Everyday heroism can be a macabre thing. Certain critics even declare it a subject to be censored and condemned -- when we consider Tim Blake Nelson's THE GREY ZONE.

I sometimes have reflected that the real "heroes" of Modern Western Life are the men and women who rise up every morning to go to dehumanizing jobs to keep their families together, or at least to support their children; fathers who sacrifice their real ambitions to follow society's more lucrative dictums; mothers who expend their intelligence, youth and energy in generally underpaid jobs for the sake of children they've borne.

Their great failing, our great failing, is in cooperating with our own destruction.

All these heroes are mostly ground up by Western commercial society, and then, if they are lucky, sent off to a rest home, often soon disposed of in crematoria But we ignore those people (Us), and rather have been led to think of a "hero" as a sublimated version of ourselves, a guy who charges up a hill, waving a flag, a bayonet in his teeth, marries a perfect woman, and becomes U.S. Senator or president of a great corporation (like Enron, say); or the girl who, against great odds, a Barbie Doll pressed to her chest, becomes Miss Kumquat, lands a part in a blockbuster Movie (or cuts a platinum CD) and marries the third richest bachelor in America.

None of those latter models of "heroism" is what THE GREY ZONE is about.

American Generation X (and Y now, I suppose), with many important exceptions, do not put themselves out so much to achieve the above accomplishments. (Not so many of the opportunities are pressing at the moment -- at least, until the draft is re-established.) Perhaps they dream of hitting a home run in the World Series clutch, run a winning touchdown for the Cowboys, or have the adulation granted to a Britney Spears, but that is about it.

Those who have advantages, education or ambition may become better off materially, but no great surge of young men crowds enlistment centers after 9-1-1 to track down Osama bin Laden, trap the evil Saddam in Babylon; few delegations of young women journey afar to minister to the destitute widows of Kabul, or teach them how to read. [The Bush Administration, for its part, has given Florida greater breaks in the Federal Budget than it has to Afghanistan.] Perhaps, these young people are right, at least pragmatic, certainly more cautious than those of recent generations. By and large, they seem to see the World around them like a sporting contest.

They are spectators.

But they are not the subject of THE GREY ZONE either, and yet . . . they -- and we -- all are.

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The specific subject of THE GREY ZONE is Jews in Poland in the Autumn of 1944. These were ordinary men and women who, although they knew they were vulnerable to the delusions of the system in which they lived, felt the people they had to deal with would be reasonable.

They are not those who escaped the ghettoes to join partisan bands in the forests; nor on the other side, the privileged like Kurt Gerron -- Stage and Movie director, important actor in THE BLUE ANGEL, and Tiger Brown in the first stage production of The Three Penny Opera. He negotiated a cabaret production deal at Concentration Camp Thieresenstadt, and made the Nazi propaganda film "The Fuhrer Gives the Jews a City," to stay in show biz and extend his life. [To no final avail; he was executed at Auschwitz in 1944.] Still others tried as best they could to conceal their Jewish identities by becoming Nazis themselves, following in the path of Herschmann-Chaim Steinschneider, who changed his name to Erik-Jan Hanussen. [A subject of Werner Herzog's current INVINCIBLE. At the birth of the Third Reich, before his murder by Nazi agents, Hanussen appears to have been an occult influence on -- and perhaps a personal acquaintance of -- Adolph Hitler.] THE GREY ZONE is further not about the successful survivors nor the more conventional victims of the Holocaust, though they are assuredly part of the film.

Writer/Director/Editor Tim Blake Nelson, whose grand parents escaped from Europe just before the World War II to Tulsa, Oklahoma, has the same objection to many Holocaust movies that I do. Most of these highly praised works either depict entirely noble, downtrodden, sentimentalized people, as those shown in SCHINDLER'S LIST (not that they did not exist) or fantasy figures like Roberto Benigni, who makes a joke of the experience in LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL. Neither type of film comes anywhere near the kind of reality you and I know had to be the case.

Nelson, rather, was attracted to the work of the great meditator on the Holocaust, Primo Levi, who pointed out in "The Drowned and the Saved" that these victims of Hitler's fiendish pragmatism were much like ourselves. Some were heroes and some were innocents, but there was a large group in the middle who were complicit in their own annihilation or actually assisted it. They were in "the grey zone," which gave Blake the subject for his play, and a title of the same name for his film: THE GREY ZONE, one of the very best of 2002.

THE GREY ZONE, at 108 minutes, is about a group of Jews (and some others) known as the Sonderkommandos, who were recruited by the German Gestapo and the SS -- in part for their efficient and twisted amusement -- to help herd, supervise and hoodwink thousands of humans a day into the gas chambers, in this case, at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Afterward, the Sonderkommandos stripped and shaved the dead, looted their belongings, and searched the body cavities of the corpses for their masters, before cramming the remains into ovens of the five huge crematoria, which operated day and night for over three years. In return for their services, the Sonderkommandos were allowed to live in relative comfort, eat and drink crudely -- but more lavishly than most Poles and Slavs (or ordinary Germans, latterly) in a hundred mile radius of the sprawling group of camps. They were also able to survive another day -- to an average tenure of four months.

Auschwicz was established by Gestapo Chief Heinrich Himmler in Oswiecim, Poland, in April 1940. Communists, trade unionists, Seventh Day Adventists, Gypsies and other minority populations were brought there, first as detainees, and then as slave labor in a growing complex of synthetic rubber and gasoline factories run by the R.G. Farben Cartel [read, "primitive model for the multi-national corporation"], plus the nearby *Union Munitions Plant. Women's facilities were added in 1942; in addition to Birkenau, designed to house Jews in the Final Solution. It was not long before military medical and state sponsored genetic experiments were being performed on the mentally retarded, then Gypsy and Jewish women and children. Figures are in some conflict, but once the Zyklon B dispensers and furnaces were installed, the high estimate runs to three million Jewish people alone who died there.

In the Fall of 1944, the Nazis, shaken by a massive revolt at Sobribor, closed many of the other camps, but Auschwicz accelerated the annihilation of Hungarian Jews, rounded up late in the game, and the Camp management, in a classic business move, began to reduce personnel. In revenge, and from other primal motives, the 12th of 13 Sonderkommando teams which would man the camp during the War, already beyond their life cycle in the eyes of the Nazis, planned a desperate, hopeless assault on the crematoria and system, which they had been serving.

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THE GREY ZONE is, with some artistic license, the story of the 12th Sonderkommando unit.

After establishing the satanic flame-belching chimneys of the crematoria (recreated at 80% scale outside of Sophia, Bulgaria), the film begins in close-up with the face of Hoffman (David Arquette), registering fear, suppressed rage, and other mixed emotions, as he stands in a flickering glare, as corpses are floated in water by gravity to glowing, crackling doors of the furnaces. He has been sent in the midnight hour to summon, Dr. Miklos Nyiszli (Alan Corduner), who is having a scientific philosophical discussion, amid specimens of gall bladders and eyeballs, with the infamous Dr. Josef Mengle (Henry Stram). Dr. Nyiszli, a Jewish pathologist and "a member of the staff" (on whose book the film is partly based), goes with Hoffman into the Sonderkommano barracks, where he is shown an elderly man, apparently dead. Dr. Nyiszli gives the man a shot of digitalis to revive him, whereupon the first of many arguments in the story ensues. It culminates as Rosenthal (David Chandler) smothers the old man to death with a pillow. The doctor, appalled and baffled by this behavior, tells the assembled inmates (who are feasting occasionally on wine, bread, cheese and other delicacies from a long linen-covered table) never to risk his position by bringing him there to treat a prisoner again.

We share the Doctor's feelings, as the inmates enter into another argument over what they will do with the body. What can be going on here? [Several people in the packed preview I attended left at this moment, one with his hand over his mouth.] But remember this incident, because it is at the emotional heart of THE GREY ZONE'S very lean plot, which until late in the film, has hardly a drop of the sentimentality that ruined Stephen Spielberg's renowned SCHINDLER'S LIST.

We learn presently how the main conspirators, Rosenthal, Schlermer (Daniel Benzali) and Hoffmann, are planning a revolt, but they are so constricted and divided that it is very difficult for them to agree easily upon any course. The barracks are divided by distance, and segregated among Hungarians, Poles, Czechs, and others, none of which said groups entirely trust the others. Additionally, one faction sees the revolt as a possible means of escape while another simply wants to register an act of defiance. They use "pay" in form of the loot they take from the corpses, or belongings of their fellow murdered Jews, to provide bribes for the guards, and to finance the weapons and munitions they will need.

In another part of this ugly Nazi-engineered jungle, at the Union Munitions Plant [financed, by the way, in part by the American Union Banking Corporation], women workers are sequestering gun powder for the plot.

We accompany Abromowics (Steve Buscemi), a Polish Hasidic Jew, on his a journey from the people in his part of the Camp to the barracks of Sonderkommando 12. More conflicts erupt between the Pole, who is both skeptical of the Hungarians and their goal of revolt, but they finally make progress toward the fruition of their plan.

In among these plottings, and for most of THE GREY ZONE (which always seems in muted blues, greens or browns -- illuminated by occasional fire or sunlight), there are certain of the most gruelingly horrifying scenes I have seen in movies. The days and nights of the Sonderkommandos are chronicled, for instance. They meet new arrivals off the trains, after those unfortunates have been separated out for either work, experimentation or death by the Nazis. The ones marked for the gas chambers are marched directly to the sites, while a camp chamber orchestra plays classical music in the pleasant weather of early September, above the portals of the death house. Urging that those to be murdered entrust their valuables to them, the Sonderkommandos tell the victims that they must strip for showers and delousing, that they would be wise to pile their luggage together, note where they leave their clothes, tie their shoe laces together so as not to lose them, etc. Then, the Sonderkommandos hand the condemned innocents over to German guards, who escort them to their doom. The Sonderkommandos wait, for the 20 minutes it takes, listening to distant muted cries of fear and panic. It is just part of a day's work.

[An unsettling but effective aspect of THE GREY ZONE is that though there is little music, the sound stage carries a constant, almost subliminal stream of messages: the murmur of people, barking of dogs, train whistles, rumbling of furnaces, flow of liquids, etc.]

In a particularly brutal scene, a well-dressed man (Lee Wilkof) refuses to give his expensive wristwatch to Hoffmann. The man with the wristwatch becomes suspicious of this demanding, nervous, seething host, and he begins to call out to others, urging them to resist. Hoffmann goes berserk, beats and kicks the man nearly to death in front of his shrieking wife (Jessica Hecht), until a guard dispatches the man with a pistol shot, and sneeringly hands Hoffmann the watch he wanted.

Writer-Director-Editor Blake used a portion of his small $4,000,000 budget to hire a SteadyCamSL, which keeps us constantly in the center of the action. This film might have been called "You Are There, Whether You Want to Be or Not." In empathy with the myriad victims of this abominable murder operation.

At the same time, to his credit, Writer/Director Nelson shows us Commandant Muhsfelt (Harvey Keitel), a weary time server, who, if he were doing something else today, might be in middle management. He walks casually among his workers, observing "the product," urging them to observe procedures, promising bonuses (of schnapps, perhaps, which Sonderkommandos and guards alike consume in copious amounts). Muhsfelt is all about order and efficiency, keeping his factory humdrumming. In private, however, he has long serious discussions with Dr. Nyizli about his high blood pressure, drinking problem, and insomnia. In return for medical treatment, he arranges that the Doctor's family be saved, and he wearily gives the good doctor advice on the necessity, whether they like it or not, of carrying on "the work," keeping production levels high. (As Dr. Mengle justifies their experiments to Nyiszli as "expanding scientific knowledge.")

The constant shifts in editing go into high gear when two of the smuggler ringleaders at the Union Munitions plant are caught. (In real life, there were four.) The women, Rosa (Natasha Lyonne) and Dina (Mira Sorvino), evidently Lesbian lovers, are interrogated and tortured. Gestapo specialists (of the kind that our CIA later brought to the United States to train police in the Americas) question the gaunt, emaciated, completely terrified women. A bland, calm Brian F. O'Byrne (AN EVERLASTING PIECE, 2000) patiently repeats the same question to Dina, each time signaling for another fingernail to be ripped out.

But the women will not crack. The gunpowder is not found.

And the plot picks up momentum, retarded only by the entry of Maria (Kamecia Grigorova) -- another woman, a touch of sentiment -- a young teenage girl, miraculously but inconveniently left alive after gassing.

The film hurtles in its semi-documentary way toward the morning of October 7, 1944.

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THE GREY ZONE, a risky project in the best of times, had several good spirits looking over it. Killer Films, which had a three picture deal with Tim Blake Nelson, allowed him to concentrate on his own project instead of theirs. Avi and Danny Lerner, bosses of Milennium Films, gave the film the proverbial green light, even though they stated frankly that they did not expect to turn a profit on it. David Arquette, whose past career has been that of a goofy teen hero (SCREAM 1, 2 and 3), volunteered to play against type, and Mira Sorvino, suffering from "The Marissa Tomei Oscar Curse," lent her name, cut her hair, and lost more weight than she can afford, to play the harrowing role of Dina. Interested in Tim Nelson's play, Harvey Keitel took a personal interest in seeing a film be made of it, became one of its producers, and insisted on playing the part of the head Nazi. Production Designer Maria Djurkovic, Cinematographer Lee Russell Fine (NAQOYOQATSI, 2002), and Sound Editor Phil Benson aided Nelson in realizing his dark vision.

At age 37, Actor [O BROTHER, WHERE ART THOU? (2001); THE GOOD GIRL (2002), etc.], Playwright [THE EYE OF GOD], Director [O. (2001), and short films] emerges with THE GREY ZONE as a major all around Artist -- one to be watched.

On the downside, THE GREY ZONE was held up a year because of 9-1-1. Just released, it has faced an uphill critical battle. Initial responses often ran to, why do we need another film about the Holocaust? Why tell this story now? And why tell it from the standpoint of co-dependents with the Nazis? And why tell it with such a mixture to stylization and naturalism?

While the latter criticism [e.g., the inmates speak in a normal variety of dialects, camp personnel with German accents] may put off some, Tim Blake Nelson answers the other questions as follows: "We [all] want to be able to interpret history from extreme margins, not [from] where history actually occurs, which is in the center of these poles, where most of us exist."

We are in just such a time and situation ourselves today. Some future historians and artists will judge us critically, if we allow ourselves to become the Sonderkommandos to our fellow humans in the next decade.

THE GREY ZONE is one of the best films of 2002. I urge you to find it and see it.

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*The Union Munitions Factory: In casually researching background for this review, I traced the tendrils of the vine from the Union Munitions Factory to the Union Banking Corporation of New York (UBC).

Formed by Brown Brothers Harriman, engaged in complicated business affiliations with the Swedish-German Thyssen Family (who helped finance Hitler in the late 1920's and 1930's), it was natural that UBC would link American business with Nazism at the highest levels. Under the general management of George Herbert Walker, maternal grandfather of principal stockholder W. Averill Harriman (advisor to several Democratic Administrations), UBC was specifically guided by his Son-in-Law, Prescott Sheldon Bush. Bush engaged Lawyers Allen and George Foster Dulles -- later Founding Head of the CIA and Secretary of State (a chief architect of The Cold War) under President Dwight Eisenhower, respectively -- to deal with the Bank's German investments in Hitler's New Order. Hence, through Thyssen's mysterious Consolidated Silesian Trust [in THE MASK OF DIMITRIOS (1944), perhaps a model for Eric Ambler's "Eurasian Credit Trust"], Prescott Bush was actually the nominal manager of the Union Munitions Factory at Auschwicz in October 1942, when he and Brown Brothers Harriman were charged with treason under The Trading with the Enemy Act, pushed through by FDR earlier that year.

Prescott Bush, and his Father-in-Law George Herbert Walker, weathered that storm of sedition nicely (supposedly because a full investigation would have seriously damaged Wartime morale and the War Effort), but following the war, his opposite number, Baron Fritz Thyssen, found his various assets frozen. It was not until after his 1951 death in Argentina, that investments in the Hamburg-American Line, Consolidated Silesian Trust, Union Munitions A.G., etc were released.

George Herbert Walker and, to a lesser extent, Prescott Bush were hard drinking, brutal anti-Catholic, and despite connections to American Jewish organizations, anti-Semitic Republicans. Both had peculiar interests in Eugenics and Planned Parenthood. These unpleasant qualities were not publicized at the time.

Prescott Bush used part of the 1.5 million dollars proceeds of the sale of Thyssen's stocks to finance his successful campaign for U.S. Senate. [It was of course Senator Prescott Bush who persuaded General Dwight Eisenhower to run for President on the Republican ticket, which saved the Party from threatened oblivion.] His Son, George Herbert Walker Bush, drew on these funds and related influence, in forming his Apache Oil and Zapata Oil Companies; buying into Pennzoil, United Fruit, etc; and in his easy ascent through half a dozen positions, including U.S. Representative, Ambassador to China, Chief of the CIA, U.S. Vice President, and of course, U.S. President. In his 1988 Campaign, he was briefly embarrassed by the revelation that he had half a dozen old Nazis and Nazi sympathizers on his Election Advisory Committees, some of them longtime friends of his Father and Godfather, but the American Public was not interested, and three years later President Bush was forming a coalition to launch The New World Order in the Gulf War.

We now have his Son, President George Walker Bush, carrying out The New World Order as part of his "War on Terrorism."

The origins of the Bush Family's direct connection to the Holocaust were first reported in 1994 by John Loftus and Mark Aarons in The Secret War Against the Jews: How Western Espionage Betrayed the Jewish People.

You may begin to trace this much more wide ranging story through the following URL:

http://www.clamormagazine.org/features/issue14.3_feature.3.html

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*UPDATE: March 30, 2003 -- At the time I wrote this review, I was puzzled, as I had been reading part of the story in Charles Higham's sensational Trading with the Enemy, how Prescott Bush managed to become a United States Senator after being implicated in treason less than a decade before.

I recently learned "the rest of the story." Grandpa Bush made an early day plea bargain. His Wall Street friends rallied around him, and, he agreed to spearhead and largely finance the new United Service Organization (USO), which became famous and beloved for organizing military canteens and sending performers like Bob Hope at home and overseas to entertain and support the troops. Bush took the position of Honorary Chairman.

That looked good after the War on his resume, when he ran for office, and later, helped persuade General of the Army Dwight D. Eisenhower, with whom he had worked through the USO, to run for President on the Republican ticket. (Eisenhower said, being a serving military officer, he had been apolitial. If he were going to run, he could go with either the Republicans or the Democrats. Running as a Republican, some say, saved the Party, which had been distrusted by a majority of Americans since the Crash of 1929.)

President George W. Bush's Undersecretary of State Richard Pearl, a Bush Family advisor for nearly two decades, and principal architect of the President's plan to create an empire in the Eurasian Heartland, was revealed to have problems roughly comparable to those Prescott Bush had when he helped finance Hitler's war machine.

He stepped down from his position and from several chairmanships -- but was retained as a "trusted advisor."

It will be interesting to see how he fares.

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Click the link for a review of a marvelous little spy thriller, which still has things to show us today:

THE MASK OF DIMITRIOS --

http:/epinions.com/content_77175557764

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UPDATE: June 12, 2005 -- Richard Pearl retreated in to the Back Room, but his partners went on to greater positions of power. Paul Wolfowitz, for instance, has just been appointed President of the World Bank, a position for which he has questionable credentials. John Bolton, another collaborator, a man who has often expressed his contempt for the United Nations, is about to become our representative to the UN!

Meanwhile, Tim Nelson Blake's career languished. He played nondescript parts in half a dozen mostly forgettable movies. His next directing project is scheduled for 2006. What a shame.

I invite you to visit the "BLOG" which I now maintain on my Epinions Profile Page, where I occasionally discuss matters of the day:

http://www.epinions.com/user-macresarf1/show_~View_Profile#long_bio























Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Good for Groups
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age