Best Oscar of the Night: Toyland

In his acceptance speech, Toyland director Jochen Alexander Freydank spoke of spending four years of his life on a fourteen minute film. As winner of the Academy Award for best live action short film, those efforts seem to have paid off. Though seen by relatively few, it is arguably the worthiest winner of the night, saying much in those fourteen minutes.

In Toyland (Spielzeugland), terms like Aryan and Jew mean little to two little boys, but have tragic wider implications in 1942 Germany. For a single Aryan mother, it is too difficult to explain to her son that his best friend will soon be transported with his family to a concentration camp, so she tells him they are leaving for Toyland. Naturally, her son wants to go to a place like Toyland too, as the mother’s white lie leads to complications she had not foreseen. It is difficult to write at length about Toyland without revealing too much of the story, given its brevity. However, it well earns the emotional payoff of its elegant conclusion that implies a lifetime of memories through its poetic closing image.

Toyland vividly captures a mother’s panic for a lost child, but also shows a moment of dramatic heroism. Months after screening the film, I still ponder the mother’s original intentions in that pivotal scene, but always come to the conclusion that it does not matter. It is truly a film with staying power.

To its credit, the Brooklyn International Film Festival programmed Toyland last summer. New Yorkers have also had an opportunity to see it as part of Academy screenings of this year’s nominated shorts. It was one of last year’s best films, of any length, and the best recipient of Oscar gold this year.

Early Oscar Prognosticating

(Note: Blogging will be light for the next week, as I will be attending a Christening in Prague.)

I predict the awards other pundits just won’t prognosticate, like the jazz categories at the Grammys. For the Oscars, that includes best documentary and best foreign language film. These two categories are particularly difficult to gage given their unique voting rules within the academy.

I have seen some excellent docs this year, but do not expect any of them to win, for reasons of political correctness. The winner will be about hardcore propaganda. However, with even MTV’s Kurt Loder fisking Sicko’s issues with truth and reality, this won’t be Michael Moore’s year. Domestic box office for his valentine to Cuban health care is also only $24.5 million, respectable for a documentary to be sure, but a crushing disappoint compared to the $119 million for Fahrenheit 9/11. DiCaprio’s global warming doc 11th Hour by contrast is an out-and-out flop, with ticket sales of only $700,000. Even Roger Friedman found it “mind-numbingly dull,” so scratch that one too. However, Jonathan Demme’s hero-worshipping Jimmy Carter Man From Plains opens soon. I have not seen it, but it smells like an academy favorite from here.

Gore may have won the documentary award last year, but liberty loving film goers could take satisfaction from the foreign language award for The Lives of Others, a remarkable look at Communist oppression in East Germany before the fall of the Wall. Maybe this year, we can root for Poland’s official submission: Katyn, Andrzej Wajda’s dramatization of the Soviet massacre of 4,000 Polish prisoners of war in the Katyn Forest, not far from Smolensk in Russia. Long denied by the Soviet Communists, Gorbachev finally admitted their guilt in a 1989 Glasnost-era “our bad.”

Katyn still has tremendous resonance for Poles and Polish-Americans. One of the most striking sites (perhaps the only one) of my former hometown of Jersey City is the enormous Katyn Forest Memorial. Its dramatic depiction of a Polish Officer of bayoneted in the back almost brings to mind the grand-scale Russian WWII monuments. Normally it provided a stark contrast to the placid Manhattan skyline, but on September 11th, the juxtaposition took on added meaning, as these pictures attest.

If I had a vote for best documentary it would be for The Rape of Europa, but I will be delighted if it is even nominated. I am more hopeful for Katyn’s chances to make the nomination cut, or at least find distribution here in America. Yet how sad is it that for films that really understand the idea of liberty and totalitarian attempts to proscribe it, American film patrons have to look to Poland and Germany.

Coming Attraction (and Oscar Nominee): The Lives of Others

This year’s crop of Oscar contenders has been an underwhelming lot, but there is a bright spot. One of the nominees for best foreign language film, The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen), offers profound insight into the nature of totalitarian systems and the human desire for freedom—and it actually comes from Germany.

It is 1984 in East Berlin. The Communist Party rules through fear, using the Stasi, the State Security force, as their instrument of terror. Those of an artistic bent are most likely to be targets of Stasi surveillance, which usually leads to interrogation and internment in the feared Normannenstrasse headquarters. Ulrich Mühe plays Capt. Gerd Wiesler, a faceless Stasi functionary, who excels at his duties. However, during a routine assignment watching writer Georg Dreyman and his actress girlfriend Christa-Maria Sieland, played by Sebastian Koch and Martina Gedeck respectively, Wiesler experiences a gradual awakening of his conscience. As Dreyman, a former darling of the Cultural Ministry, conspires to write an expose for the western press, Wiesler takes tentative steps to protect his would be quarry.

Much has been said about Hannah Arendt’s concept of the banality of evil. Lives essentially portrays the converse: a cog in the wheel of an evil system, who comes to the realization that he can no longer actively participate in the Stasi’s crimes.

Writer-director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck visited the GDR on several occasions as a child, and clearly the experiences had a lasting impression. His story is also well informed by the samizdat literary tradition. No aspect of Socialist (and it is explicitly identified as such) rule is romanticized—the atmosphere of fear is unrelenting. He truly captures oppressive environment of East Berlin, from the washed out colors to the Brutalist architecture, fitting for a brutal system.

On one level, Lives is quite effective as a kind of spy thriller, creating quite a bit of suspense. It is also a story of tragedy compounded, in which suicide is an important theme. Yet FHVD’s moving script concludes on an elegant note. The acting is first rate, particularly Mühe and Koch. Gabriel Yared’s score, including the crucial “Sonata for a Good Man,” perfectly fits the on-screen action. Appropriately, it was recorded by the Prague Symphony Orchestra.

This is an exceptional film, and clearly the class of the Oscar field. Whether the Academy concurs is another matter, but this is a film that deserves a campaign on its behalf. Released by Sony Pictures Classics, it opens in New York (at the Angelika) and in Los Angeles on February 9, unrolling around the country later. Viewers who seek it out will be well rewarded for their efforts.

(Welcome Gateway Pundit readers, you won't be dissapointed when Lives rolls out nationally.)