Movie Reviews: Redbelt, A Walk Into the Sea, Swimming in Auschwitz

 GO  REDBELT With his 10th feature — an entertaining tale of high-stakes martial arts — David Mamet has infused the trademark sleight of hand with a measure of two-fisted action. Mike Terry (Chiwetel Ejiofor), an exponent of Brazilian jujitsu, teaches his prize pupil how to fight with one hand bound: “There is no situation from which you cannot escape.” That the instructor’s pedagogical style is a nonstop torrent of hectoring advice mixed with color commentary suggests the filmmaker’s own faith in the power of language. Still, as played by Ejiofor, Mike is almost sweet — a natural victim. When Mike visits his brother-in-law’s bar, he finds himself intervening in a fight to protect a big-time movie star (Tim Allen). Mike is subsequently invited to the set of the star’s new movie, and somehow the filmmakers start to consider bringing him on as an executive producer. But is this all a plot to force the honest samurai — who has hitherto been too pure to fight competitively — into the ring? Like the left-wing, largely Jewish writers of the ’30s and ’40s, Mamet identifies with the situation of a solitary fighter trapped by a corrupt system. In his case, however, the system isn’t capitalism so much as show business. Therein lies a paradox — Mamet attacks showbiz while surrendering to it. The tenets of jujitsu may argue there’s no trap that cannot be escaped, but the rules of American entertainment insist on it. (ArcLight Hollywood; The Grove; The Landmark) (J. Hoberman)

 GO  SWIMMING IN AUSCHWITZ One of the chief complaints against Hollywood films about the Holocaust is that they shy away from those who died in favor of those who survived. Swimming in Auschwitz is not a studio film, but a modest, locally made documentary that celebrates six women who were at Auschwitz and who survived, moved to Los Angeles after the war, and appear to have lived happy, healthy lives ever since. If it were fiction, director Jon Kean’s first feature-length film, with its tales of unpunished dips in the Nazi officers’ swimming pool and teenage friendships forged between the barracks, might be accused of cheap, Life is Beautiful–style nostalgia — a look back at Auschwitz as if it were just a summer camp with particularly cruel counselors. But Kean’s subjects — and their sometimes improbable stories — are real. These women’s ability to relate their personal histories with humor, detail and without a trace of self-pity make for an honestly moving end result. Instead of the grand horror of the Holocaust (or the “big suffering,” as one woman calls it), Swimming in Auschwitz depicts individuals who “maintained some semblance of life” amid the mass dehumanization that surrounded them. The filmmaking is often amateurish, leaning heavily on the conventions of more ambitious period docs and is, for the most part, stylistically unmemorable; still, the women’s vivid recollections are unforgettable. (Music Hall) (James C. Taylor)

The Andy Warhol Museum

A Walk Into the Sea

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More About

• Mimi Weddell
• Esther Robinson
• Danny Williams
• Martial Arts
• The Holocaust

GO  A WALK INTO THE SEA Danny Williams, subject of Esther Robinson’s documentary portrait A Walk Into the Sea, was a ’60s casualty. His brief life derives cultural significance from his association with the Silver Age of the Warhol Factory — and a particular poignance in that the survivors of that epoch barely remember him. A Harvard dropout from an old New England family, Williams was an aspiring filmmaker who apprenticed with the Maysles brothers before drifting into that great high school cafeteria cum religious cult known as the Factory — and even into an affair with the pale duke himself. Robinson, who is Williams’ niece, suggests that he was written out of history. Not true: Williams does figure in two Warhol biographies, if not Warhol’s memoirs. Still, interviewed by Robinson, narcissistic cool kids Bridget Polk and Gerard Malanga have long since forgotten her uncle, while other Factory habitués, Billy Name and Paul Morrissey, seem to have regarded him as a threat. Williams, who had experience as a film editor and soundman, designed and operated the light show for Warhol’s 1965-’66 multimedia extravaganza, The Exploding Plastic Inevitable. Velvet Underground violinist John Cale recalls an instance of Williams and Morrissey, whose job was to project the movies, scuffling one night for control of the cables. A few months later, Williams disappeared off the beach at Cape Ann. Was he driven mad by methamphetamines? Too many strobes? Factory cat fights? A Walk Into the Sea is given additional ballast with excerpts from Williams’ 16 mm movies, discovered by Warhol historian Callie Angell (who points out that Warhol bequeathed Williams his 16 mm Bolex). Hyper-lit and edited in the camera, these films seem to be mainly studies of Andy. But who was Williams? He has a different look in every blurry photo, and, perhaps out of deference to her family, Robinson has little to say about his background. Or maybe it’s a strategy — that Williams’ personality never comes into focus has the effect of making his 15 minutes of fame all the more sad and ghostly. (Grande 4-Plex) (J. Hoberman)