The Seed of the Sacred Fig

The Seed of the Sacred Fig is peppered with actual footage of Iranians taking to the streets in 2022 and 2023, protesting the regime and the hijab following the death of Mahsa Amini. For that reason, it is a difficult film to watch. We see real people getting abducted by police, real people getting beaten and shot at, and I am sure that at least one clip shows a dead man. It occurs to me now, 24 hours later, that the footage showing him was not blurred to obscure his identity, unlike so much of the other footage. Whether I realized it or not at the time, that might be why I knew he was dead.

During one of those montages, I found myself thinking about power, and what it means to believe in a world that consists of nothing but power, or rather nothing but power and its absence. That is, after all, the worldview of the Iranian regime: either my control is total, or it may as well not exist.

That is very much what The Seed of the Sacred Fig is about, power and absolutism and the ways they undermine our humanity. The title refers to the sacred fig, ficus religiosa, which propagates by landing on other trees and eventually choking them out. In the real world, the sacred fig was a metaphor in Iran for the revolution and the regime. As for the movie, the regime may be the sacred fig, but if it is, it’s smothering the people of Iran rather than the US-backed Pahlavi Dynasty. More likely, director Mohammad Rasoulof sees the sacred fig in this story as the inevitability of cultural change and progress. I keep thinking about a single shot in the film, showing a tattooed young woman wearing a baseball cap and driving car, which suggests that the world has already moved on more than even the people in this film care to acknowledge.

The day before Seed, I saw I’m Still Here, which tells the true story of Rubens Paiva, a former Brazilian congressman who was disappeared by the military dictatorship. During a harrowing sequence set in a military prison, I found myself thinking, “Why do you feel so compelled to hold onto power that you would behave this way?” I’ve had the thought before. I do not find meaning in power, and I never have. The only power that means anything to me, the only power I understand people fighting tooth and nail to retain or reclaim, is autonomy, but autonomy doesn’t extend beyond one’s own immediate borders.

I understand power’s appeal intellectually. Donald Trump and Elon Musk are entirely foreign to me, but I get where they’re coming from. Our own little home-brewed fascists share the same outlook as the Ayatollah, the AfD in Germany, Putin, the Communist Party in China, and Bibi. Each and every one of them exists in a world that consists of those who do and those who are done upon. The idea of a world in which we are all equal and we all have dignity doesn’t exist for them, because they do not believe that is possible. They believe power is a zero-sum resource. If they don’t have it, someone else must.

When you see the world that way, as so many Americans do nowadays, you open yourself up to all manner of horrors. I was reminded of Adam Serwer’s now-immortal line, “the cruelty is the point.” When he wrote that during the first Trump presidency, Serwer was putting the lie to the idea that Trump supporters liked his policies and were willing to ignore his racism. The cruelty of his words was central to why people flocked to him, why they still do. The cruelty isn’t a side affect, it’s the whole point. Poor white people supported the institution of chattel slavery because it meant there was someone beneath them. There are those who do and those who are done upon.

Both The Seed of the Sacred Fig and I’m Still Here were part of a two-day mini-marathon to catch up on new releases. Whether it’s because I started with I’m Still Here or because I’ve been reading Say Nothing, about Ireland during the Troubles, or because of what it’s like to live through this moment in time with even a hint of awareness, all four movies that I saw seemed to be about power, in one way or another. Even Companion, a fun B-movie about a sex robot, can be framed as a story about one man’s inability to accept his own impotence. If he’d managed to find meaning in any other aspects of life, none of [gestures vaguely towards a pile of dead people] would have happened.

The last movie in my two-day marathon was Nickel Boys, which also has quite a bit to say about power, about who has it and who doesn’t, and how those who don’t survive. Nickel Boys is adapted from Colson Whitehead’s novel The Nickel Boys, which was in turn based on a real and highly-abusive reform school in Florida. The administrator of the school, a white man named Spencer, enters the film congenially enough. He talks to the boys about the school, its system, how they can earn early release with good behavior. He then tells them that misbehavior will not be tolerated. “I’ll see to that personally,” he says while patting a ring of keys on his belt loop.

One of the places he takes the boys for punishment is a shed where he belts them. We only see the shed once, though that’s certainly enough. The whole scene plays out like a horror film, enhanced by director RaMell Ross’s decision to shoot the entire movie in POV. Because of that choice, you spend a lot more time observing the details of the world, rather than focusing on the protagonists. When Elwood enters the room, which is dim and splattered with blood, we see Spencer looking haggard, exhausted, spittle or possibly some blood dripping from his lower lip. He looks, in the moment, far weaker than any of the boys. You can gain power if you want. It isn’t necessarily hard. But what you have to give up in the process is almost certainly not worth it, and, if all four of these films are to be believed, it will destroy you.

Conclave

Conclave is, first and foremost, fun. Too long, yes, but fun. Nothing I’m about to write will make it sound fun. I’m about to bleed all the joy out of what is, despite the moments when it gives in to its loftier intentions, a trashy arthouse thriller. This is a B-movie shot by a prestige director. That’s not a compliment. We don’t get enough of those nowadays.

But I cannot help where my mind goes. Whenever I encounter a story involving high-level religious bureaucrats, I wonder to what extent they believe in the whole [gestures vaguely] thing. Are the rituals truly important to the people who participate in them? Do they do the rituals out of habit? I understand the power and importance of pageantry and public perception, the idea that rituals convey legitimacy over time, etc., etc., but the Cardinals at the center of Conclave are doing all this behind closed doors. When the Pope dies, the Cardinals could call a conclave, choose the new Pope via a round of Heads Up 7 Up, then hang out playing X-Box for three or four days. We would never know.

Conclave seems to ask similar questions. For the duration of its two hours, the pomposity of these men, the self-absorption of those who would be Pope, runs up against the mere materiality of their world. Early shots of the elaborate ribbon-and-wax seal tied around the door to the Papal residence are intercut with paramedicos zipping His Holiness into a body bag and clumsily loading him onto a stretcher. The title card, “Conclave” in yellow letters that take up the whole of the screen, is shown atop an overhead shot of that bodybag in the back of an ambulance, rocking side to side every few seconds with the motion of the vehicle. Director Edward Berger holds that shot for a while. This is not a movie that is concerned with the sacrosanct. At least, not in the sense that it wishes to distinguish between what is and isn’t.

There’s a world in which a movie about Catholics that emphasizes the material could be on the side of the Catholics—the material world holds us back from transcendance—but here it mocks. For all of the presentational severity, the stark lighting and intense close-ups, Conclave finds every possible opportunity for quiet, needling comedy. We are at all times kept aware that these are merely men vying for an office position.

Conclave doesn’t embrace comedy to the extent of, say, Iannucci’s The Death of Stalin, nor does it have anywhere near as much to say about the nature of power, but it does have serious matters on its mind. Ideas about the nature of sin and doubt ooze out of the quieter corners of this movie. Its outlook is Humanist. Better to have sinned and learned than to have never been tempted, better to question the things you hold dear than to take them for granted.

I keep coming back to how firmly the movie is rooted in the material world. We see the immediate destruction of the Ring of the Fisherman, the ballots threaded together and burned, the cans that serve as the source of the legendary black/white smoke that concludes every vote, the liver spots that convey the age of most involved. Even the film’s final twist, an absurd attempt to give this delightfully glossy bit of eurotrash (non-derogatory) real heft, is rooted in the material.

Given my issues with Berger’s last film, All Quiet on the Western Front, I don’t find it surprising that the movie gets stuck on trying to make a statement. By the end, Conclave has become too consumed with making a point to remember that it used to be fun. Unless you are conveying something, well, transcendental, better to tell a good story that makes some good points on the way, I think, than to force it.

His Three Daughters

His Three Daughters is about death. There’s no getting around it. For most of the film, which takes place almost entirely within the living room of a single Manhattan apartment, the man in the next room is dying. Despite that, there isn’t a whole lot of talk about death. The characters don’t waste any breath speculating on the hereafter. Death isn’t a mystery to be pondered so much as it is a process to be borne out. It is scheduled nurse visits, DNR orders, and shifts keeping watch in case the inevitable should suddenly happen.

The protagonists are a trio of estranged—well, no, not estranged, but certainly distant—sisters who have come together in the final days of their dad’s hospice care. Not only do they not talk about death, you get the impression that they don’t talk about anything all that much. When they do, they seem to be talking past one another. Katie (Carrie Coon), the eldest, talks at, mostly.

The particulars of their lives are slowly and meticulously established. Katie lives in nearby Brooklyn and has a teenage daughter who won’t speak to her. Rachel (Natasha Lyonne) places daily sports bets and spends her days high. She’s been providing live-in assistance to their father, Vincent (Jay O. Sanders), for an unspecified amount of time. It would be easy to make Rachel a stock comedy stoner, a slacker, but Lyonne plays her as sensitive and clear-eyed, someone whose drug habit comes from a need to create a buffer between herself and the world so she can bear to function. The youngest sister, Christina (Elizabeth Olsen, who is magnificent), lives in another state, seemingly happily married and with a young daughter. The two moments when she talks to her daughter on the phone are the only expressions of joy we get for most of the movie.

That’s not to say this is a dour affair. It isn’t. It is often funny, and in unexpected moments, as befits the setting. The hardest I think I’ve ever made my mom laugh was during my grandfather’s funeral, on the way from the car to the door of the funeral home. The script is full of dialogue that reflects back on what we see in unexpected ways. One night at dinner, Katie tries to engage Rachel in conversation about the food, but Rachel is watching the final game in her parlay on her phone. “You think watching will change its outcome?” Katie didn’t intend it as a joke, but it is, and it’s a grim one. All three of them have upended their lives to sit around an apartment and watch their dad die. Do they think watching will change what’s going to happen?

After a particularly exhausting interaction with the hospice care provider, the sisters relax into their first and only real conversation, one in which nobody has any walls up and little seems to be at stake. Christina tells the story of a time when she and dad were watching something on TV and he became furious at the way it depicted death. What was on that screen had nothing in common with the real thing, he said. The mistake the movies and TV always make is using the depiction of death itself to represent the feeling of death, of what it is to have someone pass away. “The only way to sum up a person’s life, to communicate how death truly feels, is through absence.” The movie itself has been following his advice. Up until now, Vincent has been nothing but a suggestion, the beeping of a heart monitor. His absence has managed to take up the entirety of these women’s lives.

“I think what dad meant,” Katie follows up, “is that we don’t really know who people are until after they’re gone.” I agree with Victor’s belief that absence is the real impact of death, but I bristled at Katie’s interpretation. You may learn more about a person after they die as you go through their possessions, but surely we can learn more from the living? At least, in an ideal world. That’s particularly true when talking about our parents, full human beings who’ve often closed off entire portions of themselves in the interest of having and raising us.

At that point, having finally moved past their differences, the three of them go into Vincent’s room for the first time as a trio. He responds to their presence and, as best he can, asks them to bring him out to the living room so he can sit in his recliner.

In some stories, there comes a point where the limitations of reality run up against the need to express something, and reality, however briefly, loses. That moment in The Worst Person in the World when Julie, about to break up with her boyfriend, flicks the kitchen light switch and spends an entire imaginary day elsewhere. The ballet at the end of La La Land, when Seb and Mia play out the decade they could have had together if only they’d been different people. These are, unfailingly, my favorite pieces of storytelling. In His Three Daughters, that point comes when Vincent stands up from his recliner, goes into the kitchen, and opens himself a beer.

At that point, Jay O. Sanders delivers a wonderful monologue. You can always tell when a theatre actor knows they’ve been given a good piece of meat to bite into. He winds up by getting the beer, and then he uncorks. He speaks directly to each of his children, speaking to the hearts of their disagreements and insecurities. He tells them how much he loves them, how much he loved their mothers, and tells them the story of the first woman he ever loved. It’s all wonderful, beautifully acted and emotionally gripping.

As the monologue ends, Vincent leans against the apartment window and looks over to his chair, where he sits dying. His daughters are crying against him. He has, of course, said none of what we just heard. He makes and holds direct eye contact with himself. It seems to me that in his final moments he has imagined all of this, saying the things he never got to. Katie and Rachel are on their own to figure out why they get along like oil and water. Christina will never know why she didn’t get the sense of family that she needed. No person alive will ever again know the story of the first woman he loved. “We really don’t know who people are until after they’re gone” is nonsense. You have to tell people who you are and who they are now, while you’re here, before it’s too late.

Evil Does Not Exist and Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes

It would be hard for the two movies I saw last week, Evil Does Not Exist and Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, to exist at further ends of the cinematic spectrum. Evil Does Not Exist is a new film from Ryusuke Hamaguchi, the writer and director of Drive My Car. It is a Japanese arthouse drama, and almost punishingly slow. If you’re inclined to like that sort of thing (I am), maybe you’d describe it as patient. “It’s boring,” I wrote in my notebook, a neutral acknowledgement of a seemingly objective truth rather than a complaint.

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, on the other hand, is the fourth installment in the current iteration of a long-running blockbuster franchise. “Very excited to watch some apes beat the shit out of each other,” I texted a friend before heading into the theater. I got exactly what I wanted.

* * * * *

The slowness of Evil Does Not Exist is a lot to deal with. This is a movie with a 15- or 20-minute town hall meeting, and that’s arguably the most dynamic scene. I love a slow movie in a theater. Slow movies that should be snappy drive me nuts, but movies that have no intention of being anything other than a sensory bath are great excuses to relax in a distraction-free environment. I can let my thoughts off the leash to drift where they may. That’s often the point of slow movies.

In the midst of the many things that passed through my mind in the first forty or so minutes of Evil Does Not Exist, I spent a lot of time thinking about climate change. It felt intrusive, a distraction spurred by a coincidence. Evil Does Not Exist takes place during winter in a heavily-forested town. Everything is dusted with snow. The village of Mizubiki may be in rural Japan, but the way of life depicted didn’t look all that different from my childhood in the heavily-forested outskirts of Connecticut. An early scene in which Takumi (Hitoshi Omika) splits firewood and loads it into a wheelbarrow stirred up strong memories, memories that led me to think about the infrequency with which my childhood yard now likely sees any snow at all.

For a few minutes, I was worried this sudden focus was derailing my experience, but it quickly became clear I’d been played. Far from intrusive, thoughts of climate change had been cultivated. I got there via an unusually personal and immediate route, but Hamaguchi takes great pains throughout the first third of Evil Does Not Exist to establish the patterns of life in the village, and to get you thinking, on some level or another, about threats to those patterns. It’s hard to watch a man ladling water out of a creek without thinking about the fact that a lot of people can’t do that anymore. What once would have seemed quaint now seems precious.

* * * * *

The single aspect of Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes that I found most remarkable was the physicality of the apes. I was always aware of their strength, in a sort of tactile way. “Can you imagine,” I thought to myself during an early fight scene, “getting punched by a gorilla who meant it?” Throughout all of the set pieces, the effects team and the animators in particular never lose sight of the weight of each hit. We are meant to marvel at them without ever feeling them to be fantastical. The power and presence of the apes reminded me of the day many years ago when I gazed in awe at the underwater scenes from Disney’s Pinocchio, processing the fact that Jiminy Cricket had weight.

The protagonist is Noa, a young chimpanzee on a mission to free his clan, who were all taken prisoner in a raid. Along the way, he encounters and befriends a human woman, Mae. Within the world of Apes, humans exist, but they are feral and pre- (well, strictly speaking, post-) verbal. The same virus that gave apes speech and intelligence, took them from humans. Mae is unusual. She can talk, fully fluent and cognitively unimpaired.

From that revelation, the movie loses its way a bit, sacrificing what it’s great at (world-building, mood, general vibes) for what it isn’t (plot and emotional payoff). Part of the reason it starts to wobble, I think, is because the creative team is never quite sure what they want to do with Mae. Is she the new audience surrogate, or are we supposed to dislike her? The movie itself seems unable to decide. It’s ambitious, and I like that the movie tries something, even if it doesn’t work. “The fact that she sucks is probably the most interesting thing about that movie,” a friend texted me after seeing the movie, and he’s right.

The movie ends with Noa and his tribe rebuilding their home, and Mae setting off to help humanity do the same. Before she goes, they have a final, standoffish conversation, during which Noa asks if humans and apes can ever live side-by-side. His question is hopeful, even if he asks it despairingly. He wants the answer to be yes.

There’s an insert shot there, brief enough that I almost missed it, of Mae holding a pistol behind her back. It is jarring, a fantastic and unexpected directorial choice. I love that shot, and how it collapses everything the movie has been struggling to articulate into a single frame. The gun is a visceral betrayal of Noa, who’s harmless, but we say that as the audience. The gut reaction of judging Mae is replaced almost instantaneously by self-reflection: Would you feel safe living side-by-side with these apes? Would you live with Noa? I realized in that moment that I wouldn’t. Because of the work that the production team put into making the chimps and gorillas—boy, that gorilla—feel real, I realized that I’d already known that for at least the last hour.

Beauty and the Beast (Work in Progress)

I love process. I love drafts and iterations, watching something take form. I often wish we celebrated the process more, instead of just focusing on the results, but I recognize I’m in the minority there. Nobody wants to see Yo-Yo Ma practice a piece for hours, they want to see the soaring performance that comes after.

There is evidence, though, that people may want to see more of the process than they realize. The world (correctly) lost its mind three years ago when the Beatles documentary Get Back showed Paul McCartney will “Get Back” into existence over the course of about 45 minutes. The recent deluxe edition of Revolver offered something similar, as “Got to Get You Into My Life” thrillingly took form over four distinct versions.

Aside from the technical knowledge you can gain by consuming multiple drafts of something, the invaluable insights surrounding the “why”s behind each decision made, observing the process also makes great works seem within reach. The picture book Princess Mononoke: The First Story, for example, collects a series of conceptual paintings from a young Hayao Miyazaki. The story, which he wrote and illustrated in the early 80’s, contains the seeds of what would become not only Princess Mononoke, but also My Neighbor Totoro. That those two ideas were at one point intertwined makes both masterpieces seem less impossible as individual accomplishments, while it seems all the more magical—to me at least—that each arrived at its final, “inevitable” form.

* * * * *

In September of 1991, as Disney Animation was putting the finishing touches on Beauty and the Beast, the studio made the unusual decision to bring a work print to the New York Film Festival. Though it is not uncommon for live-action directors to screen rough cuts, this was an unprecedented choice for an animation studio. My guess is that Animation head Jeffrey Katzenberg—for some reason I always want to call him Jeffrey Katzenberger—was eager to publicize Disney’s next musical. While The Little Mermaid had been a big success, subsequent release The Rescuers Down Under was a bomb.

The NYFF print was not a rough draft. The film had been locked for ages. The audio was basically finished. What made it a work in progress was the animation, 30% of which was raw pencil drawings, storyboards, or even concept art. In the age of the Internet, and having lived through the era of the DVD extra (RIP), we’ve grown accustomed to this sort of look behind the curtain. This was 1991. Most of the people in that audience had probably never seen anything like it. By all accounts, it was a success. Viewers responded with a lengthy standing ovation.

While I can’t imagine what it must have been like to be in that theater, I don’t have to imagine what it’s like to watch the print, which was included when Beauty and the Beast made its DVD debut in 2002. Despite having owned the print across two formats and two decades, I realized last night that I’d never watched it. I was surprised. I adore animation as a medium and technical process. I almost majored in animation in undergrad. The work in progress version of Beauty and the Beast feels like something I should be screening annually at my apartment, and I’ve never  seen it? I decided to put it on.

It was wonderful, obviously. It’s always wonderful to experience something you know and love in a new way. In my lifetime, I have watched Beauty and the Beast well over 100 times (if my mom is reading this, she probably just scoffed out loud at the idea that the number could be so low, but I’m being conservative). Over time, it has settled into something familiar. Not closed off, necessarily, but finished. The work print cracked it back open. Because I was paying more attention, watching it as a new work, I experienced it more intensely.

More than that, the unfinished pencils, storyboards, and concept paintings encouraged me to really think about the people who made the movie. Rather than focusing on the animation, I started thinking about the animators. I do that all the time when watching stop-motion, whose tactility actively encourages the audience to think about the artisans. Finalized hand-animation renders the process, and therefore the people behind it, invisible.

The rough pencil lines of unfinished animation bring a similar tactile quality. Much as you cannot see a slight indentation on a plasticine puppet without thinking of the thumb that made it, you cannot look at unvarnished graphite without imagining the pencil and the hand holding it.

Glen Keane, the supervising animator for the Beast, delivered something particularly astonishing. Because I was paying so much attention, I even noticed new details in the finished material. Take as an example the scene after the Beast rescues Belle from the wolves.

“If you would hold still, it wouldn’t hurt as much,” Belle chides.

“If you hadn’t runaway, this wouldn’t have happened,” Beast replies, a smirk on his face.

“If you hadn’t frightened me, I wouldn’t have run away.”

“Well,” he begins, frantically searching for a reply, “you shouldn’t have been in the West Wing.”

Look at his face! He is grinning! Grinning! In 33 years of watching Beauty and the Beast, I never before noticed that he is enjoying the flirtation, the back-and-forth. He is so pleased with himself for finding a riposte. “Keane should have gotten an Oscar nomination for Best Actor,” I muttered to myself during another scene. I stand by it.

The ultimate outcome of all this is that every pan, every zoom, every vocal inflection, every subtle bit of squash-and-stretch, all of it became transparently the result of human choices. Of course, it always was. Just like Yo-Yo Ma’s transcendent performances of Bach’s cello suites, the electric final arrangement of “Got to Get You Into My Life,” and the forms into which My Neighbor Totoro and Princess Mononoke ultimately settled, Beauty and the Beast as a movie exists because a remarkable, driven group of people got together and did the work. The NYFF work in progress print is a wonderful reminder that you have to build a house brick-by-brick, that the process is just as worthy of celebration as the end result.

If anyone wants to attend next year’s screening, please know ahead of time that seating at my place is limited. Tickets go on sale May 1st.

The Zone of Interest

If there’s a single argument to be made in favor of The Zone of Interest being a great work of art, it’s the fact that I have walked away from each of my two viewings with entirely different impressions. The first time I watched it, I was at home, and I disliked the majority of what I saw. Save for the very end, I found it self-consciously arty and pretentious, a film that took two slow and tedious hours to say exactly what The Look of Silence had said a decade earlier.

Zone of Interest depicts the day-to-day home lives of Rudolf Höss, commandant of Auschwitz, and his wife Hedwig. It is not, and the movie will not be upset to hear me say this, interesting. He sits through a pitch meeting for work in the study, or takes his children fishing. She tries on a fur coat, tends the garden, receives her visiting mother. The children see daddy off to work as he mounts a horse. It is all achingly, intentionally quotidian.

The ending, in contrast, absorbed me completely. As Rudolf leaves an opulent Berlin party, he stops on a landing and stares off into the dark. The camera cuts to contemporary footage of staff preparing Auschwitz for a day of visitors. They sweep, and wipe, and vacuum. The sound of the vacuum was violent in the context of what had been a quiet, restrained film.

Despite my disinterest in the rest of the movie, I thought about those shots for days afterward. The staff of the museum echoed the staff at the house, bustling here and there on behalf of the museum’s visitors, on behalf of the Hösses, and, somehow, on behalf of me. The shots in the museum felt pointed at the viewer, asking me if I’m all that different from the people I’ve spent the last two hours watching.

I don’t mean that in a boring way. I’m not talking about the Banality of Evil. Events like the Holocaust are far away, we tell ourselves, separated by so much time and civilization. We put our memorials behind glass and tell ourselves that it won’t happen again, which isn’t really all that different from how the Höss family conducts their business. They separated themselves from the realities of their lives with trellises and vines. “This will grow and cover everything, you’ll see,” Hedwig says to her mother about the vines surrounding their yard.

What’s striking about the museum in that instant is the sanitation of the whole thing. The glass is a transparent barrier, that’s better than a wall, but it’s still a barrier. Plate glass separates you and me from piles of abandoned shoes, from thousands of ownerless suitcases, from the systemized subjugation and murder of how many millions of lives. The thing about plate glass is that it can, as we have seen recently, shatter.

As for the rest of the film, what struck me as pretentious at home felt finely-tuned in the theater. Dozens of smaller details leapt out. The Zone of Interest is all about those details. Auschwitz does not exist save for an ambience at the edge of their lives, an inconvenience that continually insists on making itself known. The fishing trip ends suddenly when he realizes that the camp, located upstream, has dumped incinerator ash into the river.

At home, I rolled my eyes. In the theater, I understood that I wasn’t meant to have a reaction to what I was seeing so much as I was meant to observe the characters’ reactions. Imagine having to scrub your children down to rid them of human remains and then going back to work.

A pair of scenes set at night, treated to resemble a photographic negative, show a young girl of about 10 hiding food in the fields where the prisoners work. She pushes apples into the soil and hides pears among their shovels while an ominous sound repeats over and over. Hers are the only altruistic actions in the film, the only time a character steps outside of themselves to think about others without resenting the implications.

Everyone else seems content with their lot, or content to look away. Hedwig’s mother has the most complex reaction of any German we see. At first, she is happy for her daughter, for her house and her successful husband, but that doesn’t seem to last. She vanishes in the night, after waking up to the eerie red light of the incinerator. That’s as close to an act of resistance as any of the Germans get, a quiet “nein, danke.”

The characters we spend the most time with have chosen to lean in, and none with more alacrity than Hedwig. “I could have my husband spread your ashes across the fields of Babice,” she offhandedly snaps at one of the Polish housemaids. She understands the hierarchy of this world. The cruelty, to borrow from Adam Serwer, becomes the point. The Zone of Interest isn’t talking about the Banality of Evil either. It isn’t about evil rendered with indifference. It is about evil realized with surgical precision, with aplomb, because it works. This is a depiction of evil as means.

In their last on-screen conversation, one held over the phone, Hedwig asks Rudolf about the party. “Who was there?” “I didn’t really pay attention,” he replies. “I was thinking about how I would gas them all. It would be a particular challenge, because of the high ceilings.”

As he descends the stairs, just before the contemporary footage of Auschwitz, he stops twice to retch. It is 1943. The worst of the Holocaust is about to begin. Höss has that day accepted responsibility for the military operation that bears his name, the transportation and extermination of Hungary’s 700,000 Jews. The retches seem to me his body’s last attempt to expel all of the evil he has so willingly imbibed. He swallows it down, fixes his cap, and continues to descend the stairwell into absolute darkness.

Ennio

Ennio Morricone, the beloved Italian film composer, left behind a remarkable body of work. Active well into his 80’s, Morricone’s scores are remarkable not only for their sheer quantity—he scored over 400 films and television programs over the course of sixty years—but for their quality. The Good, the Bad, & the Ugly; a handful of deeply influential gialo films; The Mission; Cinema Paradiso; Once Upon a Time in America; The Hateful Eight. On and on, the list goes. These are some of the greatest scores of all time. You could talk about Morricone’s work for days without running out of things to talk about.

So wealthy a corpus should be ideal fodder for a documentary, but Ennio, the 2021 Italian documentary, doesn’t know what to do with that much material. It’s far too long, too repetitive, and all while nothing that’s mentioned gets the time it deserves. We learn very little of consequence, about either him or the work. While you would hope a 2.5 hour documentary about one of the greatest composers of the 20th century would provide a buffet, it’s more a loose assembly of Costco samples.

That is not a knock on Costco samples, I was raised on Costco samples, but they don’t make a meal.

It started off strong, overlaying audio from various talking heads with footage of il maestro doing stretches. Exercise will keep you, it seems, pretty damn limber. I salivated at the thought of going through his office, lined as the shelves were with albums, scores, and books. The only real glimpse into anything profound comes on two occasions when Morricone reveals an exceptional sensitivity, something that he seems to keep guarded much of the time. It is easy to see how that type of sensitivity would have contributed to his work, which exudes raw humanity.

Despite my disappointment in the film itself, I found myself walking away consumed with thoughts about the magic of The Movies. This was only my second time hearing Morricone’s music in a theater, despite the fact that he has been one of my favorite composers for as long as I’ve had favorite composers. I’ve seen clips from The Good, the Bad, & the Ugly dozens of times over the course of my life, and I have always had an academic interest in seeing it, but watching those scenes play out on the big screen, surrounded by darkness and those glorious sounds, having nothing else to distract me? I became positively desperate to see them.

I know every note of “Gabriel’s Oboe,” one of the main themes from Morricone’s score for The Mission, and I heard it in a completely new light on Thursday. How many times have I heard the coyote call from The Good, the Bad, & the Ugly? Even in the midst of a documentary that was too long, during which I found myself dozing off intermittently, the power of those great scores wed to those great films, presented in a room in which I had no choice but to completely surrender myself to what I was seeing and hearing?

Fuck, man. The movies.

The Silence of the Lambs

It was impossible for me to read The Silence of the Lambs in a vacuum. I’ve seen the movie too many times. The book had to exist in conversation with its adaptation, which does seem unfair, the parent justifying their own existence to the child. I was immediately struck by the tone, and the degree to which the movie gets the tone right. There is a quality to the opening chapters, a studied remove, a sense that something nearby (but not here) is wrong. Director Jonathan Demme captured that perfectly. I have no idea how. How do you translate something as ephemeral as texture to a different medium? It’s a magic trick, as far as I’m concerned.

With the book fresh in my mind, I rewatched the movie. It has long been one of my favorites, and the biggest compliment I can pay this book is that I now experience the movie as an adaptation while I’m watching it. Just about everything I love about The Silence of the Lambs, it turns out, comes from the book. Even the way Demme explores the experience of women in male spaces, something that I’ve always understood to be Demme’s own exploration of the material, is right there on the page. The film is remarkably faithful to the source material.

Most, if not all, of the changes are about focusing the material. Jack Crawford, the FBI agent in charge of Behavioral Psychology, no longer has a dying wife, which makes sense. The movie is concerned entirely with Clarice Starling. No need to venture away from that. Exposition is far deadlier in a movie than it is in a book, and a number of adjustments are made to spare the audience an explanation. All in all, it’s entirely successful.

The one thing that suffers in this adaptation? Hannibal Lecter.

It feels as weird for me to say it as it probably does for you to read it. Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter is an iconic performance, one that still reverberates within culture at large. More people know references to Hannibal Lecter than have seen the movie or read the book. Hopkins won an Academy Award, for god’s sake.

Nevertheless, if there’s one character the 1991 film adaptation of The Silence of the Lambs lets down, it’s the good doctor. A series of small and individually innocuous changes come together to turn Lecter into a bogeyman. In the film, he destroyed his medical records before the FBI arrested him, something the fastidious and studied Dr. Lecter of the novel would almost certainly never consider. It’s an act of impropriety. “Discourtesy,” as he says, “is unspeakably ugly to me.” They were destroyed in the book as the result of a court order, which also feels more in keeping with Harris’s worldview in a way that I can’t entirely articulate.

There’s a scene in the novel where Lecter discusses a fellow inmate with Starling, talking about how the poor fellow has been misdiagnosed by the viscously unpleasant head of the asylum, Dr. Chilton. You get the impression in that scene that Lecter does, to some extent, care about this misdiagnosis, even if it is because the misdiagnosis itself is more of an affront to him than this unfortunate individual being left to live an unnecessarily catatonic life.

The biggest change, a throwaway bit of exposition that explains Lecter’s awareness of the presence of a human head in a Baltimore storage locker, makes it sound like the locker is his. In the novel, the story is more complex, undoubtedly trimmed down for time, but Lecter had nothing to do with the head being there. He knew about it through a patient. The problem with this, only obvious once you see it, is that Lecter becomes, through that exposition, entirely monstrous. He is no longer a terrifying human being, but a sort of a bogeyman. He puts heads in the backs of cars of storage units. In the book, Hannibal Lecter is a terrifying man. The movie is content to make him a Monster.

As for the book? Magnificent. Within 50 pages, I had stopped thinking about the movie at all. Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs is incredible, full of great writing and memorable scenes. He knows how to do quite a bit with very little. I was sad every time the subway arrived at my destination. For one blissful week, any ten-minute pause in my schedule was an opportunity to make progress. In the last year and a half, I’ve read two other books I loved this much: The Grapes of Wrath and The Poisonwood Bible. That puts The Silence of the Lambs in remarkable company.