Movie Review: Waltz with Bashir

I just rented this extraordinary film on Netflix and recommend it to anyone who loves film. Waltz with Bashir (2008) follows writer and director Ari Folman’s quest to remember his service in the Israeli Army during the Lebanese War of the early 80s. The animation is exemplary and at times breathtaking in its rendering of the space between fact and fiction in our own memories and the price of war on those who participate. Its most compelling images juxtapose the horrors of war and how men deal with their own complicity in death and atrocity; often through the mundane and eradication of emotional attachment to actions and their consequences. The animation amplifies the power of the message and somehow captures the truth of the moment better than a traditional documentary or even film could. Ironically, by escaping the limitations of real images he transcends them (as Sontag once argued, a photograph is as important for what it excludes as what it includes – and this is just as true with film). In the denouement he moves from animation to real footage of the Sabra and Shatila massacre and this serves as a perfect ending, unmediated by any context except the story that preceded it (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabra_and_Shatila_massacre).

Folman’s approach provides a balanced view of the victim’s of the war, among Israelis, Lebanese and the various other players in the long running civil war that involved many of the surrounding countries. Rather than simply condemning Israeli complicity in the atrocities, it uses images and the words of the veterans to leave the audience to decide. The main characters are all involved at some level in the conflict, but are themselves victims of events essentially beyond their control. Through his extraordinary narrative structure and use of animation, he captures the fog of war explicated so poignantly in the traditional documentary form by Errol Morris in his interviews with Robert McNamara (Fog of War, 2003). Waltz seems to take Hannah Arendt’s perspective of the banality of evil to heart, showing young men pushed to service against their deeper instincts and morality; while simultaneously showing the coldness with which they ignore or justify their behavior and the destruction and killing of civilians, including women and children, in which they partake. The film rejects the bathos that often underlies films in this genre, instead allowing the images to serve as the moral underpinning of the critique of war.

Ultimately, the film is a beautifully rendered tragedy that captures the complex relationship between memory and atrocity, fear and bravery and the long term costs of war to all involved. The surreal dream sequences serve to codify the very real events that surround them and move the film from docudrama to an artistic masterpiece. I am hard pressed to think of a better animated film in history. (A)