Zev As brutal and grim as this movie was, I was never convinced of its realism. In addition, I questioned the goal of the movie.If you read books like Bettelheim's 'Informed Heart' (a psychological analysis of surviving in the camp from a survivor), they will forever change what you think you know about concentration camps. The psychological torture there was so systematic and extreme, that not only were people's layers of social behaviour and their moral compasses completely torn apart and not allowed a millimeter of breathing space, even their basic instincts were altered.Which is why, when I watch someone like Steve Buscemi pretend to be a concentration camp inmate by swearing and throwing his attitude around as if he were an inmate of Alcatraz, I find it impossible to take the movie seriously.And then there is the question of making the Sonderkommandos the protagonists of a movie. It is hard not to judge them, but if you take the above into account, it is also hard to judge them. So, putting aside the question of judgment, here we have people forced to do horrible things to their own people, human beings in a shameful state worse than death, hating themselves for it with every breath, yet unable to keep themselves from surviving.To display real people in this extreme state of shame and remind everyone of what they had to go through, is like all those pictures showing naked Jews in concentration camps. You had better have a very good reason to publicly display their past embarrassments. Does this movie have such a reason? Just because one group decided to fight back, does that make them heroes and make this story worth retelling? I much preferred the man about to be gassed who fought against the Sonderkommando and decided to be gassed with his integrity intact.It is an insulting thing when movie producers and directors look for Jewish heroes by searching for the ones that picked up a gun, brushing aside the rest of the Jews as sheep. Sure, fighting back is important and even heroic. But it doesn't justify anything and everything. What about heroics of the soul? So, as grim and soul-searching as this movie wants to be, and despite the power in some of the scenes, I question the subject matter.

jzappa The Grey Zone furnishes soul and significance for an episode that's little more than a postscript in history books, the story of the Jewish work units in the Auschwitz concentration camp. These prisoners were made to assist the camp's guards in shepherding their victims to the gas chambers, then disposing of their bodies in the ovens. Nelson attempts to utilize the past to remind us of the fragile vagueness of our own principles, that most of us will never have to know what we might have the capacity for in particular conditions.And yet Nelson's dialogue is like a horse race. It sounds like American slang and divulges its theatrical roots, which works against the potent acting and the intrinsic impact of the subject matter. His screenplay needs to show more of the catch-22, instead of have his characters put on hostile debates about it. No doubt there is much tension created through all the tug of war, but characters are too graceful and fluent while speaking under pressure and in conflict. I don't feel anyone's true nature comes through in their words, except perhaps Harvey Keitel's surprisingly becoming SS officer. You can virtually hear the components of his principled device stirring as characters rap their adages and aphorisms. There's an affected purpleness to everything. Sometimes it works and sometimes shrieks of pretension. Nelson takes an emotionally inconceivable situation and comes close to sterilizing it with self-conscious technique. But ultimately, these are defects that, ironically, make fodder for subsequent discourse.Nelson, an actor himself, knows experientially how to stimulate and inspire his cast, which is comprised of other strong performances than just Keitel's. Needless to say he must also know how to make an actor seem not to act, how to put him or her at their ease, bring them to that state of relaxation where their creative faculties are released. I think for every time that's done successfully here, there are just as many instances where we see through the baroque artifice.Whether its sense of style seems to trivialize the authenticity of its situations, that's not to say it aims for the heart and misses. There are nevertheless many extraordinarily bleak and, most significantly, unflinchingly emotional scenes and moments that it's out of the question that you'd not be moved by the film. The violent rebellion, played not for hero worship but with somber fatalism, using minor key tonality in its score. If this story must be told and retold, and to be sure it must, then The Grey Zone is to be praised for discovering a new approach. The film's feeling for images gives it a grave intensity, but it's thrust by the acting, self-conscious or not. And not like many mainstream Holocaust films, even great, monumental ones, The Grey Zone is actually frank enough to renounce the prospect of hopefulness in Auschwitz. Or the world.The film sneers at how we, most of us, more than we'd like to know, feel we can generalize about groups of people, races, nations, ethnic and religious groups, how in the bleakest of examples of this shameful human weakness gone to the extreme, it is all self-fulfilling prophecy. When you take away the rights of people, when you dehumanize them, they will of course work as corruptly and extremely as you to survive your oppression. One day sit down and make a list of groups of people in any or all countries, not least of which ours, that can be equated to this, and you may see a less distilled, less explicit holocaust that may or may not end.

Darrin This film would have been far more convincing, had the entire cast not spoken with American accents. This is absurdity at its finest. Far and few Europeans at the time spoke fluent English, let alone perfected the American accent! LOL! Arquette (mother was Jewish - and the daughter of a Holocaust refugee from Poland) was miscast. Harvey Keitel (b. Bklyn, umpteenth sweet, Jewish NYer) gave the only convincing performance, since he had no choice but to speak in German tongue. Sorvino, Buscemi, and Natasha Lyonne (b. Braunstein, umpteenth sweet, Jewish NYer) were hardly in the film. While far from slow-moving, "The Grey Zone" was definitely no "Schindler's List" or "Europa, Europa."

peter-ramshaw-1 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.