Beyond the Multiplex

Distressing box office results for brilliant indies and docs. Plus: Zombies, Hitler and maybe the best 9/11 film yet.

By Andrew O'Hehir

Oct 6, 2005 | Too many films, too little time. This isn't just the lament of a relatively pampered film critic; it's more or less the predicament of independent film as an industry. As I've endlessly insisted in this cubbyhole, these are the best of times and the worst of times. Filmmakers around the world are churning out new work, much of it ambitious and interesting, at a pace never before seen -- in part because the cost of production keeps dropping and the technology becomes ever more available.

But is there an audience for all these movies? That's not clear. There continue to be low-end micro-hits, at an economic scale that probably makes sense for at least some producers and distributors. Werner Herzog's documentary "Grizzly Man" has grossed something like $2.5 million in the United States, despite never playing on more than 105 screens. (A mid-level Hollywood film might open on 3,000 screens; a huge release, more than 4,000.) Phil Morrison's "Junebug" -- a film I still haven't seen, embarrassingly enough -- has topped $2 million and reached 143 screens. British director Pawel Pawlikowski has grossed almost $1 million, from just 55 screens, for "My Summer of Love." (I'm not even including a freak breakout like "March of the Penguins," which has now grossed $72 million and counting.)

But when you look at the year's other well-reviewed indies and imports, you see a lot more failure than success. David Mackenzie's "Asylum," a film I thought was destined for a broad adult audience, has grossed only $364,000, despite playing on 55 screens. Mike Mills' "Thumbsucker" has brought its producers $227,000 in limited release on 28 screens -- not atrocious, but not what was expected from a film starring Vincent D'Onofrio, Tilda Swinton and Keanu Reeves. Jan Hrebejk's Oscar-nominated Czech film "Up and Down"? Just $244,000 from 16 screens. Hans Weingartner's "The Edukators," which I sagely predicted would be the anti-globalization left's first hit movie? Only $170,000 on 19 screens.

Arnaud Desplechin's "Kings and Queen" got reviews to die for (yours truly certainly fell out of his tree), but never escaped the big-city art-film ghetto, playing in seven big-city theaters and bringing home $225,000. Even those chump-change figures might look good to the distributors of Jia Zhangke's marvelous film "The World," which has grossed a grand total of $58,000, or Gusha Omarova's Kazakh-made "Schizo" ($52,000). Björn Runge's "Daybreak" -- a serious drama from an important Swedish filmmaker -- played for one weekend in Manhattan and made a grand total of $6,355. Siegrid Alnoy's "She's One of Us" also played New York for a few days, but the results must have been so painful that the distributor has reported no U.S. income at all.

Is there a pattern to this gruesome lottery? Not one I can see, except, as the estimable Hollywood screenwriter William Goldman once put it, that nobody knows anything. In that spirit, no more predictions from me (at least none this week). Dennis Gansel's acclaimed Nazi-era drama "Before the Fall" feels like a potential hit, which obviously means nothing. Wim Wenders' "Land of Plenty" is one of the director's best films in years, and may be the great 9/11 movie so far -- and it doesn't even have a distributor. Two classics by the master of Gallic severity, Robert Bresson, are back in circulation in lustrous new prints, and then there's "Zombie Honeymoon," which is more like a Bresson or Wenders movie than you might expect. Except that it's about zombies. On a honeymoon.

"Before the Fall": Training the future Nazi governors of New York and Chicago
As director Dennis Gansel explains, it's become difficult to get German audiences interested in films about the Third Reich. People over 35 may feel they've spent too much of their lives expiating and obsessing over the unforgivable sins of their parents or grandparents; to younger generations, the whole thing seems like distant, unpleasant and largely irrelevant history in a nation divided by contemporary political, class and ethnic tensions. All the same, German artists and intellectuals have returned once again in recent years to the central conundrum of the Nazi era: How could it have happened? How did the most cultured nation on the planet, which had produced much of the poetry, philosophy and music at the bedrock of Western civilization, descend so rapidly into barbarism?

Gansel's friend Oliver Hirschbiegel made the extraordinary film "Downfall," which depicts Adolf Hitler, in Bruno Ganz's memorable performance, as a recognizable human being whose cruelty and insanity were framed by a powerful and in many ways pathetic personality. Gansel's new film, "Before the Fall," won't be as controversial, but it's a potent and well-executed drama that explores the seductive power of the Nazi elite and its sweeping vision for the future.

Max Riemelt, a blond and muscular young actor who's something of a matinee idol back home, stars as Friedrich, an innocent but ambitious boxer from a working-class family who becomes identified as a rising star. In defiance of his anti-Nazi father, he enters a Napola, one of Hitler's exclusive military academies designed to produce the future party leadership of the Thousand-Year Reich. ("Napola" is also the film's German title.) As the school's governor tells his young charges, loyal Nazis will be needed all over the world -- they will one day be governors of London, New York, Sydney and Cape Town.

What follows is a conventional but tautly paced boys'-school drama, with a profoundly sinister undercurrent. Friedrich slowly develops a painful understanding that all is not right at the Napola -- he is encouraged to beat his boxing opponents into unconsciousness, and the "prisoners of war" the cadets are enlisted to hunt down in a nearby forest one night turn out to be unarmed Russian children. But it takes his growing friendship with a sensitive, intellectual boy named Albrecht (Tom Schilling), son of the school's powerful governor, to catalyze Friedrich's moral reaction.

Next Page: "Why did someone like my grandfather follow these people?"

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