What if I told you that the Nazi who ran Auschwitz was an awful person-that he didn't care about the people who were being killed in the concentration camps, that he turned a blind eye to the violence around him, and that, on top of all that, he wasn't even someone who was especially fascinating in his evil but was instead just kinda flabby and boring and, well, banal? Would that blow your mind? Would you be shocked to learn that? Would I be telling you anything you didn't already know? If I put him on film for two hours petting his dog and visiting his doctor for a medical checkup and sharing inside jokes with his equally heartless wife, would I have made a masterpiece? Is it necessary for you to spend two hours coldly examining the banality of evil?
That is the movie that Glazer has made. The movie that the trailer sells, however, and that the sound crew tried to create and that lots of viewers seem to believe they have just seen is something completely different, something far more interesting. I have heard many people talking about this movie as being about the "complicity of violence." Reviews claim that it has a message for ALL OF US about what it means to ignore the oppression in our backyards. These reviews suggest that this is a story about what it means to have to live your life in the midst of someone else's oppression. Will you cover your ears? Convince yourself it's not what you think it is? Convince yourself that there's nothing you can do? Focus on your own problems? Be brave and try to resist somehow?
If that were indeed what THE ZONE OF INTEREST was, then yes, that would be quite a compelling and meaningful movie! What I saw, however, was something much more simplistic and much less vital. This is due to Glazer's choice of perspective: for the most part, we see the film through the eyes of the camp commander and his wife-the two most powerful for hundreds of miles. They are evil and awful. Glazer knows they are evil, you know they are evil, anyone who knows the first thing about history knows they are evil, and they are also willful, active, voluntary agents in perpetrating the Holocaust. We are not meant to empathize with them (which would be a bizarre and much more problematic artistic choice); instead, we are meant to stare at them in tedious, disgusted horror. The only potential surprise-although it probably wouldn't be a surprise for anyone watching this movie-is that they are boring and "just like us." Except we know that they're NOT like us. They're not like us at all because they're very powerful Nazis, and we would and could never be in their position. The film asks nothing of us; it's all too easy to keep your distance from them from beginning to end. Your opinion will not change, for they do not change. From the opening minutes you will hate them, and when the credits roll you will realize that you still hate them for exactly the same reasons. At no point will you put yourself in their shoes. At no point will you ask yourself, "Well, if that were me, would I be able to trust myself that I wouldn't do the same thing?" At no point will you get so wrapped up in their story that you find yourself actually caught up in their petty bourgeois melodrama, only to be snapped back to the reality that people are being murdered just off screen and you have been guilty of focusing on the wrong thing. The film never asks that of you, and so it's hard to see how it has anything to do with calling attention to our own complicity with violence.
The film briefly glimpses through the point-of-view of other characters, and these are some of the only interesting moments in the film. I can only imagine what this movie could have been if it had instead focused mostly on, for example, the viewpoint of the commander's teenage son: someone old enough to know what's happening and to possibly do something about it, someone capable of questioning the privilege of his position, yet someone who also just wants to make out with his Aryan girlfriend. Such a perspective would be rife for exploring what it actually means to be complicit in such a system. Likewise, if the film had been more firmly rooted in the perspective of one of the "local girls" who work as housekeepers for the family, that could have given a better portrait of what it means to be trapped in an unjust system. What do you do if you know that your employer is a murderer yet you still need a job to support your family? By focusing the camera on these side characters, Glazer could have actually given us some interesting questions to ponder. Instead, the majority of the film is wasted on hammering home the obvious points that Nazis are evil and evil is banal.
For anyone interested in seeing a film that is actually about what ZONE OF INTEREST is supposedly about, I highly recommend all 9.5 hours of the riveting 1985 documentary SHOAH by Claude Lanzmann. Lanzmann captures a wide variety of witnesses with his camera: powerful camp commanders and their families, bureaucrats whose contributions to the Holocaust consisted in selling train tickets, local people who came to terms with the fact that their farms were now neighboring killing factories, people who resisted, people who hid, people who survived. SHOAH's all-encompassing scope hammers in the horrifying fact that the Holocaust was a fact of OUR existence, that it happened in our same boring world with people just like us on all sides. THE ZONE OF INTEREST's one-note sound design gimmick, on the other hand, is all it really has going for it; otherwise, it has nothing more to add to our understanding of Nazi violence than the most recent Indiana Jones movie.
That is the movie that Glazer has made. The movie that the trailer sells, however, and that the sound crew tried to create and that lots of viewers seem to believe they have just seen is something completely different, something far more interesting. I have heard many people talking about this movie as being about the "complicity of violence." Reviews claim that it has a message for ALL OF US about what it means to ignore the oppression in our backyards. These reviews suggest that this is a story about what it means to have to live your life in the midst of someone else's oppression. Will you cover your ears? Convince yourself it's not what you think it is? Convince yourself that there's nothing you can do? Focus on your own problems? Be brave and try to resist somehow?
If that were indeed what THE ZONE OF INTEREST was, then yes, that would be quite a compelling and meaningful movie! What I saw, however, was something much more simplistic and much less vital. This is due to Glazer's choice of perspective: for the most part, we see the film through the eyes of the camp commander and his wife-the two most powerful for hundreds of miles. They are evil and awful. Glazer knows they are evil, you know they are evil, anyone who knows the first thing about history knows they are evil, and they are also willful, active, voluntary agents in perpetrating the Holocaust. We are not meant to empathize with them (which would be a bizarre and much more problematic artistic choice); instead, we are meant to stare at them in tedious, disgusted horror. The only potential surprise-although it probably wouldn't be a surprise for anyone watching this movie-is that they are boring and "just like us." Except we know that they're NOT like us. They're not like us at all because they're very powerful Nazis, and we would and could never be in their position. The film asks nothing of us; it's all too easy to keep your distance from them from beginning to end. Your opinion will not change, for they do not change. From the opening minutes you will hate them, and when the credits roll you will realize that you still hate them for exactly the same reasons. At no point will you put yourself in their shoes. At no point will you ask yourself, "Well, if that were me, would I be able to trust myself that I wouldn't do the same thing?" At no point will you get so wrapped up in their story that you find yourself actually caught up in their petty bourgeois melodrama, only to be snapped back to the reality that people are being murdered just off screen and you have been guilty of focusing on the wrong thing. The film never asks that of you, and so it's hard to see how it has anything to do with calling attention to our own complicity with violence.
The film briefly glimpses through the point-of-view of other characters, and these are some of the only interesting moments in the film. I can only imagine what this movie could have been if it had instead focused mostly on, for example, the viewpoint of the commander's teenage son: someone old enough to know what's happening and to possibly do something about it, someone capable of questioning the privilege of his position, yet someone who also just wants to make out with his Aryan girlfriend. Such a perspective would be rife for exploring what it actually means to be complicit in such a system. Likewise, if the film had been more firmly rooted in the perspective of one of the "local girls" who work as housekeepers for the family, that could have given a better portrait of what it means to be trapped in an unjust system. What do you do if you know that your employer is a murderer yet you still need a job to support your family? By focusing the camera on these side characters, Glazer could have actually given us some interesting questions to ponder. Instead, the majority of the film is wasted on hammering home the obvious points that Nazis are evil and evil is banal.
For anyone interested in seeing a film that is actually about what ZONE OF INTEREST is supposedly about, I highly recommend all 9.5 hours of the riveting 1985 documentary SHOAH by Claude Lanzmann. Lanzmann captures a wide variety of witnesses with his camera: powerful camp commanders and their families, bureaucrats whose contributions to the Holocaust consisted in selling train tickets, local people who came to terms with the fact that their farms were now neighboring killing factories, people who resisted, people who hid, people who survived. SHOAH's all-encompassing scope hammers in the horrifying fact that the Holocaust was a fact of OUR existence, that it happened in our same boring world with people just like us on all sides. THE ZONE OF INTEREST's one-note sound design gimmick, on the other hand, is all it really has going for it; otherwise, it has nothing more to add to our understanding of Nazi violence than the most recent Indiana Jones movie.