The Tin Drum (1979) * * 1/2
A movie review by Serdar Yegulalp Copyright 1998 by Serdar Yegulalp
What a strange story. It's been nearly a week, and I'm still having a hard time sorting out my feelings about THE TIN DRUM. Oddly, I get the feeling another viewing wouldn't help much.
Disturbing but not dishonest, THE TIN DRUM is certainly like no other movie ever made: it mixes a note-perfect evocation of WWI, Weimar Republic and WWII Germany with a heavy streak of sexually-symbolic surrealism. There's also a twisted coming-of-age story in there, somewhere. But it all adds up to a movie that isn't quite the sum of its parts.
Based on Guenter Grass's monolithic and symbolically-saturated novel, THE TIN DRUM takes its time setting up the story of Oskar, a child of pre-WWII Germany who at a very early age takes fierce note of the unpleasantness and hypocrisy of the adult world. To protest all of that, he throws himself down the cellar steps and stops growing -- just like that. From then on it's Oskar against the world, in a sense... although the movie's main flaw is that seems to have less and less of an understanding of Oskar as it goes along.
Oskar is played by the dwarfish David Bennent, a terrifying-looking little man with eyes that seem centuries older than the rest of him. (See him in LEGEND [where I accidentally called him "William Bennent"] for another example of his malevolence.) He's never anywhere without a tin drum he bangs incessantly on (hence the title), and his stunted growth gives him the ability to shatter glass with a keening shriek. Both become ways he registers his disgust with and distrust for the world: when he finds his mother philandering, he jolts her and her lover out of bed with a cathedral-wrecking yell. And in the movie's best scene, he uses his drum to subvert the signals of a Nazi marching band and gets them to switch over to "The Blue Danube".
Danzig of the Thirties and Forties comes to life perfectly on the screen in this movie; in fact, the reproduction of the time and place is so convincing it's a little unnerving. We get a scene in a post office on Polish soil, under attack by German soldiers, that recreates the ugliness of the war with distressing vividness. The details of Oskar's neighborhood (including a Jewish toymaker and a gaunt, wraithlike figure who seems to live in the graveyard) are finely observed and stick in the memory.
But the center of the story -- the underpinning, I guess -- is never clear. The movie's a little too free with its cold-blooded whimsy. At one point, in apparent contrast to what he's done before, Oskar joins a midget troupe to entertain the Nazi soldiers at the front lines, but the movie never really makes it clear if he's doing this out of expediency -- or self-contempt, or out of loyalty to his friends in the troupe, etc. If the movie is trying some of the same tricks as the book -- throwing a whole fistful of emotions at us and seeing if they stick -- then it makes more sense, but only slightly. Except through artifical devices like the drum, the movie never achieves real coherence, and then it's a kind of forced intelligibility that hurts its apparent ultimate aims.
I mentioned that the film is off-putting, but not dishonest: a good deal of the middle stretch of the movie depicts Oskar becoming aware of his own sexuality, and fixating on a young girl who's come to work in his father's store. (There's also the suggestion, left openended, that he winds up fathering a boy through her.) As uncomfortable as the scenes are of Oskar and the girl (they have a *very* weird variety of foreplay that involves, I think, cane sugar), they make sense in context. But... what context is that? I kept asking myself, and came up empty.
So -- is it worth seeing? I guess so. THE TIN DRUM is not a bad movie, and certainly never a boring one, but not wholly intelligible or satisfying either. What a strange story.
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