Review: The Zone of Interest, and the inadequacy of our "best" pictures
I just returned from seeing the last film I needed to check off my list of the ten nominees for this year’s Best Picture Oscar: The Zone of Interest. Written and directed by Jonathan Glazer, the film is set in 1943 and depicts the daily lives of Rudolf Höss, commandant of Auschwitz, and his family, as they go through the motions of, to their eyes, an objectively ideal domestic existence, while the concentration camp operates in the background.
Glazer has always been a provocative filmmaker; in the past, I’ve struggled to reconcile my visceral distaste for movies like Birth (2004) and Under the Skin (‘14) with the critical praise that attended them. I’ve come to respect Mr. Glazer as a visionary of unusual resourcefulness, who’s able to craft disquieting fables out of the fault lines in human consciousness.
Here, he diligently and brilliantly chooses to depict the Holocaust – one of the most filmed events in modern history – through the eyes of those who perpetuated it, allowing us to see only what they themselves were willing to see. I have a nagging indignation for movies that indulge in graphic imagery of people in anguish, so The Zone of Interest may be the first movie about Auschwitz that actually, by my definition, preserves the dignity of those who were brought there.
We never see anyone inside the camp; we only ever hear them.
The film is also genius for how it toys with its audience’s sense of identification, foregrounding a portrait of marital conflict that, at times, consumes one’s focus, until one is reminded that, “Oh, right – these are vile, soulless people.” And yet, are they soulless? After all, they care about their family; they have dreams, a sense of purpose. Höss is a monster – yet, at the end of the work day, he’s a bureaucrat coming home to his wife and children.
What middle-class American can’t identify with that?
Glazer’s hyper-fixation on the mundane activities of the Höss family’s everyday life, in juxtaposition with the ever-present smoke and gunfire arising from the camp, is a groundswell indictment not only of the Third Reich, but of anyone who enjoys material comforts while genocide unfolds within plain sight, or hearing.
For these and other reasons, the timing of this film’s release positions it as an unintentional yet blistering commentary on the United States’ endorsement of the Gaza genocide – but at a more intimate level, The Zone of Interest prompted me, after I’d left the theater, to interrogate my own daily behaviors, my own presumptions to the spaces I occupy. For instance, I drive my car along roads that were paved over the former homes of Indigenous Americans. I eat food harvested by migrants who labor at poverty-level wages. I wear clothes produced in sweatshops around the globe.
All the fixtures and features of the life I live are underscored by colonialism. Anyone who lives as I do, in the country that I call home, who avoids this fact, and who doesn’t allow it to move them toward decisively progressive politics, is complicit in a form of violence not unlike that perpetuated by, say, Höss’ wife, Hedwig (played by the exquisite Sandra Hüller) – who, at one point in the movie, tries on the stolen fur coat and lipstick of a woman who has been killed in the camp.
Are those of us who use laptops and tablets sourced from the Congo, without protesting the atrocities committed there, really any morally “better” than her? By how much?
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As I sit with the implications of The Zone of Interest, and then turn my gaze back towards the other films nominated for Best Picture, I’m struck by how disproportionally significant Mr. Glazer’s work feels in relation to those other titles. Of course, not every movie should be about the Holocaust, nor should every movie be a direct critique of fascistic infrastructures. But I do think that the urgency of this particular film only highlights how fundamentally unmoved I am by the Oscars’ present offerings:
American Fiction is a charming coup of a metacomedy that finds its awards season admirers mimicking the smug publishing world culture that it skewers onscreen. Anatomy of a Fall is a keen interrogation of guilt, and of the biases that inform humans’ construction of stories. Barbie, unlike Rudolf Höss and his crowd, doesn’t control the railways or the flow of commerce. (Or, at least, that’s what she tells us.) The Holdovers is sweet yet neither good nor important enough to be on this list. Killers of the Flower Moon indulges in the kind of violent spectacle that I’m glad Mr. Glazer forewent. Maestro is bloated ego stroking for the amusement of its subjects’ children. Oppenheimer is a compelling historical thriller about a bomb that ends, not with a bang, but a whimper. Past Lives is sweet yet neither good nor important enough to be on this list. And Poor Things was fun – quirky, engaging, and a little too comfortable with the idea of a man desiring a woman with the brain of a three-year-old.
Each of these movies is solid, and taken as a collective, they constitute a satisfying portrait of mainstream filmmaking. But none of them are masterpieces; none of them inspired awe or high regard on the part of this critic. (Even The Zone of Interest is less than great – ultimately undermining its own lean, disruptive vision with one too many formal divergences.)
When the world is falling apart at its seams, I crave excellence onscreen. When the world is peachy, I crave excellence onscreen. It’s funny to think that The Zone of Interest is set in the same year that Casablanca was first released, and won Best Picture; for all its intelligence, I will not be watching Mr. Glazer’s film again nearly as often as I watch the latter.
Is that my failing, or his?
