In theaters
WALTZ WITH BASHIR, written and directed by Ari Folman, 87 minutes, rated R. In Hebrew, German and English, with English subtitles.
Ari Folman’s Academy Award-nominated “Waltz with Bashir” is about the ramifications of the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre that took the lives of hundreds of unarmed men, women and children during the Lebanon war.
It uses animation not only as a means to generate the film’s stunning imagery — you’ve never seen a war movie quite like this war movie. More profoundly, it employs the animated form as a method of underscoring the surreal and hallucinatory aspects of war, and all the varied difficulties of coping in the wake of war.
As such, it takes a medium best known for pleasing tots and uses it to inform its story and characters in ways that real life couldn’t.
This isn’t new (Richard Linklater’s “Waking Life” did it, as did others) but the way it’s handled here is something of a contradiction — a beautiful-looking film about an ugly, unthinkable event. If Folman had chosen to tell his story with live action, it goes without saying that the film’s mix of horror and bloodshed would be anything but beautiful, but it is here. And what are we to make of that? In this case, one shouldn’t assume any disrespect on Folman’s part — the dark color palette he chooses to use is alone enough to suggest shame.
Folman based his script on his own experiences as an Israeli soldier in the Lebanon war, and what he has created is a film geared specifically toward adults that carves into the subconscious and explores what doesn’t want to be remembered or revealed. For Folman, it was this: He and his fellow soldiers knowingly allowed Christian Phalangists to enter a Palestinian refugee camp and go on a killing spree.
The movie begins with a jolt of terror. Twenty-six dogs — all ravenous, wild and hungry for blood — are seen rushing through city streets, their fangs bared, their eyes burning orange against gray coats sharp with angles only animation could create. Their target is a man named Boaz, who awakens from this nightmare to ques-tion the reasons he continues to have it.
For counsel, he goes to his friends, including Folman, who now must confront his own lack of memories surrounding the war. Bizarre dreams start to strike and with them, the pull for answers and the need to face the darkness he himself has buried. This is key: Even if he didn’t fire one bullet himself, by standing silent so that massacre could happen, how much blood does he have on his hands?
It’s a question for the ages, and it’s just one of the reasons “Waltz with Bashir” is so relevant to the here and now.
Grade: A
On DVD and Blu-ray disc
RACHEL GETTING MARRIED, directed by Jonathan Demme, written by Jenny Lumet, 113 minutes, rated R.
Jonathan Demme’s “Rachel Getting Married” isn’t really about Rachel (Rosemarie DeWitt) at all. It’s about her screwed-up sister Kym (Anne Hathaway in an Academy Award-nominated performance). Smoky, troublemaking but ultimately well-meaning, Kym is on leave from a rehab facility. She has been on drugs and booze for so much of her life, and she unfortunately claimed another life along the way.
Just who that is won’t be revealed here, but it drives the emotions in a movie happy to unleash them at any point, which is often.
Shot with a hand-held camera, which gives the movie an immediacy and intimacy it otherwise might have lacked, Demme based the film on Jenny Lumet’s script. What he features here is last year’s most diverse cast, so much so that you half expect the pending nuptials to be held at the United Nations instead of in the backyard of Rachel and Kym’s father, Paul (Bill Irwin), and their stepmother, Carol (Anna Deavere Smith).
This is, after all, a film about the complications that come when cultures collide in a home so broken, the foundation shakes the moment Kym steps inside.
Oh, everyone tries to make it work, at least initially, with co-dependent Paul rushing to give Kym food she doesn’t really want while the elephant in the room — Kym’s addictions, her time in rehab and now her time away from it — go strenuously ignored.
Some of the movie’s best scenes are, in fact, about this family going through the motions of what they think it means to be a happy family — they laugh so hard at hollow jokes and their few good memories, you know that laughter is doomed to eventually be caught in someone’s throat, which it is.
After all, before long, Kym’s loose mouth and shattered self-esteem are testing the waters to see just where she stands with her family now. To do so, she picks fights, she drops bombs, she sleeps with the best man (also a recovering addict), she needles Rachel and others, she scratches at wounds so deep they’ll never heal, and she isn’t really surprised to realize that she’s the one doing most of the bleeding.
While parts of the movie feels false and manufactured, that’s never true for Hathaway’s performance, which provides the necessary jolt of reality and isolation in a film whose family seemingly would prefer as little of that as possible. And it’s also never true when Debra Winger enters into the equation as Kym’s distant mother, Abby. Her mean mouth and calculating eyes go a long way in explaining why Kym turned out the way she did, and why this family is as screwed up as it is.
Grade: B-
WeekinRewind.com is the site for Bangor Daily News film critic Christopher Smith’s b log, DVD giveaways and archive of movie reviews. Smith’s reviews appear Mondays, Fridays and weekends in Lifestyle, as well as on bangordailynews.com. He may be reached at Christopher@weekinrewind.com.