A great movie, but for who?

Rating: 7/10 (7 February 2010)

When I say that "The White Ribbon" is a great movie, I mean, only, that it's a movie made by a great director. And when I refer to Michael Haneke as a great director, all I'm really saying is, the man knows what he's doing. He's no hack.
My problem – or, I should say, my issue – is with exactly that: what he's doing. If I seem ambivalent or undecided about this review, it's only because that's how I felt about the movie. It's a mystery/drama about a town on the Austrian countryside right before WWI. It has the appearance of a regular, idyllic town, but, some really bad things start happening. People start getting hurt, when no one else is around. It's clearly more than one person perpetrating these crimes, which start to resemble ritual punishment.
So it's a mystery. But since this is a Haneke film, we know the "mystery" is unimportant. It's about what the mystery reveals about the town. This is the same storytelling technique he used for "Cache," a movie that a lot of people spend a lot of time trying to figure out. I can't imagine why – the movie, like this one, offers no concrete solutions, only ambiguity, and since any definitive conclusions (about the plot) would draw too much from the viewers' imagination, and not enough from the film itself, such conclusions are rendered completely irrelevant to the film. It's sort of like the Philip Seymour Hoffman/Meryl Streep movie "Doubt."
Now, thematic conclusions – those are abounding. And since Haneke pushes the plot so far to the side they can come off a little heavy-handed. This is my primary issue (problem?) with the craft of "The White Ribbon." Whereas "Cache" focused mainly on two wonderful performances (from Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche) that lent the film a certain precision, "The White Ribbon" is about an entire town's worth of characters. Each is allotted less time, and therefore, fewer dimensions – and therefore, less precision, and morepredetermination. They come off as numbers in a thematic equation Haneke is calculating, or trying to.
The "trying to" is the part I'm back and forth on. I haven't mentioned how starkly beautiful the film is, thanks to the black and white cinematography and compositions of Christian Berger. It'll remind you of Bergmans like "Through a Glass Darkly," "Winter Light" or "Hour of the Wolf." The film is so visually arresting, if it was Silent, I might call it a triumph. Even so, there are ways Berger (or Haneke) use their camera that disturb me, and not, I don't think, in the way they mean to.
I'm sort of dancing around – I know. Let me talk about one thing that really struck me about Haneke's film: the way he depicts his "good" characters. There are a few of them. The story is narrated by the town's resident teacher, much older, trying to make sense of the events that shaped his personal history. The younger version is played by Christian Friedel, and he's seen as ugly, weak and completely ineffectual. It's not quite his fault (it's society's!), but there is some intended frustration caused us by the character's complete inability to alter the course of his life or his town's. Another character, a farmer, is perhaps the only one in the film with a rigid code of honor he apparently lives his life by. He's got a lazy eye. There's an extended close up on his face where the focal point is the bridge of his nose, and his left eye points to the left and his right eye points to the right and he comes off as practically inhuman. Is Haneke saying to live righteously in an authoritarian society you must be a freak, or abnormal? I don't know – all I know is, if I was the actor with the lazy eye, I might be insulted.
To call the film misanthropic would be overstating the point, I guess. It's about bad people. I haven't said much about what the movie's actually trying to say, because, after saying it, it seems almost pointless. "Religious suppression and societal demand for perfection are the seeds of fascism." There it is, more or less (read Ebert's review if you want a really meaningful dissection of the film's themes). It's the kind of thing you can sort of nod your head to, I mean; it makes enough sense within the confines of the movie. Is it an important statement on German/Austrian history or the beginnings of Nazism? I don't know enough about the history to really say.
No one loves a movie, or returns to it, for what it's saying. "Avatar" didn't gross two billion worldwide because of its metaphorical criticism of outsourced American capitalism (well, maybe in some places). It's because of the way it looked, and "The White Ribbon" will be embraced by cineastes for the same reason, I think. It's well-made. Like I said earlier, it looks beautiful. Is it a great movie? It looks like one.
SoI don't know. 7/10. I don't regret seeing it. It held my interest for the most part, if not rewarding it completely. How could it have, you ask me? I don't know. It's the right movie; it's the movie Haneke was trying to make. But I don't think I'd watch it again.