‘The Zone of Interest’ and the Humanization of Nazis
Jonathan Glazer’s new film is about a family trying to make its way in the world, the most relatable story in the world — except the father is the commandant of Auschwitz.
Welcome to the second edition of The Martell 100 newsletter, and the first one that does not feature my top-100 list. In addition to the monthly rankings, I am going to be writing about movies a few times per month. The main movie in this edition is Jonathan Glazer’s new film, The Zone of Interest which opens in select theaters today. A bit lower, you’ll find the other movies I’ve watched over the past two weeks, along with my thoughts on them.
Some of you may know Peter Carellini, a friend of mine from high school who is now a filmmaker and member of the Screen Actors Guild. Last week, I went as Peter’s plus-one to a private SAG screening of The Zone of Interest at the Directors Guild Theater in Manhattan, with a question-and-answer session afterward with director Jonathan Glazer and lead actor Christian Friedel, moderated by the actor and comedian Ramy Youssef.
It was the first time I had ever attended an industry screening, and I couldn’t help but feel the tinge of excitement that comes with being an outsider who gains entry into an exclusive club. I showed up early and stood in a long line of actors and their guests. We made our way through the lobby, into a cozy auditorium with red curtains and cushions and mahogany surfaces, and took a lap around the packed room, scanning for two open seats. After a few minutes, we slid into the third row, where we were warmly welcomed by the two older women on our right.
The movie begins silently with the opening credits, before the screen goes black. The darkness holds for an uncomfortably long time as the most haunting score I’ve ever heard plays. The music, by Mica Levi, is made up of elongated, booming groans, as if the sounds were coming from the depths of Hell. Then, mercifully, the score cuts out and we see lush greens and hear the sounds of birds and insects and footsteps. A family of five is walking through the woods on an idyllic sunny day in the European countryside, heading to a lake, where they will spend the rest of the afternoon swimming and picnicking in the grass nearby. As evening falls, they pack up, get in the car and return home.
Millions of people dream of building a life such as this for their families. A husband and wife are raising their three children, two boys and a baby girl, in a tidy house, with a beautiful garden in the yard where the kids play. In the mornings, the father goes off to work and the mother has friends over for coffee.
They juggle professional ambition with personal contentment and are mostly satisfied with how things have turned out, despite some minor inconveniences: Beyond the tall, cement garden wall, festooned with barbed wire on top, are smokestacks, which can be a bit of an eyesore. The ambient noise of the neighborhood is a cacophony agonizing cries, firing weapons, chugging trains and, especially at night, a roaring, churning furnace — but they’ve learned to tune it out. There is the omnipresent stench of burning flesh, but they’ve adjusted to it. Occasionally, human remains might wash up in the water during a swim, causing panic and vigorous scrubbing, because even the good life has its drawbacks.
It is easy to relate to this family because, for the most part, they are just like us — except, of course, the father is Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz, played with chilling mundanity by Friedel. He spends time with his children and talks about day-to-day logistics with his wife, Hedwig (Sandra Hüller). It’s a slice-of-life movie, so there isn’t much of a plot here. We go from scene to scene, observing inconsequential moment after inconsequential moment. The actions in the film are benign; if we didn’t know what happened at Auschwitz, we wouldn’t give much thought to what we are watching because we never see it. In one scene, Höss reviews design plans for new equipment, a rather routine part of plenty of jobs. However, because we understand that he is the commandant of a concentration camp, we quickly realize that he is approving equipment that will allow the Nazis to exterminate people with greater efficiency.
At another point, a proud Hedwig tells her mother that she has been nicknamed the “Queen of Auschwitz.” In another scene, she picks out a fur coat from the collection of clothes that were stripped from the prisoners when they arrived at the concentration camp and tries it on, checking herself out in a mirror. She then pulls out lipstick that had been left in the pocket and tries that on, too. All of this creates an unbearable and unrelenting cognitive dissonance between what we see — and do not see — on screen and what we know is taking place on the other side of the garden wall.
The only major event in the story comes when Höss gets a promotion that requires him to relocate, and Hedwig decides that she would rather not move from her dream home next to Auschwitz. So Höss leaves alone, hoping it is only for a little while. He enlists colleagues to make the case for him to be reassigned back to Auschwitz. They argue that he is the best person to manage the systems that carry out the killings.
To me, the most devastating moment happens early in the movie. One night, the two Höss boys, who share a bunk bed, cannot fall asleep. With their flashlights on, they lay in bed talking over the drone of the crematorium. The scene ends with the younger brother, his face illuminated by flashlight, wailing along with the noise as if it were the siren of a passing firetruck. The moan of the mass-murdering machine is the soundtrack of his youth, and he can’t help but sing along.
During the Q&A, Glazer said he didn’t want to show us what we typically see in Holocaust movies. In many ways, we have become used to the horrors they depict and, as a result, feel removed from the suffering. His goal was to make us “identify with the perpetrators, not the victims,” and in doing so, we are forced to grapple with the fact that those who committed these atrocities were not monsters, but human beings. They were people with families, jobs and dreams, who nurtured and cared for their children.
In humanizing Nazis, The Zone of Interest is a warning about the banality of evil. The story is set in the past but it is about the present. Just as humans are capable of love and compassion, they are also capable of genocide.
I liked this movie quite a bit, though it is difficult to recommend, because it is so pulverizing. That said, it is an undeniable cinematic achievement, and if you are interested, it’s worth checking out.
The two months after baseball season ends are always the time when I scramble to see as many of that year’s movies as possible before the ball drops.
I’ve watched 12 movies over the past two weeks. Half of them were 2023 releases, bringing my total from this year to 28; I plan to see at least 22 more from this year between now and the Academy Awards on March 10.
Among the six other films are two classics that I rewatched and four others that I had never seen before, including an obscure film about Pearl Harbor co-directed by John Ford that won the Oscar for Best Documentary, Short Subjects in 1944, despite its not being a documentary.
Here is my movie diary from Dec. 1 to 14. The synopses are courtesy of IMDb.
Mikey and Nicky (1976)
Director: Elaine May
Cast: Peter Falk, John Cassavetes, Ned Beatty
Watched: Dec. 1 at home in Brooklyn
Synopsis: Nicky is on the run from the mob, and he turns to old pal Mikey for help.
Where to Watch: Streaming for free on Max with a subscription.
This is a great movie. I’m not going to say anything more about it here because there is a pretty good chance it ends up in the January 2024 edition of The Martell 100. You should definitely check it out before then.
Out of the Past (1947)
Director: Jacques Tourneur
Cast: Robert Mitchum, Jane Freer, Kirk Douglas
Rewatched: Dec. 1 at home in Brooklyn
Synopsis: A private eye escapes his past to run a gas station in a small town, but his past catches up with him. Now he must return to the big city world of danger, corruption, double crosses, and duplicitous dames.
Where to Watch: Streaming for free on Max with a subscription.
My Letterboxd review for this classic noir simply reads, “Top 5 tax evasion movie of all time.” So … coming sometime next year in The Martell 100: Best Tax Evasion Movies! (Also, if you’d like to follow me on Letterboxd, here’s the link.)
Citizen Kane (1941)
Director: Orson Welles
Cast: Orson Welles, Joseph Cotten, Dorothy Comingore
Rewatched: Dec. 2 at home in Brooklyn
Synopsis: Following the death of publishing tycoon Charles Foster Kane, reporters scramble to uncover the meaning of his final utterance: “Rosebud.”
Where to Watch: Available to rent or buy on Amazon Prime, Apple TV, Vudu and Google Play.
My Black Friday splurge, if you can call it that, consisted of two Blu-Rays from The Criterion Collection: Thief (No. 64 on the latest Martell 100) and Citizen Kane. I first saw Kane in high school, as part of a class called “Society and Culture in the 20th Century.” I didn’t get the movie, and I didn’t like it much. For some reason, I dwelled on the fact that I didn’t see anybody else in the room to hear Charles Foster Kane (Orson Welles) say “Rosebud.” Since then, I have returned to Kane a handful of times. It rules.
Lost in Translation (2003)
Director: Sophia Coppola
Cast: Bill Murray, Scarlett Johansson, Giovanni Ribisi
Watched: Dec. 3 at home in Brooklyn
Synopsis: A faded movie star and a neglected young woman form an unlikely bond after crossing paths in Tokyo.
Where to Watch: Streaming for free on Netflix with a subscription.
Somehow, I had never seen this movie before. It’s so good, but I think it will be even better on rewatch. Getting around to my second viewing won’t take anywhere near as long as the first one did.
The Zone of Interest (2023)
Director: Jonathan Glazer
Cast: Christian Friedel, Sandra Hüller, Medusa Knopf
Watched: Dec. 4 at the Directors Guild Theater in Manhattan
Synopsis: The commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss, and his wife Hedwig, strive to build a dream life for their family in a house and garden next to the camp.
Where to Watch: Now playing in select theaters in New York City and Los Angeles. It will open to more theaters in other locations in the coming weeks. You can check showtimes for your area on Fandango. It is expected to be available to stream early next year on Max.
May December (2023)
Director: Todd Haynes
Cast: Natalie Portman, Julianne Moore, Charles Melton
Watched: Dec. 5 at home in Brooklyn
Synopsis: Twenty years after their notorious tabloid romance gripped the nation, a married couple buckles under pressure when an actress arrives to do research for a film about their past.
Where to Watch: Streaming for free on Netflix with a subscription.
You’ll be hearing a lot about this movie over the next few months. It is getting plenty of Oscar buzz, and rightfully so. Check it out, if you haven’t already. It’s a fun movie to talk about. I’ll go into more detail about it in a different newsletter edition early next year.
December 7th (1943)
Director: Gregg Toland and John Ford
Cast: Walter Huston, Harry Davenport, Dana Andrews
Watched: Dec. 7 at my parents’ house in Hopewell Junction, NY
Synopsis: “Docudrama” about the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7th, 1941 and its results, the recovering of the ships, the improving of defense in Hawaii and the US efforts to beat back the Japanese reinforcements.
Where to Watch: Streaming for free on TCM.com with a television provider log-in and with ads on Tubi.
This movie is fascinating. It was produced by John Ford in his role as the head of the Field Photographic unit during World War II, under the newly created Office of Strategic Services — a precursor to the CIA.
Assigned as a full-length feature for cinematographer Gregg Toland to direct, the official purpose of the film was to present what happened at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, and show its aftermath. But, really, the military expected it to reinforce the war effort.
When the military reviewed Toland’s film and realized it was hardly the work of U.S. propaganda that the OSS had wanted — among other reasons, it portrayed the Navy as incompetent and partly blamed the attack on its complacency — the 82-minute movie was censored. Ford was tasked to edit it. The military-approved film was cut down to a run time of just over half an hour, primarily showing scenes of the attack that was re-created and presented as contemporary footage.
At Ford’s request, the full-length film was preserved by the National Archives and was declassified 50 years after the attack. The uncut version is the one I saw last week with my dad, on the 83rd anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor. Neither of us liked it, and we wouldn’t recommend you watch it, but I’m glad I saw it. It featured Hollywood actors, plenty of anti-Japanese rhetoric and philosophical musings on warfare. It also included an epilogue, which consisted of a conversation at a military cemetery between an American Navy sailor who was just killed at Pearl Harbor and the ghost of a U.S. soldier who died in World War I.
My Letterboxd review: “Come for the racist anti-Japanese propaganda, stay for the absurd extended baseball metaphor at the end. The battle sequences are pretty cool.”
Poor Things (2023)
Director: Yorgos Lanthimos
Cast: Emma Stone, Mark Ruffalo, Willen Dafoe
Watched: Dec. 9 at the Alamo Drafthouse in Brooklyn
Synopsis: The incredible tale about the fantastical evolution of Bella Baxter; a young woman brought back to life by the brilliant and unorthodox scientist, Dr. Godwin Baxter.
Where to Watch: Now playing in select U.S. theaters, with a wider release slated for next Friday.
Go see Poor Things. It’s in my top five favorite movies of the year, but I am waiting to watch it again before writing about it.
Fair Play (2023)
Director: Chloe Domont
Cast: Phoebe Dynevor, Alden Ehrenreich, Eddie Marsan
Watched: Dec. 9 at home in Brooklyn
Synopsis: An unexpected promotion at a cutthroat hedge fund pushes a young couple's relationship to the brink, threatening to unravel far more than their recent engagement.
Where to Watch: Streaming for free on Netflix with a subscription.
Pretty good feature-film debut from director Chloe Domont. Also, this continues an incredible comeback year for Alden Ehrenreich, along with his roles in Oppenheimer and Cocaine Bear. The script needed an editor to give it more scrutiny, as some of the details don’t make sense. But it looks great and is emotionally upsetting, which is the point.
Maestro (2023)
Director: Bradley Cooper
Cast: Carey Mulligan, Bradley Cooper, Matt Bomer
Watched: Dec. 11 at the Regal Essex Crossing on the Lower East Side of Manhattan
Synopsis: This love story chronicles the lifelong relationship of conductor-composer Leonard Bernstein and actress Felicia Montealegre Cohn Bernstein.
Where to Watch: Now playing in select theaters. Streaming for free on Netflix with a subscription beginning Dec. 20.
Bradley Cooper follows up his directorial debut, A Star Is Born (2018), with a biopic of Leonard Bernstein that is just as interested in his relationship with his wife Felicia (Carey Mulligan) as it is with his professional life. Maestro is lively, emotional and funny, with excellent performances from the two leads, as well as from Matt Bomer and especially Maya Hawke in supporting roles. It’s one of the best movies of the year.
Midnight Run (1988)
Director: Martin Brest
Cast: Robert De Niro, Charles Grodin, Yaphet Kotto
Watched: Dec. 12 at home in Brooklyn
Synopsis: A bounty hunter pursues a former Mafia accountant who is also being chased by a rival bounty hunter, the F.B.I., and his old mob boss after jumping bail.
Where to Watch: Streaming for free on Netflix with a subscription.
Midnight Run is a great buddy comedy and road movie that is at times unexpectedly emotional. De Niro and Grodin have perfect chemistry. Also, add this to the Joey Pants hairstyle and facial hair Hall of Fame, which is absolutely a real thing.
The Boy and the Heron (2023)
Director: Hayao Miyazaki
Cast (Voices Dubbed in English): Luca Padovan, Christian Bale, Robert Pattinson
Watched: Dec. 13 at the Regal Essex Crossing on the Lower East Side of Manhattan
Synopsis: A young boy named Mahito yearning for his mother ventures into a world shared by the living and the dead. There, death comes to an end, and life finds a new beginning. A semi-autobiographical fantasy from the mind of Hayao Miyazaki.
Where to Watch: Now playing in theaters.
I really like Hayao Miyazaki, and this was one of my most anticipated movies of the year. As always with Miyazaki, the visuals are stunning and the world-building is impressive. But I felt like I missed something in the story and was trying to play catch-up throughout the movie. My big takeaway is I need to see it again.
Thanks for reading this edition of The Martell 100. If you like what you see, subscribe to get full access to the newsletter and publication archives. And please share this newsletter with anyone who might be interested.
Also, if you missed the first edition of The Martell 100, my top-100 movie rankings as of Dec. 1, you can read it by clicking on the link below.
Have a great weekend!