The simple task of a blockbuster director is to behave like a bargain-basement drug dealer, supplying his convulsing, frothing patient with the steady narcotic drip-drip. All he needs to do is make sure the good stuff is coming through at sufficient a rate so everyone dutifully zombies their way back into the cinema when it is time for the next dose.
Never mind if his stuff is cut with unbelievable dross, if the acting is terrible, the costumes are hideous, if the wigs are preposterous and the codpieces are disappointingly flat, loyal fans will still come back to be expertly fleeced — and screw everyone who hasn’t watched the last umpteen films and has no idea what’s going on.
For those who are still not hooked, Captain America: Civil War may seem incomprehensible. Because blockbusters are now essentially mindless television, it is like sitting down to Game of Thrones in the middle of the fifth episode of series three. You will already need to know a vast selection of infinitesimal trivia from the last 20-plus hours of films for this latest episode, sorry, film, including the fact that Captain America (Chris Evans) and assorted cronies have just destroyed the Republic of Sokovia. You will also need to remember that hundreds of people were killed during that war, and one of them was the twin brother of Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen).
Following another mission in Lagos where Wanda uses her telekinetic powers to terrible effect, Captain America must now sign the Sokovia Accord, agreeing that the Avengers can no longer kill people with impunity. Because Captain America is a raging Republican, he obviously feels that he should be able to kill whoever he damn well likes in the name of international peace and security. Resident Democrat Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr) is duly dispatched to sort him out.
This leads to a fabulous showdown in which five superheroes side with Captain America and six side with Stark. It also provides a shameless opportunity to provide trailers for the next wave of films, introducing a whole new Spider-Man (Tom Holland) — a character who has now been reinvented for cinema audiences for an exhausting third time in less than 15 years.
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The chief appeal of this film is fannish sentiment, based on in-jokes about Falcon’s “bird costume” and Spider-Boy’s silly homemade suit. It is a film for anyone who ever wondered who might win out of Spider-Man and Ant-Man (Paul Rudd returns as the tiny hero) or who would win out of Falcon (Anthony Mackie) and Black Panther (Chadwick Boseman). It helps that it is put together with expert efficiency, that the directors (Joe and Anthony Russo) stream the drugs straight into one’s system in addictive three-minute chunks.
It eventually takes on the tone and shape of a rollicking northern variety show, as new superheroes seem to tumble onto the screen every five minutes. The whole thing slips down easily, with some amazing fight sequences, but I’m not sure that “It was 147 minutes of heels and hairspray and vile sub-Alan Partridge onesies — I didn’t hate it” counts as an entirely positive review.
Towards the end of the film, when — spoiler alert — Stark and Captain America enjoy their final clash, Helmut Zemo (Daniel Brühl) emerges as the evil mastermind who has made the Avengers fight among each other. Before I even looked up Baron Zemo, I knew he would be a sadistic Nazi scientist who tested his weapons on innocent civilians. And so it proved. It says something about the enduring horror of the Nazis that they can feature in both our silliest and our most serious film this week. When it comes to movies, the Nazis are our central story, our polluted wellspring, our twisted Oresteia and our Iliad.
Son of Saul is a Hungarian film from Laszlo Nemes, the winner of the best foreign language Oscar this year, about the crematoria and morgues of Auschwitz. It is not without its own cartoonish moments, focusing as it does on the lurid work of the Sonderkommando, a unit of Jews who cleared and cleaned the gas chambers on pain of their own death. If you ever wondered who herded the victims, who mopped the floors, who loaded the bodies, who shovelled the ashes, this provides a ghoulish how-to. It is so merciless and forensic in its detail that I am not sure why anyone would watch it, unless they were seeking some extreme, masochistic form of catharsis.
It is shot mostly from behind the right shoulder of the quivering Sonderkommando Saul Ausländer (Geza Rohrig). He is cringing, crouching and fully submissive. He is permanently covered in a light white powder that at first looks like a ghostly sort of stage make-up, until it is horrifyingly revealed as human soot. Saul and his comrades are living ghosts, theatrical bit parts in their own funerals, desperately shovelling the ashes of their friends and possibly relatives into a river.
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Ostensibly, it is an account of a camp uprising in October 1944, in which a number of the Sonderkommando managed to escape. In Hollywood, this story would inevitably be reimagined as a Jewish version of The Great Escape, complete with mad dashes and the sickly tang of hindsight, the recognition that, in just eight months’ time, the tables will be turned on these bastards. But the uprising is treated more subtly here, as merely a backdrop, a hopeless battle going on nearly off stage. Saul focuses on the task in hand, which is burying a boy he describes as his son, who miraculously survived the gas ovens only to be smothered by one of the guards.
It is never quite clear whether the corpse really is Saul’s son — if he is delirious with horror and is making it up. Nor is it clear what his friend is doing with his camera. (In fact, he is trying to record the Nazis’ crimes.) It is a masterpiece of silence and chaos, the idea that when things get this bad, all meaningful communication ceases, humans become ghosts, bodies become mere “Stück” (pieces), conversations are reduced to stage directions and instructions, where those instructions are 12 minutes in the oven, followed by two minutes’ waiting time, followed by removal of the bodies and disinfectant.
Amid the pushing and the shoving, orders delivered with slaps, punches and fists, Son of Saul becomes as eerie and as physical as a grim silent film. Rohrig cuts a miserable, small, Chaplinesque figure as he scrabbles furtively for the Gollumish “shiny” in the pockets of the jackets left by the gas-chamber corpses: gold he will use to bribe guards for the burial. It is a film set quite literally in the voiceless pits of hell. Harrowing.
Captain America: Civil War
12A, 147 mins
★★★
Son of Saul
15, 107 mins
★★★★
