Portrait of the Artist Portrait of the Artist

The opening scene of Frida is one of those great crane shots that seems to float down from heaven, taking us along for the ride. The camera glides to a stop, then escorts us around a south-of-the-border courtyard alive with life and color. Flaming reds and blues of near-psychedelic intensity dominate the scene, with huge, crimson devil-pinatas looming from the corners and magnificent peacocks strutting along the grounds, just to add the requisite dose of magical realism. A group of burly men enter the scene, struggling to maintain their footing as they hold aloft a massive bed. Lying prone on the bed is Frida Kahlo, the great, mono-browed Mexican artist, her face framed by a variety of exotically colored pillows, and looking just like one of her paintings.

It's an amazing moment, and one stamped with the unique aesthetic flair of the film's director, Julie Taymor (Titus). Unfortunately, with a few notable exceptions, it's just about the last time we get a sense of the person who's actually making this movie.

Frida, a long-gestating dream project of many, including its star, Salma Hayek, is a competently made but not particularly remarkable film that falls victim to many of the problems commonly associated with bio-pics. The film is true to its subject's life, and Taymor makes herself subservient to the material, often to the point of invisibility. The result isn't bad so much as it's an overly restrained and disappointingly conventional affair.

The film crams in a lot of Kahlo's life — too much for its own good, really — but the main focus is on Frida's long, passionate and extremely complicated relationship with the painter Diego Rivera (Alfred Molina). Both were fascinating people, but the script's handling of their relationship becomes predictable. The two meet, bond, marry and enter into a pattern whereby every 15 minutes or so of screen time, the womanizing Diego has another fling, Frida flips out, and Diego insists that it means nothing. It's actually a fairly accurate screen condensation of what really happened, but it makes for dull viewing.

Frida simply propels itself from one key event in the artist's life to the next, in a manner that's honest but a bit dry and lacking in detail. By the time we get to Kahlo's affair with the legendary politico Leon Trotsky, we're completely missing a sense of the enormous strangeness of this union of cultural icons (think, say, Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio). It's only in the moments that Taymor allows her imagination free reign that the movie really comes alive — as in the scene where a young Frida is horribly mangled in a life-changing accident that leaves her body dusted with gold leaf drifting down from the ceiling. Horribly maimed and laid up in a complete body cast, the diagnosis is that she';l never walk again.

She does eventually walk, of course, because Frida's spirit, like her art, is indomitable — which is exactly why movies get made about people like Frida Kahlo. If only Frida displayed a little more of that same fire.

LESS THAN ZEROThe thing about Holocaust movies is that it's nearly impossible to make a good one.

Back when the Second World War was still relatively fresh in everybody's minds, the reality of what happened to Europe's Jews was regarded as something almost unspeakable, an area of obscenity that most artists, filmmakers included, were reluctant to even approach. The two most successful attempts to tackle the subject on screen were necessarily extreme — the elegiac |minimalism of Alain Resnais' 30-minute Night and Fog, on one hand, and, on the other, the obsessive and exhaustive 9-hour investigation that is Claude Lanzmann's Shoah. Both films essentially let the testimony of the survivors and the unadorned images of the death camps speak for themselves.

As time has passed and memories have dimmed (or been extinguished), we"ve inevitably distanced ourselves from the horrors of the Holocaust, objectified it and devalued it as just one more terrible event that took place far away and long ago. The vagaries of time and decades of daily inundation by all sorts of televised atrocities have made certain that the Holocaust is no longer something unimaginable. It is now merely something "interesting."

Whatever their flaws, movies like Schindler's List, and now Tim Blake Nelson's The Grey Zone, justify themselves simply by popping up every so often and screaming into our faces: This really happened, and this is what it looked like. That's a useful service in a world that doesn't bother much with history anymore. It's even more useful in a world where the ghost of European anti-Semitism is alive and well, where Hitler's name is greeted with squeals of delight on the Arab street, and where a considerable body of propaganda continues to claim the Holocaust never even happened.

The Grey Zone is a deeply flawed film, but it's also a uniquely ambitious one, especially as Holocaust movies go. Rather than go the expected route and simply document the unfathomable evil of the Nazi genocide one more time, the film complicates itself by extending its focus to yet another monumentally unsettling phenomenon: the Jewish prisoners who actually aided their captors. It's a subject ripe for exploration, and it's a pity that the movie isn't quite up to the task.

Nelson's film has the best of intentions, but it doesn't get much right except for the basic details. The film takes place in 1944, towards the end of the war, at the infamous Nazi death camp of Aushwitz-Birkenau in Poland. As the drive to exterminate the Jews intensifies, the Nazis begin bribing select Jewish prisoners with extra rations or a few extra months of life in exchange for helping to lead their fellow lambs to the slaughter. The Grey Zone is the story of one of these Jewish Sonderkommando groups, of the deal they struck with the devil, and of how they eventually rose up against their masters. The film applies a liberal slathering of artistic license to the events it depicts, but it paints what appears to be an essentially accurate portrait.

Most of the movie amounts, as you might imagine, to an absolute horror show. There are brief and very tiny flickers of hope within it all, but what we're basically barraged with are scenes of unrelieved pain, humiliation, degradation and torture, as well as assorted death camp images that have become icons of ultimate evil: ovens, gas chambers, chimneys billowing smoke (of burning human beings).

The film is at its most effective when it's simply, wordlessly depicting the gruesomely methodical mechanics of institutionalized genocide — hosing down the death chambers, organizing the shoes of the dead, labeling, recording, dispassionately disposing of the corpses. If you can stomach an unblinking look at what Holocaust philosophers like to refer to as the banality of evil, The Grey Zone provides a potent one.

So much for the good news. Despite the convincingly hellish framework within which the film places itself, The Grey Zone is pretty stilted stuff. The movie is based on Nelson's off-Broadway production, and as hard as it is to imagine this material working on stage, it's possibly even less engaging on screen. Simply put, The Grey Zone feels like a play, and not a particularly good one. The deliberately posed characters stand around the bare sets delivering self-consciously terse, jagged lines of dialogue that remind us of David Mamet by way of Harold Pinter.

The cast is distracting as well, a bizarre mix of stars we don't for a moment believe and who barely seem to be acting in the same movie as one another — Harvey Keitel, David Arquette, Steve Buscemi and Mira Sorvino, among others. Keitel is particularly ludicrous, sporting a silly World War II military haircut and struggling with a cartoonish German accent. The other actors speak in oddly cadenced but accentless English, portentously delivered and sprinkled with anachronistic modern idioms. On top of it all, everybody looks way too healthy and well-fed for concentration camp inmates who are supposed to be one half-step from starvation.

You get used to the accents after a while, but the movie's other problems persist. There's no denying that the film has some important things to say — about how a moral vacuum infects everything it touches, about making choices (to be good, to be bad, to be nothing at all) — but it all gets lost in a stylized orgy of death, despair and bad acting.

The Grey Zone ultimately lives up to its title in the worst way, dragged down by stiff, lifeless mannerisms that eventually consume even its best intentions.

Lance Goldenberg can be reached at

This article appears in Nov 6-12, 2002.