| World Film Classics: The Tin Drum | |
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Directed
by Volker Schlöndorff
Written
by Jean-Claude Carrière and Volker Schlöndorff
Based on the novel by Günter Grass
With Mario Adorf, Angela Winkler, David Bennent, and Katharina Thalbach
Germany 1979. 142 minutes.
To refresh my memory, I like to rewatch the films I recommend here. So I went to my local library and rented The Tin Drum for the umpteenth time. This time, however, the pleasure that usually accompanies a viewing of this film did not want to happen. More on that in a moment.
In a nutshell, Volker Schlöndorff's "The Tin Drum," based on Nobel prize winning German author Günther Grass' novel of the same title, is the story of Oskar Matzerath, a boy who grows up in Eastern Germany before and during World War II. Oskar, who also narrates the film, is one of the most unique children in movies, period. This kid, appalled by the cruelty and ignorance of the adult world around him, throws himself down a basement staircase at the age of three and stops growing. A gnome with stunted growth, Oskar also has a drum which he bands like a mad fool, a piercing scream that can shatter glass, and vicious and cynical snide comments about the insanity around him.
Thus equipped, Oskar faces the fascist horrors of Nazi Germany, the Second World War, and the awful developments in his own family. The visuals are exciting, the narrative has an absurd nightmarish quality to it, and the movie used to strike me as an almost feverish hallucination, a twisted version of history, as one of the most eloquent accounts of the horror of fascism, and human cruelty in general.
All this is digestible and appealing because the quirkiness and absurdity of the telling makes the tale bearable. This is not only a story of jackbooted thugs and a horrible war, it also features some of the ugliest sex scenes in memory and - believe it or not - suicide by eels (I couldn't eat sushi for weeks.)
This time around though, the surreal touches had worn off, and all that was left was disgusting, appalling, and awful. I am not surprised that this film has caused backwards folks in Oklahoma to ban it from libraries and rental stores -- the truth about the abyss that hides in the human soul is not a pretty sight, and for people who like to censor art, there's a lot to object to here.
But now I'm worried that I made this film sound less than worthy of your time. Nothing could be further from the truth. If you've seen it six times or more, I'd like to hear if you experienced a similar reaction. If you haven't, go out and rent it -- the film shared the Palm d'Or in Cannes with Apocalypse Now, won the Oscar for Best Foreign movie in 1980, and counts as one of the stellar achievements of German cinema since World War II.
