The Tin Drum (1980)

This movie is a masterpiece and surely one of the greatest film of the 70's if not of all time. It is a very original work from the brilliant director Volker Schloendorff which combines expressionism, avant garde, zeitgeist, and magic realism flavors. It successfully translates the complexity of Nobel Price winner Gunter Grass' novel. The face of David Bennent is magnetic throughout and the movie is served by outstanding performances from Mario Adorf, Angela Winkler, Daniel Olbrychski, Katharina Thalbach and even singer Charles Aznavour. This movie should be rated largely above 8 like Apocalypse Now (they both shared the Cannes Festival Palme d'Or in 1979) and it won the Oscar for best foreign movie in 1980. To be seen at least once in a life time.

I just finished watching this film and i deserve a medal for making it over the half way point. The tin drum is the story of a boys life who jumps himself down the stairs so that he will stop growing, he also has the power to break glass with his voice and has an addiction to his tin drum. at first this is just the film, following around this boy and his drum. i was really enjoying the film at this point but it took a turn for the worst around when his mother died of "eating too much fish" as he puts it. after this point the boy and his tin drum just continue on with life, living with random people who just seem to be fine with him living with them. the film then gets gradually more and more disturbing as he starts a sexual relationship with a 14 year old girl. the film completely relies on it being confronting, disturbing and at times difficult to watch so that its viewers that like it discard the nonsense of it because it is weird and different. this doesn't mean its good. in the end its just a series of disturbing events resulting in nothing.

As winner of the Foreign Language Oscar for 1979, The Tin Drum has been on my list of movies to look out for for a while. It's a lot stranger than I anticipated- possibly more unconventional than the winner of the same award for 1978, Get Out Your Handkerchiefs. Say the movie is a coming-of-age tale of a boy living before and during World War II in Poland, and yeah, you'd think it'd be fairly typical. Now say the protagonist never grows more than he was at age three, screams so high he can shatter glass whenever you try to take his drum away, and that his mom dies from an addiction to eating raw fish- and you'd say, what is this?The Tin Drum is a surreal dark comedy that is often more unusual than funny, but it is, generally, interesting and enjoyable to watch. You just have to be willing to accept a protagonist who isn't totally likable. Oskar's screaming actually hurt my ears, his drumming creates disruptions, he doesn't seem to mourn his parents' deaths, and despite some glimpses into the Nazis' cruelty, doesn't seem to have any problem with entertaining German troops. What this movie has to offer is a view of history, and life generally, quite possibly unlike any other. There is some colour, some laughs, some tragedy, and some eroticism, making for competent storytelling. Do I agree this is the best foreign language movie of 1979? I'd go with Tarkovsky's Stalker. But this is a movie worth seeing.

'The Tin Drum' is so bizarre and stirs up such a mix of appreciation, fascination, revulsion and whatever the best word for "thoroughly weirded out" is that I actually can't rate it. The best comparison I can offer potential viewers is 'Taxi Driver'. (And now that I've said that legions of American film buffs will damn me for a heretic, but it's true.) The central character is intentionally only minimally sympathetic--your fellow-feeling with Oskar (as with the protagonist in 'Taxi Driver') begins and ends with the sense that the world he lives in, a reflection of the world you live in, is a madhouse. Bad things happen to good people and the reverse, innocence is too often functionally equal to stupidity, people are jerks, and life is brutally, cruelly unfair. But the way he deals with it is grotesque, unrealistic and simply can't work. What keeps you watching is a morbid fascination with a single question: "How long can he get away with it?" (Fair warning: "grotesque" in 'Taxi Driver' and "grotesque" in 'The Tin Drum' take very different forms. The WWII setting does not make this 'Life is Beautiful'; the coming-of-age aspect does not make this a charming film. If you're an American and you're not used to the unconventional/off-kilter visions of childhood in some of the films of Europe, this is not the place to start. I recommend Francois Truffaut's films for that.)Other reviewers have criticized the film for promoting Oskar's attitude and choices, expecting the audience to like him. They're mistaken; I don't think you ARE supposed to like him. It's true that in American film making one is supposed to identify with the principal character(s) and cheer them on, as it were. But it's not a hard and fast rule; 'In Cold Blood' proved that. Oskar's twisted response to the chaos around him is as much a part of the film's social/political/human commentary as the chaos itself.'The Tin Drum' is based on a book, which I have yet to read but am curious to do, because knowing that I feel like I'm missing part of the picture. People who are familiar with the book seem to know a bit more about what in heaven's name is up with the weirdest of the weirdness in the film. I'd like to be able to claim more understanding of this formidable master work than I can right now.Some book-based films you're better off seeing before you read the book so that the good things still outweigh the "WTF?! That's not part of the story!" ('Apocalypse Now', 'The Vampire's Assistant') and some films are so intriguing that they lead you to gobble up mountains of original books ('True Grit', 'Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World').... and some films you just won't fully understand/appreciate unless you know the whole story. 'The Tin Drum', for me, belongs to the second group. But in all honesty, for a lot of people, it probably belongs to the third.