WORLD WAR The Holocaust II Movie Review

World War II: The Holocaust on Screen

It is almost impossible for a mainstream film to deal with the Holocaust. Movies are primarily a medium for escapism; 95% mean to do nothing more than make money for producers and entertain the viewer. The central horror of the 20th century—the deliberate, systematic slaughter of millionsis—not a subject to be trivialized.

How, then, does a commercial filmmaker tell a story about that horror which is true to it, and at the same time finds enough redemption to give its audience some level of enjoyment? Only a handful of filmmakers have tried to address the subject and managed it with any success.

Francois Truffaut's The Last Metro handles it obliquely. He sets his story in Nazi-occupied Paris and confines much of the action to a theater. The persecution of Jews is an immediate and suffocating shadow that hangs over the events of the plot. It adds a strong dimension of sadness to an odd show business story. Louis Malle engages the matter more directly in Au Revoir les Enfants. His is an autobiographical story set in a Catholic school for boys in occupied France. Malle subtly explores the roots of prejudice—the distinctions people make between “us” and “them” and how they choose to act on those distinctions—while he slowly reveals the realities of life in a police state.

Made for German television, The Wannsee Conference is an astonishing re-creation of an actual meeting that took place in 1942. Nazi party officials, led by Reinhard Heydrich and Adolf Eichmann, called the meeting to iron out the particulars of the “final solution” to “the Jewish problem”—who qualified, how they would be transported, who'd be responsible for what. In its absolute ordinariness the film is thoroughly chilling.

The surprise hit Life Is Beautiful ambitiously attempts to find romance and nobility within the horror. To do that, Roberto Benigni lightly dances around certain aspects of Nazi brutality and terrorism. To my mind, he is less than completely successful.

By far the most important cinematic contribution to public understanding of the Holocaust is Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List. It shows as much of the barbarity as the screen can hold—and audiences can accept—and yet it still finds an honest measure of hope. The film is the work of a gifted director applying all of his talents to an important subject.