Movie Review: The White Ribbon

The New Yorker's Anthony Lane makes one of my favorite filmic observations when he drew the line between 6 o'clock and 9 o'clock movies. The latter you watch later in the evening, after dinner and just before going directly home for a comfortable night's sleep. But 6 o'clock movies you watch earlier to leave enough time to let off the pressure through discussion and debate. If you try to sleep right after one of those without breaking it down, you're guaranteed a night of tossing and turning. Of course, a good 6 o'clocker can keep you awake despite good convo. Lane wrote  about this distincation with director Michael Haneke, exclusively a 6 o'clock guy, in mind. He's the guy who did Funny Games (family gets tortured for 2 hours) and Benny's Video (pig gets shot in the head, close-up and in slo-mo). I've seen neither of these.

I did watch his Palme d'Or winning The White Ribbon, though, which concerns a small farming village in 1914 Germany. In this particular village, this particular year, occur a series of strange and brutal crimes: the town doctor falls from his horse after it trips on deliberately stringed wire; the retarded son of the town midwife and the son of the town baron are both viciously beaten; a barn is burned to the ground. The likely culprits are the town tweens. If you do the math, they'll be smack-dab in the middle of adulthood when 1939 comes around and a certain Holocaust begins.

So, what kind of conditions form the people who commit such large-scale violence? According to this movie, partly it's some bad parenting. There's an emotional gap in almost every parent-child relationship. Take the town pastor, for instance, whose two eldest seem to be running the crime spree. He rules his family through fear, backed by cold rationality. When his said two eldest disappear for an evening, he schedules a whipping session for the following day. The whipping is necessary, he explains, to repair the household trust. Oh and he coldly orders his entire family, not just the two kids, to bed without dinner. Healthier would be some display of anger or sadness, some kind of emotional outburst, than this recipe for internalized resentment.

Add to this a layer of extreme religion. The town kids, including but not limited to the pastor's own children, develop in an environment of stringent ideology which informs their understanding of everything from the punishments their parents hand down to the success of the year's crops. You can imagine how limited these kids are in things like imagination and empathy. One kid does a high-wire act on the town bridge to see if "God wants him to die". Since he didn't, God didn't want it. These aren't dumb kids, they're just play-doh for anyone with a bit more will. When Adolf comes along, huffing like their fathers, with an ideology that doesn't exactly clash with the one they know, these kids will be the adults who fall in line.

Or that's what the film argues. For my tastes, it's a bit too neat an explanation if Haneke's project was to accurately diagnose that particular Germany. However, if his project is a commentary on modern war-prone, ideologically driven generations (say, the American evangelical right or hard-line Islamists) then he's right to K.I.S.S. Hanneke aims for both an honest diagnosis and a cautionary tale, but the film leans towards the latter and, as a result, compromises artistically. Had Haneke aimed for more complexity, he would have had a more vivid, more complete portrait and work.

Despite being substantially limited, The White Ribbon is an aesthetic achievement. The black and white captures both the period and the town's pretty stark moral stuff. There's also a couple of really dread-filled sequences. One I liked a lot is when the pastor sends his son to retrieve his spanking stick. It's one long shot as we follow the boy through a darkened corridor. We don't get to go with him into the actual room where he retrieves the stick, we don't get to read his face as he digs around for his own punishment. We get to follow him after, as he walks back to the living room stick in hand, but we're left outside again and we only get to hear wood on ass and screams. Haneke lets us fill in these blanks, and what goes on in our prompted imagination is worse than anything he could have shown us.

Then there's the kid actors themselves who all give amazing performances, top to bottom. One little crack and the illusion of these kids's moral deformation goes. They don't crack. Particularly vicious is the performance Haneke gets out of one of the kids who gets beaten, the son of the town midwife. The actor has down syndrome. There is one sequence when he screams in agony as the doctor wraps his eyes in gauze. He grabs at the doctor's sleeves. This is all extreme close-up. Let me repeat what goes on in this scene: stark black and white close-up of a screaming down-syndrome kid. Sure, you might call out Haneke here for being a bit manipulative and cheap. After all, I called out Precious for reducing a kid with down syndrome to a prop, something ridiculed. Haneke comes harder than that, though, putting not much between us and a sad, in-agony face. This kid is no prop, and calling him an actor might not be enough, either.  

So this is in some ways a simplistic movie, but at the same time, it's not an easy one. And often, the best 6 o'clockers aren't perfect. There's just more to talk about. One thing about Hanneke that isn't really controversial is his talent as an artist and craftsman. I'll take The White Ribbon over its more polished 9 o'clock cousins (Schindler's List, anyone?)