Thomas F. Cook

I wasn’t going to review this but The Times review, once again, proved that their reviewers are hacks and unqualified to review a high school musical.

My biggest complaint about this movie, which will not have a wide release or be seen by very many people, is that the preview for it gave away the entire story. Basically it was Schindler’s List with a non-German protagonist. In fact, one of the most interesting things about the story, is that Nicholas Wintin, the person whose life is being depicted, sought no recognition for what he accomplished.

The movie is, oddly, a reminder that everyone — especially England — tried to appease Hitler by not going to war with him and giving in to his demands. Why countries like Austria should be sacrificed and then the southern part of Czechoslovakia which was called the Sudetenland (sorry about the spellings if I’m wrong), is beyond me. But that is what happened. And then in the northern part of the country, the government was replaced with the German/Nazi government, so that Czechoslovakia became the 2nd country swallowed up by Germany, before its invasion of Poland.

In any case, it’s against this time frame and urgency that Nicholas Wintin and others began a kinder transport from Prague to London. At the London end, Wintin and his mother did most of the difficult work: finding people to foster the children, raising 50 pounds for their eventual return (the equivalent of about $4,000 in today’s money), and getting their visas. They managed to save 669 children, most of them Jewish. Another 250 were on the last train but it was prevented from leaving and of those 250, only 2 children survived the camps. Also in the way was Holland, which had banned Jews from entering their country. As they said in the movie, only 200 children survived the camps. He and the others in his group saved 3 times that many.

The Times critic complained about the present-day story, and said it was self-congratulatory which is as wrong headed as can be. Anthony Hopkins makes it very clear that he doesn’t want to think about the Holocaust or the children that he was not able to save. And when forced to, cries only in front of his wife. So it may not be a Times pick while The Tuba Thieves and Knox Goes Away and even Snack Shack are. But at the end of the movie, which was in one of the lower theatres at AMC Lincoln Square — theatres that are reserved for the not well attended — the entire audience burst into applause at the end. And I thought it was well deserved.

I wanted to see this, without having read the reviews or even seen any previews, because I was always a little curious about “Mother Cabrini,” or “Madre Cabrini,” as she’s referred to most of the time in this movie, and mainly because of the hospital that bore her name here in NY until it was closed and turned into condos. She’s also the first American saint which is defined as “beatified.” A saint in Guam, Diego Luis San Vitores, lived and worked in 1627 – 1672 and established the first Catholic church in Guam, but was not beatified until 1985 or thereabouts. They used to take their time. They don’t anymore.

Anyway, the theatre was packed and I had my seat on the aisle. I was slightly curious why it was so full and then they started to play the previews. If it wasn’t a cartoon made by Pixar, which I always turn out by closing my eyes and staring at the floor and waiting until it’s done assaulting me, it was a preview that gave a distinct smell of being about Jesus or faith. I couldn’t tell specifically, but the clips were often of these maudlin speeches or badly acted moments, and then Greg Kinnear appeared in one of the movies and I thought, “Oh God, this is one of those conservative Christian movies that have been making money hand over fist, by catering to people who want to reinforce their belief system.” The worst of these are scripts that try to “prove” the existence of God or Jesus by telling the story of the Bible, which they, like Moslems or Mormons, believe is a fact and not written by human hands. Or they’ll the story of someone who was briefly dead and “witnessed” heaven. Needless to say, you can’t quote yourself to prove something is true, nor can you quote someone who isn’t in the room to prove something is true. It’s called hearsay.

The worst that this group has made was about sex trafficking and the heinous part about that movie is that it repeated the lie that gays are harvesting children for some aspect of their blood that will keep them youthful. This is something the disgusting actor Jim Caviezel repeats over and over. It disqualifies the entire movie.

Cabrini, I had to watch, at times, half asleep because it gets into that badly written ham fisted speechifying that usually comes from the pulpit. But there was a slightly interesting and I think intentional twist to this movie. It emphasizes, (over emphasizes because of it’s bad writing and bad filmmaking) the fact that immigrants are important and should be treated with respect. And not only that, when Mother Cabrini, after being told by John Lithgow who plays the NYC mayor in this movie, that she would have been a great man, says, “No. A man couldn’t do what I did,” the women in the audience burst into cheers.

NM that she hadn’t done anything by that point and most of her achievements took place after this fictional moment. The movie undoes everything the Trump party is trying to do now: immigrants are important, not just an issue to be dealt with; and women have power.

The audience is asked, during the credits, to wait for a new song by Andrea Bocelli and his daughter, who he now tours with, but I didn’t stay. The movie sucks, as far as script, plot, writing, etc. We don’t get to know a single orphan or hospitalized patient. In fact the hospital doesn’t get built in this movie. All those accomplishments are summarized in text at the end. The men are cartoons of men — in the manor of Snydley Whiplash. John Lithgow does what he can, but even the mayor’s character is mostly a joke. I’d say the lead actress was good, especially with the preaching speeches she had to make. But the audience loved it. Any every one of them stayed to hear this beautiful new song. But even though I hated it, I do hope that Trump voters and others of that kind hear the message about immigrants and women. They probably won’t.

Many people don’t know this, but it is not legal or possible for an underage child to give consent. They can say they wanted the relationship. They can say they wanted the sex. But legally, they do not have the right to do so.

This is sort of the unspoken truth at the heart of May December — that Julianne Moore. as a 36 year old woman, seduced and fucked a 13 year old boy. Their sex resulted in a daughter which she had during her time in prison. Later, out of prison, she married him and they had twins. But in trying to do the math, it seems like he may have been 18 when she got pregnant with their twins and the older daughter was conceived when he was 13 — there seems to be about 4 or 5 years between the siblings. In any event, the boy, Joe Yoo, played by Chris Melton, is now 36 himself which makes Gracie (Moore) 59 or 60. He still insists it was what he wanted: that he wasn’t like other kids. But the intrusion of Natalie Portman, an actress named Elizabeth, is going to temporarily bring some of these unspoken truths to the surface. Elizabeth is there to study Gracie, but her presence brings doubt to Joe’s world, and doubt is what makes a story interesting. Gracie has no doubt — still — decades later — does not think she has done anything wrong. But if you look, like a jury might, she tells herself lies to keep this fantasy going. One, is that she says Joe was in charge (of the pet shop where they met). That he was in charge and he was the one who seduced her. It was already established that Gracie was working there and hired him to help out. Another clue – is that when Elizabeth starts filming a new movie about this scandal, she is shown seducing Joe (and the actor playing Joe for this scene looks nothing like a 13 year old.) Joe may have believed he wanted it, but in a powerful bedroom scene/fight, he says to her “What if I was too young..” (to make that decision.) That’s when her lies come out.

Scotty Bowers (of the Hollywood gas station), told in the documentary about him, that he lived across from a monastery, and as a 13 year old, walked across the street to get to know some of the monks and have sex with them. The interviewer said, “But that’s illegal,” and Scotty shot back, quite angrily, “It was what I wanted.” But this is what so many people don’t understand about the law and statutory rape. He was too young to give consent and the monks that he had sex with, even if he initiated it, were committing statutory rape.

Gracie, in her final line, says to Elizabeth, “I’m confident.” It’s a strange quirky line, and, in fact, we’ve seen many instances of her having extremely bizarre breakdowns — one about losing a cake client (she bakes cakes for a living, but basically has five customers who are just doing her a favor) that sends her into fits because she’s going to have a cake go to waste. And another where she irrationally complains that Joe smells like the barbecue grill. But I think that final line means, “I’m deluded and am going to stay that way.” This is quite sad because in the meantime, Joe has been questioning their whole relationship and I was quite convinced that he was going to have to leave. But that “I’m confident,” line ended it. It tells us that she still doesn’t believe she has done anything wrong, whatsoever.

Yet after viewing it twice (once in the theatre and once on the tv), it becomes even more clear that Joe has missed out on nearly everything that young people are meant to go through. He went from 13 to 36 with his abuser dictating the rules of their relationship — the main one being that they cannot talk about their relationship. Even Joe’s relationship to his children is so strained and awkward. The son can barely call him “dad,” and it’s only when they share a joint that Joe and his son make a small attempt to be a normal father and son. That moment, of course, is stifled by Gracie.

It’s a very interesting movie, but in thinking about it, I don’t think I’ve ever quite despised a lead character as much as this one. And Elizabeth, the actress who can’t possibly be very good, is just as despicable.

I’m not sure if they actually released a movie poster for this film, but this seems to be at least a poster for the movie when it played at Cannes.

I’m not a Martin Amis fan so I have not read the book, but apparently Jonathan Glazer radically re-adapted this novel to fit his vision of what evil looks like. There are also a few flaws with his adaptation and one is that you have to understand something about Auschwitz in order to understand the movie.

Without an understanding of what the “ovens” meant, or “ash,” or random gunfire, trains heading toward a walled camp, and the barbed wire on those same walls, you’d probably not understand a thing about this movie.

I was pretty certain, and I was right, that horrible reviewers like Manhola Dargis would bring up the “banality of evil,” phrase that Hannah Arendt coined, but I don’t think this movie is about the banality of evil, but much more about how ordinary and perhaps — even more important — untalented people can blind themselves to the horrors that they are inflicting on, in this case, about 3,000,000 prisoners. And yet, are they blind? Or is there some moral flaw in the human mind that rationalizes the wrongs being committed in order to keep living in paradise. (The mother of this clan — Hedwig Höss — referes to their home as a paradise.)

Just to go back and do a plot summary, this movie is about Rudolph Höss, who was the commandant of Auschwitz death camp for about four years. He and his family lived in the southeast corner of the original Auschwitz prisoner camp and they apparently lived a very luxurious life, with a large garden, a small swimming pool, a backyard gazebo, and a lot of slave labor to help them maintain it. The movie focuses solely on these people and their children. It never once shows us what’s going on inside those walls. Other than the slave labor, it doesn’t show anything except how this family ignores — but that’s not the right word — embraces maybe — the killing that’s happening on the other side of the barbed wire.

A small detail early on is when a prisoner pushing a wheelbarrow, comes through the camp to the back door of the commandant’s residence and drops off two sacks. They contain clothing, and one contains a full length fur. Hedwig allows her laborers to take whatever they want from one sack, but takes the sack containing the fur to her room and shuts the door. She tries it on to see how glamorous she looks and that single act, suggests she knows absolutely what’s going on and what she is participating in. A little later you hear some Polish or German women laughing about one of the slave laborer’s taking a tiny little Jewess’s dress and not fitting into it.

Auschwitz 1 is still there. It was originally a prisoner for Russian p.o.w.’s, but eventually, under Höss ‘s command, it became a death camp. The home is in the lower right in this google map photo. It’s labelled Don Komendanta obozu, which I think means The Commandants abode. In the movie, the garden and pool extended up NNW in that clear space which looks like a small field. Toward the top of the photo with the red arrow is the first crematorium. In the movie, this chimney is seen constantly smoking or burning orange and red.

When the Germans expanded their extermination campaign, other camps were built in the area — they have different names like Auschwitz-Birkenau, etc., and were march larger.

There are a multitude of reactions in this family to what’s going on in that camp. One girl has become a sleepwalker, and using a thermal camera the director captures her sleepwalking dreams which mainly consist of her gathering apples and leaving them in places for, presumably, the prisoners. A boy can’t stop staring at the flames coming from the chimney because he’s troubled by them. Most effective, however, is Hedwig’s mother, who has come to stay with them for an unspecified time, but it seems like it’s supposed to be a permanent move. She is horrified by the smoke (and when the wind changes direction the smell comes into the house in paradise and all the windows have to be shut) and without saying a word to her daughter or anyone else, she packs up and leaves. And Rudolph, when he is at some big gala in some town that is quite far from their home, calls his wife and tells her that he mostly spent the night thinking about how he would gas this crowd and explains that the ceilings are too high there.

Höss’s testimony at Nuremberg was creepy and horrifying. (The movie ends long before he is caught and tried.) Basically he admits that he killed and burned between 1.5 and 3 million people, but that he didn’t really keep the numbers. And basically, the psychology behind what happened there and elsewhere has occupied minds (like Sigmund’s daughter Anna Freud) and others for the last 75 years and is ongoing, as we can see with so many Trump/Maga people who are calling for the extermination of liberals and leftists and with Trump himself starting to use Hitler style language such as “infecting our blood,” and “vermin.”

But for me, that fur coat scene tells you nearly everything you need to know about how we blind ourselves to the evil we do. As long as the gifts keep coming, we can reduce people to others, and then never have to look at them again. And I for one, think this adaptation perfectly encapsulated how we commit evil by not seeing it.

Höss, like all cowards, tried to hide as a gardener. But he was found by a Nazi hunter, tried and was hanged. At the request of survivors he was executed at Auschwitz. He was the last execution in Poland. He wrote some interesting letters to his family after (after!) he knew he was going to be executed. He wrote that he had blindly believed in what his superiors said and their philosophy, and he told his son never to believe without questioning. (I’m paraphrasing of course.) But I have to take that contrition with a grain of salt, because he had basically been a career criminal before he ended up joining the SS. He was always on that path and probably always had murder in his heart.