Hollywood On The Holocaust

By RICHARD CORLISS

Open any volume of modern history, and the blood of innocents pours onto your hands. From government policies of starvation to countless varieties of religious wars, the 20th century newspaper is one huge Domesday Book, a catalog of horrors so vast that numbers lose human meaning. One death is a tragedy; millions of deaths are statistics, to be deplored, then filed away as nightmares beyond comprehension. The atrocities nag at our conscience, finally numbing it. Amnesia seems the only solace.

So it is therapeutic to be reminded of the small stories of heroism, brutality and survival that restore dimension to the century's signature satanic event, the Nazi extermination of European Jewry. What is unusual is that in this holiday season, no fewer than three Hollywood films deal with the Holocaust. Triumph of the Spirit tells the true tale of a Greek-Jewish boxer, Salamo Arouch, who literally fights for his life at Auschwitz. Music Box fictionalizes the 1988 trial of John Demjanjuk, a Ukrainian immigrant to the U.S. who was convicted of war crimes. And Enemies, a Love Story adapts Isaac Bashevis Singer's 1966 novel about Holocaust survivors sorting out their guilt and their passions in postwar New York City. Still, for all their ambitions, this trio ends up as two honorable duds and a near miss with plenty to recommend it.

There are many reasons, aside from the personal commitment of Jewish filmmakers, for Hollywood's preoccupation with the Holocaust. It is one act of state terrorism that has been exhaustively detailed. The first images of gas chambers and mass graves in 1945 sickened the world, not just with their charnel power but also with an awareness that the villains were once torchbearers of Western civilization. Hitler upended the cradle that had rocked Beethoven and Goethe, and hell fell out. His murder of millions of people for the crime of being born Jewish is an act worth pondering and mourning.

And here is a maxim worth remembering: good motives do not always make good movies. Too often Hollywood finds in the Holocaust a familiar, convenient parable of sanctified martyrdom and slavering sadism. Thorny issues are begged, compelling stories avoided. The dark psychology of the death-camp administrator, himself captive in a twisted chain of command, is rarely investigated. Neither is the prisoner's natural impulse to survive at any cost, which gave rise to "the Jewish members of the GPU, the Capos, the thieves, speculators, informers," as Singer describes them in Enemies, a Love Story. Instead, characters are as reductive as in any old-time western. The good guys wear the Star of David; the bad guys wear swastikas. The real victim in these films is dramatic ambiguity, and the result is what critic Art Spiegelman has called "holokitsch."

Triumph of the Spirit might be expected to transcend this label, if only because of one line in the movie's final credits: "Filmed on location at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camps." Co-producer Arnold Kopelson won ! permission from Polish authorities to use the huge camps (now museums) as the setting for his story. How chilling it must have been for the actors and especially the extras -- many of them Auschwitz survivors -- to see the place restored as if in full working order.

Yet how little of that dreadful impact comes across in the film, which is too respectful of its subject to find more in it than noble cliches. Salamo Arouch (Willem Dafoe), formerly the Balkan middleweight champ, is interned with his family at Birkenau and soon ordered to take part in boxing exhibitions in which the loser will almost certainly be killed. This grisly dilemma -- each of Arouch's knockouts sends his opponent to the gas chamber -- is mostly evaded in Robert M. Young's bland direction. The film's only and considerable virtue lies in its documentation of the desperate strategies people devised to stay alive in the death camps.

Some lived even longer, to bear witness to atrocities and bring the beasts to justice. In Music Box the accused is Michael Laszlo (Armin Mueller-Stahl), a Hungarian now living in Illinois. Was he the malefic Miska, who as a member of the Arrow Cross during World War II raped women at gunpoint and tossed bundles of Jews into the Danube? Laszlo's daughter Ann (Jessica Lange), an attorney, believes her father is innocent and fiercely defends him in court. But the weight of survivors' testimony is too heavy, too obscene, to dismiss. Can she believe that her doting father committed such acts? And if she does believe it, can she still love him?

Laszlo must be guilty, of course; otherwise, there is no drama. Screenwriter Joe Eszterhas and director Costa-Gavras want to create that drama, but they do not give Ann a strong case to argue, so the film's only suspense is in how long it will take Lange (who gives a smart, sturdy performance) to face the truth. Nor do they allow Laszlo a chance to justify, however speciously, his rancid past. They are content to dwell on the sins of the fathers, in which humanism stares at bestiality across the generation gap. Even in a genial mood, Laszlo sounds like a Nazi: "A healthy body makes a healthy spirit," he huffs as he completes a maniacal regimen of push-ups. Ann's father-in-law (Donald Moffat), who helped relocate Nazis as a CIA agent after the war, is no more enlightened. He derides the Holocaust as "the world's sacred cow." He's not even sure it happened.

Herman Broder (Ron Silver), the passive hedonist in director Paul Mazursky's $ film of Enemies, a Love Story, is sure. There must have been a Holocaust, or Herman would not have hidden from it for most of the war. Now it is 1949, and he lives in New York with, eventually, three loving women: his Polish Gentile wife Yadwiga (Margaret Sophie Stein), whom he married out of gratitude for protecting him in the old country; his passionate mistress Masha (Lena Olin), whom the Holocaust has driven to a volcanic indecision between childbearing and suicide; and his long-lost first wife Tamara (Anjelica Huston), whom he had thought dead in the camps.

Herman's story could be played as brisk black comedy, an "I Led Three Wives" with memories of death ever kibitzing in his restless sleep. But Mazursky is scrupulously fair to the characters -- so fair that Enemies lacks his films' customary oomph. When it is not vitalized by the beautiful performances of Olin and Huston, the picture takes on Herman's dithering lassitude. And yet there is a method to this meandering. Novelist and director both know a man is more than the sum of the calamities that have befallen him. Herman is a victim, not just of the Nazis, but of his own demons as well. And he is lucky, or doomed, to find three superior women who want to crush him in the bosom of their devotion.

Singer wrote a Domesday Book in which the blood is bathed in tears of conspiratorial laughter. Mazursky has made it into a movie that sidesteps holokitsch with the spry deftness of a Chagall peasant.