion causes Rudolf to move away from his home, causing a rift in his marriage, amongst other issues. In an instant, his perceived ascent becomes the first trip on his descent into the ugly blackness of history.
The real family the Höss clan is based upon lived in the Auschwitz camp. The film and novel get their title from the area that housed the many camps. It was called the Interessengebiet or “interest zone.” Focusing on the house and its proximity to the horrors does find an impact as the film goes on. As this horrible family has swim parties and birthday fun, the sounds of the camp make their way into the air, overpowering (for the audience) the falsely idyllic home life of Rudolph, Hedwig, and their family.
While mostly medium shots, Lukasz Zal’s camera work looks good and the excursions into Black and White give the visual tone a needed visceral bump. As smoke filled skies darken the shining sun, the symbolism is earned, causing the potency of Zal’s cinematography to hit harder than the film itself.
What Glazer gets right is showing how these people are addicted to their power. Hedwig and Rudolph discuss how they are living a life they have long dreamed of, signifying how removed they are from the wicked barbarism that funds their lives. It is in this monstrous disconnect where the film becomes something of a parable, as husband and wife represent the thousands who either participated in the Holocaust or the millions who chose to go on with their lives as it was happening around them.
What the film gets wrong is reducing the lives of the prisoners to ambient noise. While this tactic is certainly the point of Glazer’s chosen style, to focus solely on the monster while not giving the victims an ounce of proper representation feels disrespectful.
Glazer rights the ship in the film’s final act, where he chooses to take the overall tone (and what he says about Rudolph Höss) to an interesting level. I shall not reveal how the last half hour is handled, but its emotional impact comes to pass honestly and quite powerfully. It is here where proper respect is given to those who deserve it while the ugliness of those who helped execute the Holocaust will see them to their fates.
“The Zone of Interest” is a frustratingly empty motion picture for much of its short (only 1 hour and 45 minute) run time; too vacant in its drama and much too psychologically distant. Jonathan Glazer is more concerned with delivering a work that is consciously outside the filmmaking box, rather than concentrating on the power of the material. The finale is indeed compelling, but all that comes before is so vacuous, that it lessens the impact. While the film has received (mostly) praise and is likely to receive Oscar nominations, Glazer has constructed the type of film that fools an audience into believing they are seeing something groundbreaking. A deeper focus will open one’s eyes to how, with this film, Glazer’s style is self-congratulatory and obvious.
Not a bad film and I stand by the power of its final act, but taken as a whole, “The Zone of Interest” is one of the least original takes of that horrible time in history.
The Zone of Interest
Written & Directed by Jonathan Glazer (Adapting Martin Amis’s “The Zone of Interest”)
Starring Christian Friedel, Sandra Hüller, Freya Kreutzkam, Ralph Herforth, Max Beck
PG-13, 105 Minutes, A24/Film 4/Access Entertainment
