Waltz With Bashir Review

27 Mar 2009

Waltz With Bashir was excellent. I am going to do my best to review it here, briefly summarizing the plot and what I thought of it. WARNING: plot details most definitely follow:

The movie is an animated documentary, focused around the recollections of the filmmaker, Ari Folman, about the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. He was in the IDF at the time, and has only dim recollections of certain events. It begins when a fellow soldier tells him of a nightmare he has been having, and Folman then begins to have his own vision of a massacre he knows occured, but knows little of. He seeks out other veterans, including one who he sees in this dream, and tries to learn more of what went on there. As he uncovers more and more details and personal stories, the film transitions between different animation styles as we travel through the memories of these people, and come to understand the whole story through these fragmented viewpoints. At the very end of the movie, it suddenly snaps to about forty-five seconds of live authentic archival footage, and then ends. This is extremely jarring, and I was at first a little ticked off at that they had abandoned what had until that point been a purely animated feature for the sake of dramatic impact, but I am coming to understand why they did this more. It was certainly effective in terms of impact, but the question is whether or not it serves the film’s interests. I think it ultimately does. It is almost as if the animation represents the fact that these memories are all fragmented, subjective, and limited to the perceptions the soldiers had at the time of the events’ occurring, and then at the end when Folman comes to understand what actually ocurred, and the role he had in it, we see the footage, reminding us that there are in fact concrete records of these sort of things, that it is a matter of contextualizing them.

One theme the film treats especially well is that of ignorance. Character struggle with the concept of blissful ignorance, and how certain people might have shut out certain stimuli to keep themselves happy or sane. This is served especially well in a scene with the psychiatrist.

There is also one particular veteran who routinely offers very interesting analyses to Folman (who is a character in the movie) of Folman’s own viewpoints. At one point, he says that perhaps the reason Folman is so interested in discovering the details of this massacre is that his own parents were in Auschwitz during the Holocaust, and this idea of massacre has been with him all of his life. Now he is seeking to understand the situation in which he unwittingly took the role of the Nazi (to a lesser degree, but a definite parallel).

That particular exploration reminded me of a part of Maus in which Art is talking to his psychiatrist, Pavel, who says “Does the world really need another Holocaust story? Maybe they need a bigger and better Holocaust.” It seems to me that a lot of the art that comes out of trauma and tragedy, like the Holocaust or this particular military conflict / genocide, is focused on the idea of awareness. When will humanity finally get to the point where an understanding of genocide or human suffering is not limited to retrospect? When will we no longer be afraid to call these things what they are? It seems that Arik Sharon knew about this particular massacare, at Sabra and Shatila, and let it occur anyway. When will the world understand these things well enough to at least grant them classification? From this will follow action, inevitably, but we must take that first step of recognition.

Overall, I really liked this movie, and found that it explored these themes very effectively. The artwork was beautiful. The first scene, which is a dream that a veteran is having, and subsequently describes, is particularly striking. It starts with a dog running, and then more join it, finally coming to a halt underneath a window, which they bark at, where a man stands. The veteran then tells Folman that there are twenty-six dogs in the dream, and that they are the twenty-six dogs he shot during the invasion. As his unit approached Lebanese villages, the dogs would bark and awaken everyone, so his commander had him snipe the dogs before they entered, because they knew he was too afraid to kill a person. For some reason, this veteran describing the fact that he remembered the faces and the wounds of every single one of those twenty-six dogs struck me as completely tragic, and I lost it. Even at the end of the film, faced with the gruesome archival footage, I wasn’t as deeply affected. That first scene really set the tone.

I highly recommend this movie to anyone in the mood for a though-provoking and contemplative theater-going experience. If you’re looking for easy entertainment or something you can just walk away from and not think about, look elsewhere. Waltz With Bashir is not to be taken lightly.