* * * In Darkness. Written by David F. Shamoon, based on the book by Robert Marshall. Directed by Agnieszka Holland.
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| Wieckiewicz as working-class Moses In Darkness |
After the better part of a century and hundreds of films, you might think every conceivable angle on the Nazi Holocaust has been covered. We’ve gotten comprehensive views of the tragedy in such works as the 1978 ABC miniseries Holocaust and Schindler’s List, and we’ve gotten the narrow, subjective view in The Pianist. We’ve gotten stories about conspirators (The Wannsee Conference), collaborators (Mephisto, The Counterfeiters), resistors (Triumph of the Spirit, Defiance, Escape from Sobibor), Jews in hiding (The Diary of Anne Frank), Jews passing for German (Europa Europa), Germans on the run (Marathon Man, The Reader), spies (Black Book), children (The Tin Drum, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas), mothers (Sophie’s Choice), fathers (Life is Beautiful), even mutants (briefly, in the first X-Men). And that’s just counting the non-documentaries.
With In Darkness, director Agnieszka Holland (Europa Europa, Treme, Angry Harvest) has found a fresh line of attack—albeit an extremely low-angle one. In German-occupied Poland, Jews were herded into ghettoes in preparation for deportation and liquidation. In the town of Lvov—as in the more-famous Warsaw uprising—some Jews escaped underground, where they eked out precarious existences in gloom and filth, until the country was “liberated” by the Russians fourteen months later.
The sewers of Lvov, it turns out, were the bailiwick of Leopold Socha (Robert Wieckiewicz), a native Polish sanitation worker and part-time thief. At first, Leopold can scarcely spare a thought for the “Yids”, against whom many beleaguered and minimally-educated Poles keep a petty, spiteful sort of bigotry. His only motivation in hiding them is extorting money from the wealthy Chiger family (Maria Schrader and Herbert Knaup). But like a working-class Oskar Schindler, Leopold discovers a better, more humane side of himself as he becomes invested in the struggle of the Chigers and their companions, including a valiant bruiser (Benno Fürmann), a lout’s pregnant mistress, and especially the children. Before long he’s running heroic risks for “his” fourteen Jews, proving that even an ordinary man with shit under this nails could summon more moral courage than other, more powerful people who did nothing. (The historical Leopold Socha is commemorated in Israel as one of “The Righteous Among the Nations”, non-Jews who helped defy the Nazi genocide.)
Holland, a half-Jew who lost her grandparents in the Warsaw uprising and whose gentile mother helped Jews escape the Nazi round-ups, has a keen feel for the moral ambiguities at the margins of both communities. Neither her Poles nor her Jews are rendered simplistically; both groups are divided against themselves, and show as much selfishness as they do courage. This richness lends In Darkness a feel of authenticity that is rarely found in stories with such enormous—and crushingly obvious—moral stakes. Wieckiewicz’s portrayal of Socha shows less Hollywood romanticism than the boozy, low-key venality of a Rainer Werner Fassbinder anti-hero. He is never less than terrific.
So why isn’t In Darkness easier to watch? The problem is the down-side of Holland’s unromanticized approach: with its claustrophobic underground spaces shot claustrophobically, lit only with jiggling flashlights, it becomes so hard to tell the grime-faced characters apart. Just following them becomes such a labor that we barely have energy enough to care about their problems.
The subject justifies it, but In Darkness still demands the viewer to spend two and half hours crawling around a Polish cesspit. That might not require heroism, but it does take commitment.
© 2012 Nicholas Nicastro
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