This is a horrible, shallow, manipulative movie. Tim Blake Nelson is good at playing the goofy stupid guys, and the way this movie is directed, you'd think that maybe it's less of an act that you thought. When adapting any play to the big screen, occasionally one can run into the problem of wordiness, and scenes that go on too long. Every scene in this movie goes on waaay too long, and every conversation is painfully stretched to the breaking point. And the dialogue itself which due to the extremely constructed interruptions from one character on to another- always seems to be artificial, even though ironically, Tim wanted to use the effect to create realism. The dialogue and the scenes are sloppily written and incredibly unsubtle and on the nose. The characters are made to sound like Mamet creations, but the writer here only shows his pretension and his lack of talent. And overall, the worst thing about this movie is the fact that it uses violence in the movie to manipulate, and to exploit the people. After every very long boring scene between two guys, usually one of which is Harvey Keitel, doing the most embarrassing German accent one is likely to ever hear, there is a violent scene. The violent scene may be Jews going into the showers, a Jew being beaten for his watch, Jews being lines up and shot, etc. If one looks at the movie they'll see that these scenes were put into the film so that the viewer would sympathize with the film, and perhaps forget about the intensely boring scene that preceded this one. These violent scenes only want you to believe that this is a better film than it actually is, and it stoops to the lowest level to do so. It's not surprising that Nelson says there was no violence or anything in his stage play- this explains why these scenes seem so tacked on. And when the film is just about to end, before you can think of how unaffecting and poorly done it was, we get an extraordinarily sentimental, intensely manipulative voice-over of a dead Holocaust girl describing what it was like to have her body burned to dust inside the ovens. This is pandering filmmaking. If I made a short film about a learning disabled boy, had him get shot in the head, and then had a voice-over in which he cries `I didn't want to die, I wasn't too smart, but I never wanted this to happen. Where's my mommy, I'm scared mommy' The audience would be affected, but this is exploitative, and horrible, manipulative filmmaking. This is what Tim Blake Nelson does here with, of all things, the Holocaust. It's a shame because it seems like the actual story of The Grey Zone had something important to say. It's too bad that Tim Blake Nelson read the book before a better more honest director could have a chance.
Review of The Grey Zone
