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THE GREY ZONE Send This Review to a Friend
Among the most chilling dramas about the Holocaust that I have seen, "The Grey Zone" is to be recommended to all those who can take it and a challenge to those who think they can't. There is no quarter given here to make it more palatable. This is like a descent into the hell that existed at Auschwitz, and as terrible as what is depicted here is, it still probably doesn't do justice to the horrors that occurred. The film also is unusual for what it covers.
The Nazis dehumanized virtually everybody in the extermination process, but a special way of degradation was inflicted on Jews who could buy themselves extra months of life by belonging to the Sonderkommando contingents that deceived fellow Jews into thinking they were going to shower instead of being gassed, by cleaning up the mess afterward and by collecting and burning the bodies. Their collaboration raises a question for everybody: what would or wouldn't you do to live, even a little while longer? One would like to answer that one might throw oneself into a vat of excrement as the anarchist in Lina Wermüller's "Seven Beauties" did rather that kill a fellow human being on a Nazi order. But that's fiction. Probably no outsider knows how he or she would behave under such inhuman conditions.
Those depicted in the film, a group of Hungarian-Jewish prisoners, are eventually stirred to staging a revolt. When a young girl manages to survive a mass gassing, she is hidden in a show of humanity so desperately needed. Trying to keep her alive becomes a point of honor and infuses courage into most of those who had been all but desensitized.
What makes "The Grey Zone," written and directed by Tim Blake Nelson and based on a book and his play, so consistently harrowing is the explicitness of the daily barbarity--details are not spared--and the relentless forcing of an audience to face the reality unvarnished, not with some saving fictional device or relief. This is tough stuff, but not as tough as having been imprisoned or murdered in Auschwitz, so I have little sympathy for those who shy from watching such a film, save for those who have such intimate connections with the Nazi atrocities that being reminded anew is too painful.
One key character is a Jewish doctor, Miklos Nyiszli (played extremely well by Allan Corduner), whose memoir "Auschwitz: a Doctor's Eyewitness Account"--the book the film credits--makes revelations drawn from his having assisted Josef Mengele in his experiments on Auschwitz inmates. Harvey Keitel plays Muhsfeldt, the Nazi officer with whom Nyiszli converses and maneuvers against. Keitel is convincing in creating a portrait of an officer who can be thoroughly vicious yet is intrigued by his contact with this inmate. Steve Buscemi has a key role as one of the prisoners. Mira Sorvino, in a switch from types she has played before, gives a firm and strongly felt performance as a woman prisoner who has helped supply gunpowder in preparation for an uprising in the face of what can happen to her and others if caught and tortured.
Nelson shot the film in Bulgaria and has successfully created a camp world that seems all too real. Particularly upsetting are scenes in which an orchestra plays lilting music while deportees arrive from a train and are being led to what will be their gassing. What 'The Grey Zone" also accomplishes is a look into the factory-like precision with which the Nazis carried out their extermination policy against Jews. A Lions Gate Films release.
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