Another Week: Number 63

Triumph of the Will (1935)

I continue my snail-like progress through the 858 pages of Joachim C. Fest’s 1973 Hitler biography. It is the detailed explanation I was seeking for how Hitler maneuvered himself into power and put a nation under his spell.

Propaganda, of course, was one of Hitler’s most powerful tools, and Triumph of the Will, the 1935 documentary by Leni Riefenstahl, is one of the most noted examples of propaganda in history.

The film documents Hitler’s 1934 Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg. My sister Karen has visited Nuremberg, but she has not studied Hitler, and neither of us has seen Riefenstahl’s infamous movie, so on Tuesday I rented it via Apple TV+.

Her technique is solid. Gorgeous photography presents Hitler as a humble superhero, intercut with glimpses of ordinary Germans yearning for him and deeply moved to be in his presence. The enormity of everything about the annual rally is staggering — so many people, so many flags, huge bonfires at night, endless formations of marching Nazis. The troops are armed with shovels for reforestation, as it’s still four years before Hitler crazily embarks on his war.

There are brief excerpts from many speeches, and the version I rented helpfully identifies all of the despicable speakers and captions many notable details in English, with closed-captioning also available for English translation.

Despite Riefenstahl’s artistry, you can only watch so many salutes and drummers and flags and marching and Hitler histrionics before astonishment turns to queasiness, and her 144-minute documentary well exceeds that limit.

But now we have seen it.

Poor Things (2023)

The trailer for Poor Things captured me some time ago, so when it became available on Hulu Thursday, my sister and I pounced, subjecting our 88-year-old mom to it ahead of the Academy Awards.

The movie is a fantastical spawn of Frankenstein, with Emma Stone in the role of Bella, a woman brought back from death and given the brain of a child. Willem Dafoe plays the eccentric scientist, Godwin “God” Baxter. Ramy Youssef is his assistant, a passive medical student named Max McCandles who becomes fond of Bella, and Mark Ruffalo is Duncan Wedderburn, a cad lawyer fascinated by her as she starts developing into a curious, self-aware woman.

Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, the movie is visually wild. There are lots of wide-angle distortions, color shifts, odd angles, bizarre costumes and makeup, CGI wonders, and so on. Emma Stone’s physicality is simultaneously as creepy as any Universal monster movie and as funny as Lucille Ball’s.

The script is chock full of clever and unexpected lines. The characters are rich and unique, and each of the actors delivers a wonderful performance.

Obviously, there are plenty of metaphors underlying Poor Things’ story. In the end, though, I felt that these circuits did not fully connect. Maybe I need to think about the movie more, or maybe it just fails to ring that psychic bell.

Either way, it was an entertaining watch, despite some unsavory moments — and several sex scenes were more graphic than our mom is used to. She later said that seeing Mark Ruffalo naked made her uncomfortable because, since he’s from Kenosha, he’s almost like family. Still, she said the film gave her some things to ponder.

The Zone of Interest (2023)

Another Nazi-themed movie I watched this week, also nominated for Best Picture, was The Zone of Interest, rented by my sister, which I watched with my mom Saturday night. It comes to Max on April 5.

Imagine a husband, a wife, and their five children living their daily lives, doing their gardening, swimming in the river, eating their meals, working from home, and sleeping each night in a blissful home in a small Polish town.

Now imagine that the town is Auschwitz in 1943, the husband is German SS officer Rudolf Höss, and the businessmen visiting his home office are contractors building the crematoriums for the concentration camp just over the wall from his wife’s impressive gardens.

The Zone of Interest quietly observes this gut-wrenching disconnect between seemingly ordinary fellow humans and their participation in monstrous acts. The two realities play out, in tandem, right next to each other.

Christian Friedel stars as Höss. Sandra Hüller, who was great in Anatomy of a Fall, plays his wife Hedwig.

After watching, I was impressed to read about the ten-year quest by director Jonathan Glazer to make this film — how he researched and reconstructed the house, dug deep into witness testimonies, and used ten embedded, unmanned cameras in the house to witness the action unobtrusively.

Although I found the opening and closing musical score jarring, the movie’s sound editing is crucial. If you have a good audio system to bring that out, use it.