A beautiful, long, troubling, and dry experience, Germany a generation before the Nazis

Rating: 7/10 (10 January 2011)

The White Ribbon (2009)
A brave, intense, complex, nuanced movie. It's got an edge of Ingmar Bergman to the quiet, rural, psychological edge to it, but it's also a big movie with lots of characters and a social theme fitting, somehow for German culture, or so it seems from here, New York.
There are issues here that are daring for any movie--child molesting, patriarchy run wild--but it is put so thoroughly in the context of the 19th Century these themes are weirdly shocking. That proves if nothing else the persuasiveness of the movie and its mise-en-scene.
Another brave aspect to the whole enterprise is the filming, in tack sharp black and white. This isn't the shadowy, silky, dramatic black and white of classic Hollywood of the 1940s, or of film noir, but a more precise and technically clean monochrome. Shadows are dark but with great detail. Highlights sparkle without washing out. It's a thrill to watch, and it gives every scene a documentary clarity and beauty that's bracing. And in keeping with the film's contents.
There no question at all that many people will find this slow, obtuse, overly detailed, and even banal between all the short sensational moments. And the narrator might be wearing more than the voice of a reminiscing old man. But if it does click for you (and you'll know in ten minutes, for the pace and flavor does not change, beginning to end), you'll find a very delicate, razor sharp sensibility that is fresh, and refreshing. I can't say I loved the movie as a narrative experience--as a story, as a long two hours of immersion. But I did love aspects of it without reserve. This alone makes it worth watching at least part of. That's kind of a condemning suggesting, to watch half of a movie, but once you start you'll see what I mean.
And it isn't giving anything away to say that the movie doesn't resolve everything by the end. All the loose ends remain loose ends, which is wonderfully disarming as much as it is unsatisfying, both good feelings, and rare ones. The acting is intensely serious, the sets and costumes have authority, and the tenor can't be anything but legitimate for the times, just before WWI.