The Grey Zone
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$14.98
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Manufacturer: Lions Gate
Starring: David Arquette, Velizar Binev, David Chandler, Michael Stuhlbarg, George Zlatarev
Directed By: Tim Blake Nelson
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Binding: DVD
EAN: 9781588177056
Format: Anamorphic
ISBN: 158817705X
Label: Lions Gate
Manufacturer: Lions Gate
Number Of Items: 1
Publisher: Lions Gate
Region Code: 1
Release Date: 2003-03-18
Running Time: 108
Studio: Lions Gate
Theatrical Release Date: 2001
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Editorial Reviews:
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The title of Tim Blake Nelson's harrowing drama of Jewish death camp prisoners who rise up against their captors to "destroy the machinery" refers as much to the compromise and cloudy morality of collaboration as to the gray world coated in the smoke and ash of the crematoriums. Inspired by real-life events at the Auschwitz death camp, The Grey Zone stars David Arquette as a soul-deadened laborer whose being fiercely jolts to life when he finds a young girl alive among the gassed corpses. He's the heart and soul of an outstanding cast that includes Steve Buscemi and Daniel Benzali as revolt leaders, Allan Corduner as the shunned camp doctor, and Harvey Keitel as the commandant. Nelson's rapid pacing, intimate shooting, and terse, jagged dialogue give the moral debate a discomforting immediacy as it races a deadline. When doom hangs in the air, sure death creates unique priorities. --Sean Axmaker
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: A seriously flawed film
Comment: I wish I could praise this film, I really do. The historical events that lie behind it deserve more talent than those who made it seem to possess. Major flaws weaken what might have been a great film.
First, probably in an effort to `improve' the story, they muddle the history. There was a teenaged girl who did miraculously survive the gas chambers at Auschwitz, but that was at a different time and her fate was not that portrayed in the film. Bringing her into a revolt by the inmates who ran Nazism's machinery of death merely confuses the plot. Will she be saved or will the plot to destroy the crematoria succeed? The writers and directors never settle on which they want to portray, and the result is a mess.
Second, those who made this film seem captive their own culture and place in history, unaware that any other exists. Most of those involved in these historical events were born in Eastern Europe in the first three decades of the twentieth century. That was a culture far different from our own. In the film, they are portrayed as acting and sounding like they were born our West coast in the last decades of the twentieth century. They're vain, self-obsessed and foul-mouthed with small and petty egos.
I'm not talking about a lack of the slight Hungarian accents that more talented filmmakers might have added to lend a bit of realism. The problem is not that most of the characters have modern American accents. The problem is that their attitudes and the content of what they're saying is that of today's Los Angeles rather than the Budapest of long ago. Their debates about what to do have all the sallowness of those waiting in line to get tickets for a rock concert. The result rings untrue.
Finally, there's a general sloppiness about the plot. Attempting to portray those who wanted to use the revolt to escape as selfish makes no sense. The Nazis could not permit any eyewitness to the inner workings of their death camps to remain free and would have to take soldiers out of action to recapture them. Those who escaped would be helping to defeat Germany as effectively as those who remained to destroy the machinery of death. There's also Hollywood's usual ignorance of weapons. Actors in the film shoot people at long ranges with pistols with an accuracy that would have won them a gold medal at the Olympics. Other blunders are even more serious. No German officer in these camps would have placed women being brutally tortured to make them talk in a situation where they could end their misery in an instant by throwing themselves on an electric fence. A bit more care with the script would have weeded those errors out.
In the end, the significance of what these people were doing in 1944 does make up for the inadequacies of those making the film in 2001, but this film could have been much better in more talented hands.
--Michael W. Perry, editor of Dachau Liberated : The Official Report
Customer Rating:
Summary: The Grey Zone
Comment: I had been seeking this movie for quite some time. I had been told by several outlets that the movie was no longer available. I looked it up on Amazon.com and was able to find the product. It was purchased and received in a very timely manner. The movie was what I had expected and I could not be more satisfied.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Harrowing tale of absolute horror
Comment: This is a tale set within the confines of the Auchswitz-Birkenau death camps. It is a tale of the depths that people are capable of sinking to to save a few weeks of life. The men of Sonderkommando 12 work in the selection and clothes changing areas. They lead people to the gas chambers under the pretext of disinfection. When the victims are all dead, they disentangle the corpses and search them for hidden jewelry--they cut the hair and they pull out the teeth. Afterwards, they work in the living Hell of the crematoria, incinerating bodies that are at least partly their personal victims.
There is a plot to destroy the crematoria coupled with a major prison break. Arms are smuggled in from Polish partisans. The Germans, who have informants everywhere, quickly learn of the plot but don't know how, where or what. Three women from a work detail in a munitions factory are discovered with powder--illicit explosives. They are ruthlessly tortured with electric shock but don't break. They are afterall going to die anyway. They have second thoughts, however, when the Nazis line up the women in their section and shoot them down, all the while asking the million dollar question. Half are murdered but no one talks.
The plot is almost foiled, howeve, when a prisoner discovers a still living girl under a pile of gassed people. He convinces others, including the camp doctor, to assist in her resuscitation and hiding. Trying to hide the girl places the whole operation at risk. The Commandant discovers her and, in exchange for her life, tries to bribe his brilliant Jewish doctor for more information about the plot. The doctor denies everything except, to say, that there is a plot. The Commandant isn't pleased.
The plot goes forward. Arms are seized and the main crematorium goes up in a series of explosions. Efforts to hold off the trained soldiers, brought in to repel the rebellion are largely hopeless. Many are killed outright and those who survive are systematically shot in the head. The young girl, who has survived so much, is shot down by the Commandant.
This is a powerful, grim and gruesome story of one of the greatest wrongs in history--the systematic demolition of a people. It asks the very pertinent question: How far would you go to save your own life? Are you above collaboration and murder?
Ron Braithwaite author of novels--"Skull Rack" and "Hummingbird God"--on the Spanish Conquest of America
Customer Rating:
Summary: The Grey Zone
Comment: This movie is very moving, it is slow at times, but the story is amazing and hard to believe that people would be treated like that. It is totally worth buying because you will want to watch it again. Each time I watch it I see something new, not only that,but is a good historical movie to show youth about WW2. My lil bro and his friends couldn't believe that this is what happened to Jews during WW2. It is definetly a good movie.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Painful to Watch True Story
Comment: One of the hardest things to understand about the Shoah was how so many people "just walked" into the gas chambers. Harder still is to understand why people chose to help out the Germans. When you watch how the people coming off the trains were treated, you ask yourself why didn't they rebel. Well part of the reason was that they were told by their own that they were going in for showers. Why would you fight against that?
What if there were no SonderKommandos? Would the Germans not have hired other people (Poles and Balts) who would have been happy to do the work just like they did in the Eastern Camps? Would these 'others' have treated those going to the 'chambers' any better or worse? If you were there, what would you do to stay alive, even if for only four more months?
What doesn't show is the years of humiliation, like a woman who have suffered years of abuse by her husband. That is what these people were like when they came into the Jagers. They had first been stripped of all their rights and then spent years in forced ghettos living like convicts.
One thing that was missing from the movie is the condition of the people when they go out of the 'cars'. Most had been in them at least for forty -eight hours, with no food or water and one bucket for urine and feces. There may have been up to 120 people in a car that could fit maybe sixty. Many were forced to stand for the whole trip. Some would have died enroute and there was no way to get rid of the bodies. When the cars were opened the people inside were so traumatized that they were like robots. Some had even gone insane while locked up and the rest would have had to endure their screaming and ranting during the trip.
It's hard to imaging what these people endured before they were gassed. In many cases, as they left the cars, anyone who complained were shot on the spot. These were normal, law abiding people, how would you reach if someone shot the person next to you in the head, and their brains and blood were splattered all over you, having endured 48 hours or more stuffed in a cattle car?
This may seem raw, but was mild compared to the actual camps. The one part that was close was when they were shooting the woman, to get the other two woman to confess. The German in charge, took no notice of the screaming of the woman about to be shot or that they were not involved. To them all Jews were 'untermenschen' (underpeople) who would all be killed eventually. So did it matter if we did it now or later?
Zeb Kantrowitz
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