The Grey Zone (2001)

This is truly one of the most disturbing films I have ever seen. If the goal of a great movie is to make its viewer changed forever, "The Grey Zone" certainly has succeeded. Yes it is not "Schindlers List". It has no uplifting theme, other than that in the face of no hope, doomed individuals tried desperately, if for nothing else, to save one life among millions of doomed. In the end even that effort is futile.It's images are haunting.Do to its depressing topic and even more disturbing ending others have criticized this movie as not being "entertaining". In fact it is entertaining. It is a horror movie of the real kind. The horror of human evil based on prejudice and hatred.Everyone needs to see this movie, with the exception of those who lived through it, as they already know!

The Grey Zone explores well-covered territory from a unique angle: that of the Jewish prisoners who prolonged their lives by four months by becoming members of a unit used to herd their fellow prisoners into the gas chambers. Inevitably, such a subject matter raises the question of to what lengths the viewer would go in order to stay alive, and the cost to the people who found themselves capable of colluding with their captors. When one new arrival to Auschwitz, ferried straight from the train to the shower's changing room, loudly challenges Hoffman (David Arquette) over his and his friend's breezy instructions to remember the number of the hook on which they hang their clothes so that they can find them after the shower, Hoffman beats him to a bloody pulp – as if for forcing him to confront what he is doing to his people. Despite this, the performances are subdued for the most part, the prisoner's attitudes to their situation almost matter-of-fact. Given fine food and alcohol in payment for their work, they live in ivory towers that have been stained by human ashes.The survival of a young girl after showering in the Nazi's deadly gas just as the men are preparing to stage their revolt triggers an emotional crisis amongst the members of the unit, with some insisting she be killed for their protection and others demanding she be allowed to live. They face a dilemma that is mirrored by those of the German soldiers who mill around the girl uncertainly after the protesters have all been killed. There is a line beyond which even those who have grown almost inhumanly inured to killing will hesitate to step. The girl, alone and defenceless, unlike the masses herded into the showers, forces them to put a face to their victims and ejects them from their oddly cocooned existence.The film is an adaptation of a stage play, apparently, and this fact is evident in the dialogue, which sometimes seems unreal, as if the speakers are somehow detached from the emotions they are supposed to be feeling. This may be deliberate, another example of the tamping down of their true emotions, but its sometimes distracting. Despite this, the performances are good, especially that of Harvey Keitel who seems to grow into the part of the German officer who knows he has lost touch with everything that made him human.

The Grey Zone is so full of horror and anguish that it's a hard movie to watch in some ways.The basic premise is 'how far would we go to save ourselves' in situations such as those faced by the Jews in Nazi concentrations camps. The answer is, of course, almost as far as necessary. This film concerns the crews of Jews who were forced to lead their countrymen into the gas chambers at Auzcwitz and then dispose of the bodies in cematoria afterward.With the only option death, what would you do? It's a tough question to answer but this film gets it about right. By the halfway mark you are so immune to seeing piles of dead men, women and children around that I think you actually can start to feel just a tiny bit of how desensitized these men must have become as they tried to buy themselves just a few more months of live.Most of the performances are very good though I disagree with some that Harvey Keitel's was up to his usual brilliance. The German accent didn't seem quite right to me but there you go.Great film, great message.

Despite all the realism depicted in THE GREY ZONE amid the actual day to day operations of a Nazi prison camp, there's a certain stage quality in the dialog that serves as a reminder that you're watching the screen version of a stage play and not what should seem more like a true life documentary. That's the fault of the script taken from David Mamet's play and other eye-witness sources--but the acting is excellent.And yet, it does manage to convey just how those prison camps used other prisoners to operate the gas chambers, to carry out the deed with false promises--"Just be sure to remember where you hook the clothes so you can pick up your belongings when you leave"--and the backbreaking jobs of loading trucks with dead bodies and depositing them on chutes that go directly into a blazing furnace. Amid all this, various stories are entwined involving the petty quarrels among the men assigned to these tasks so they could prolong their own lives for at least four months of assured survival.The story involving a girl who does not die during the twenty-minute gassing and is then revived and how the men argue over how to protect her from further harm, is intense and touching in that it shows the humanity that is still in their souls. Her story and how it ends is one of the film's most memorable and touching elements.This is more of an in depth look at "the final solution" than any other recent films dealing with the extermination of Jews has ever been, with the exception of SCHINDLER'S LIST and THE PIANIST in which the accent was more on the triumph of the human spirit and a much broader view of the war itself in epic mode.This is a darker, intimate look at the actual operation of the camps as experienced by a handful of prisoners--the brutality, the torture, and raises the question: how far would you go to survive? It also shows how not all the Jews were as passive about their fate as some have claimed, often opposing the Nazi officers and paying for it with their lives.In the hands of a greater director, it might have been an even more impressive film than it is, so that I'm unable to place it in the same class with the two films mentioned above. The cast is uniformly good, but HARVEY KEITEL is outstanding as an SS Commander keeping strict tabs on the camp's hard-working doctor.In its own way, it's just as important. Young students of history would be well advised to view this one for a better understanding of how "the final solution" was supposed to occur and the methods used to carry out an enormous project known as "the holocaust".