In Darkness (2011)

Hard work, but powerful, based on the true story of a Catholic petty thief in 1943 who is paid by Jews to help them hide in the sewers of Lvov, Poland. It's too long by nearly an hour, gets up close and personal with atrocities, and reminds me why I used to avoid Holocaust movies. Nominated for the Best Foreign Film Oscar, it lost to A Separation (as it did at the Critics Choice Awards). Screenwriter David F. Shamoon (whose own parents fled Baghdad to escape Iraq's persecution of Jews) read in the newspaper about a book, The Righteous by Sir Martin Gilbert, about heroes who helped save Jews from the Nazis. Gilbert pointed Shamoon toward another book, In the Sewers of Lvov: A Heroic Story of Survival from the Holocaust by Robert Marshall, and Shamoon bought the movie rights to that one and spent eight years getting it to the screen. So now that I've given away that somebody survived, I can tell you that that person told the filmmakers, “You captured it. That’s how it was.” The end cards will tell you that person's name. And now you also know that it isn't all awful. But there's a whole lot of awful. Also, as I've said in the past, I'm very thankful there's no smell-o-vision. FYI: Lvov is now Lviv (pronounced le-VEE-ew), Ukraine, about 200 miles east of Krakow and 340 miles west of Kiev.

Shamoon brought in the respected Polish director Agnieska Holland (I didn't see Europa Europa (1990); I think I saw Total Eclipse (1995), with Leonardo DiCaprio as Arthur Rimbaud, and I definitely saw The Secret Garden (1993) (I loved the book when I was a child); and I'm surprised to learn that she directed episodes of The Wire and Cold Case, among others). Apparently during the test screenings the filmmakers watched the audience carefully and decided not to make it any shorter. Too bad they didn't ask Jack and me! None of the actors is familiar to me, though many have distinguished careers in Poland and Germany.

As my regular readers know, I often seek out background music from the movie I'm covering to keep me in the mood while writing. In doing so, I noticed an egregious error on imdb: the composer's name, Antoni Komasa-Lazarkiewicz' third name was misspelled (Lazarkarkiewicz) and not linked to his previous work, which was listed under Antoni Lazarkiewicz, so I have a correction in the works on that site. I did not find any tracks for us this time--my fallback is a very long playlist of instrumentals that includes soundtracks, jazz, classical, and anything else with no lyrics to confuse my wordiness.

So, if you go, try to do something fun and uplifting, preferably in the sunshine, after your two and a half hours In Darkness. Oh, and sit as far back as possible or avert your eyes from time to time, if you suffer from Motion Picture Motion Sickness.