That “The Grey Zone” (2001) strays from the truth and fails to maximize the conventions of filmmaking to tell a compelling story doesn’t make it bad film. That it delves into the bowels of the Nazi death camps more vividly than any other Holocaust film doesn’t make it a good film. In light of numerous inadequacies, what makes it an important film is its investigation of a complex moral dilemma that presents itself during the final stage of the elimination of the Jews.
It’s considerate of director Tim Blake Nelson to open his film with title cards that introduce characters and outline key points of the story that is about to unfold on screen because “The Grey Zone” is set in a part of death camps with which most people are not familiar and may have difficulty attaching to initially. Eventually Nelson’s efforts narrow and we are able to catch up as he shifts his focus to living quarters of the twelfth of Auschwitz’s thirteen Sonderkommando, handpicked – and therefore obligated to serve – special squads of Jewish prisoners who assisted the Nazis in their extermination efforts in exchange for preferential treatment and a few more months of life.
Nelson uses close-ups and a handheld camera to reveal details of the death camps that have previously only been seen as long-shots in archival footage. This results in an intimate portrait of the Sonderkommando, as they go about their daily work of herding Jewish prisoners into the gas chambers, shoveling the corpses into the giant incinerators and disposing of the ashes by the truckload. This filmmaking style crafts a realism that places the viewer in the center of the action and in the same moral grey zone as the characters in the film.
At the center of the action is the Sonderkommando’s organization of an armed revolt. As the uprising is about to begin, a young girl, who has miraculously survived the gas chamber, is rescued by a handful of men in the unit. She acts as a catalyst for their attempt at redemption. Despite their repeated pronouncement that they are not the executioners and do not actually kill each is acutely aware of the role they play in the annihilation of their fellow Jews. This desperate attempt at redemption manifests itself in the men’s obsession with hiding the girl and keeping her alive. Her one life symbolizes the millions of others that have been lost but endangers the uprising, which could save thousands.
The situation gives rise to the central theme of the film that is exemplified by a rhetorical question posed by one of the men as he guards the girl, “How can you know what you’d really do to stay alive, until you’re asked?”
Nelson responds with examples including the plunder of victims’ property, presence of a black market, inclusion of a doctor (incidentally, on whose memoirs the story of the film is based) who conducts experiments on Holocaust victims, an almost friendship between the doctor and a Nazi commander, lying to and deceiving to newcomers and the beating of one of them to death… All of which demonstrate the challenges of making moral choices in an immoral environment.
Balancing the men’s story is that of the women who while working in a munitions factory manage to smuggle gunpowder in preparation for the revolt. The Nazis discover that the gunpowder is missing and in an attempt to learn the purpose of the theft, torture the women they believe are responsible. Because they refuse to provide the Nazis with the information they want, two of the women are made to watch as one female prisoner after another is shot in the head. Eventually one runs into the electric fence, hoping her self-sacrifice will halt the execution of the remaining women.
Historically, the sequence as well as many of the events depicted in the film occurred differently than they are portrayed in the film. Nelson adopts a parallel storytelling structure that grants him artistic license to add, subtract and combine elements primarily to speed up the pace of the film that is otherwise plagued by too much exposition through dialogue that is too contemporary, overwritten and ineffectively delivered to accurately depict this period of history. “The Grey Zone” feels like cinematic fiction but in the end, succeeds by creating a strong sense of environment in which the weight of survival impacts moral choices.
References
“The Grey Zone” (2001)
The Holocaust by Leni Yahil
“Film Art: An Introduction” by David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson
Chicago Sun-Times film review by Roger Ebert
Filmtext.com by Christiane Müller-Lobeck
Variety film review by Todd McCarthy
Political Film Society review
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0252480/
http://www.jewishfilm.com