An awkwardly saccharine Holocaust love story
Film4, 10.50pm ★★★★★
AThe Tattooist of Auschwitz
s a novel,
(Sky Atlantic) was always awkward to categorise. One major book chain is currently selling it in the “Scorching Holiday Reads!” section, which is one way to describe a romance set in a concentration camp.
Now this work of historical fiction is a six-part TV drama, and the same situation arises. The scenes of suffering within Auschwitz-birkenau are so sickening that it feels plain uncomfortable to use it as the setting for a love story, even if that story is based on the recollections of a real Holocaust survivor, Lale Sokolov.
Selected to tattoo serial numbers on fellow Jews as they enter the camp, Slovakian Lale meets a young woman named Gita and instantly falls in love. As they can spend only snatched moments together, the drama focuses more generally on Lale’s experiences, including a co-dependent relationship with a callous Nazi guard (Jonas Nay). He must do what he needs to survive. “In this hell we are in, we are only given two choices: the bad one or the worse one,” another prisoner tells him.
The degradation and dehumanisation of the prisoners is familiar from countless dramas and documentaries but no less terrible for that. One man, about to be hanged,
laughs with a sort of relief: death will bring him freedom. He has no reason to live after his pregnant wife was sent to the gas chamber.
The story is told in flashback by the elderly Lale, dictating to Heather Morris, a hospital worker who offers to write his memoir. Lale is played by the great Harvey Keitel, but it’s when we go back to the war that the main casting problem becomes apparent.
Jonah Hauer-king plays the young Lale, and he doesn’t have the depth that the role demands. He recently played the prince in Disney’s The Little Mermaid, and that suited him better. Polish actress Anna Próchniak does her best with the thin character of Gita. As the saccharine Heather, Melanie Lynskey’s only job is to look tearful at regular intervals when the story cuts back to the present day.
As to the accuracy of the story: when the novel came out, various aspects of it were contested by the Auschwitz Memorial Research Centre, including Lale saving Gita’s life by treating her with penicillin when she contracted typhus (penicillin would have been impossible to get in 1943, the centre said). Who knows if the sex scene really happened. None of that affected the book’s popularity, with several million copies sold. But there are far better screen depictions of the Holocaust.
Tom Wolfe novels may sing on the page, but anyone who has seen the duff 1990 film adaptation of The Bonfire of the Vanities will know that recreating the magic on screen is tricky. Now Netflix has turned A Man in Full, Wolfe’s second novel, into a six-part drama series. It’s not a disaster, but I didn’t fall in love with it.
It starts with Jeff Daniels in a voice-over that sets the tone: “A person needs to live with vigour, otherwise what’s the point? End of the day, a man’s gotta shake his balls.” Daniels’ character is Charlie Croker, a blustering Atlanta business mogul with so much money that he can hire Shania Twain for his 60th birthday party (yes, actual Shania makes a cameo). Unfortunately, Croker has some cash-flow issues: he’s over a billion dollars in debt.
The first episode establishes this quickly. It also introduces us to other players in a manner that works better in the novel where the characters can stretch their legs. There is Raymond Peepgrass (Ozark’s Tom Pelphrey), an odd little man from the bank; Roger White (British actor Aml Ameen), Croker’s legal counsel and a man whose propriety is established by the fact that he sings Mary Poppins songs with his daughter over breakfast; and a mayor (The Good Place’s William Jackson Harper) intent on bringing down a political rival by exposing his past sexual-assault history. Oh, and Lucy Liu is here, inexplicably.
David E Kelley, who is known for glossy, female-centric fare such as Ally Mcbeal and Big Little Lies, aims for something tougher here, but struggles with the tone. The pomposity of the characters and the language lends itself to the absurd – “Like we talked about,” Croker instructs his lawyer on how to negotiate in a meeting, “f--- ’em up the a--, in the head, in the eye and in the mouth” – but Kelley doesn’t lean into this. Where Wolfe was adept at exploring societal, political and racial issues with a satirical eye, Kelley doesn’t have the same talents.
There are hints of Succession – family troubles, money, Croker yelling about “the Boeing” – but this is nowhere near the same league. You wait for the drama to ramp up, but it never quite does.
The Tattooist of Auschwitz ★★ A Man in Full ★★
Rose Glass’s directorial debut is a terrific, terrifying psychological horror set in Scarborough, where nurse Maud (The Rings of Power’s Morfydd Clark) has been assigned a new patient. Her early career was blighted by trauma, and she’s now found religion – or, more accurately, a creepy spin on it. Glass’s superb new film, Love Lies Bleeding, is in cinemas now.