ERRORS OF OMISSION AND COMMISSION

The best book I have ever read is Caste, The Origins of our Discontents by Pulitzer Prize winner, Isabel Wilkerson. It is the only time I ordered multiple copies of any book to be sent to my children and grandchildren, as well as other members of my extended family.

It is the first time I made the decision to read a book a second time with the intention of underlining certain passages, only to give this up on discovering that I was finding something to underline on every page. In fact, more often than not, I found myself underlining everything on the page.

Caste is not a novel. There are no characters to follow through its 398 pages, and yet, someone decided to turn this historical/journalistic masterpiece into a motion picture. The motion picture is Origin and that someone is director Ava DuVernay.

Ms. DuVernay and author Wilkerson wrote the screenplay. Trust me, this is not one of those books that you shake hard three or four times and the screenplay falls out. This is a most original work… and yet… it is also the book. Quite an accomplishment.

Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, whom you should remember as the wife of Will Smith in the movie about the tennis playing Williams’ sisters, essays the role of Ms. Wilkerson and it is (as if anyone needed it) proof of how without a highly paid publicity campaign, art is often overlooked at the Oscar doorstep of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Had anyone noticed… or paid the slightest attention… Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor would surely be the front runner for best performance by an actress in a motion picture, and Origin would likewise be up there with Oppenheimer and the rest while quite possibly leading the pack.

I could go on at length but will not. The tears that remain in my eyes from  having just viewed this masterwork are testament enough to a genuinely great motion picture. Origin is currently available in theatres.

And then there is The Zone of Interest, a pretentious, slow moving, Oscar nominated motion picture of the worst kind… a movie without real purpose and a bastardization of the book, by Martin Amis on which this film is purportedly based. I am given to understand that this 10-year-old novel is itself based on true events in and out of the death camps at Auschwitz where more than a million men, women, and children were put to their deaths at the hands of the Nazis.

The interesting thing about this material is the specific location: the home of the Auschwitz Nazi commandant, his wife, and children along with their lovely gardens, all immediately adjacent to the death camp itself.

The book shows us both… the horrors of the camp itself and the relatively mundane life that goes on with the commandant and his family right next door. The movie does not do that. The camera is never allowed inside the camp. If I am not mistaken, there is only one inmate who is seen in the entire film… and that is the individual who plays a sort of gardener for the family’s flower beds. He has not a single line of dialogue.

And so we are left with life among the commandant and his brood. An idea that might work… although I am not so sure of that… were this a stage play. But this is not a work for live theatre, it is on screen, and it is… please forgive the Yiddishism, but there is no better way to say it… a Shanda.

And shame on director Jonathan Glazer for even attempting to sanitize the Holocaust in this manner. I would be more agitated were the film not such a total and complete failure as a motion picture, so much so that I predict that less people than died at Auschwitz will go to a theatre to see this movie.

I will save my irritation for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences which, in an apparent attempt at political correctness, somehow thought this was a film worthy of its members’ attention. The fact that one of my pro-Palestinian followers recommended this film for my attention remains further proof to me of the film’s underlying malice, given that a minimization of the Holocaust serves an antisemitic version of historical events.

Besides Hollywood’s Academy, the same folks in France who celebrated Jerry Lewis as the consummate American auteur, voted the director of this thing their Grand Prix award at Cannes. Sandra Huller, who is being so celebrated for her excellent work in Art of the Fall, is also receiving accolades from the nation’s critics for doing considerably less in her role as the commandant’s wife in The Zone of Interest. I would label her performance in The Zone a non-event. If you must, the film can be found in theatres, but then so can stale popcorn.

 

 

Barney Rosenzweig