![]() ![]() Harry is horrified to learn that these are last-man-standing bouts in which the loser will be executed. Schneider made a project of him, feeding the emaciated man (that’s real, shocking weight loss on Foster, no Marvel CGI) and staging fights as a diversion for other officers. Only Miriam, an aid worker played with soft-spoken empathy by Vicky Krieps, forgives his impatience, and over time she befriends him.)įlashbacks in high-contrast black-and-white show us the story Harry decides to tell, and then some: When he came violently to the rescue of his friend Jean (Laurent Papot) in the camps, pummeling a guard who threatened him, Harry attracted the notice of an officer named Schneider (Billy Magnussen). (That belief causes problems with local organizations working to connect refugees, whose employees don’t appreciate his constant hounding. He’s been looking for her ever since, and though he knows everyone else he loved is dead, his heart tells him she’s still out there, somewhere. “Nobody wants to hear the truth about he camps,” he says Harry’s brother Peretz (Saro Emirze) is even more insistent, reminding him that his story in particular should never be told.īut when a reporter (Peter Sarsgaard) persists, Harry decides that getting his name in the papers is his only hope - not to advance his career, but to attract the notice of Leah (Dar Zuzovsky), the girl he loved before the war separated them. He’s touted ringside as “the pride of Poland and the survivor of Auschwitz!,” a tag that naturally raises questions from the press, most of which he dodges. We meet Foster’s Harry Haft (born Hertzko Haft) after the war, as he’s struggling to get a boxing career going in America. ![]() Venue: Toronto Film Festival (Gala Presentations)Ĭast: Ben Foster, Vicky Krieps, Billy Magnussen, Peter Sarsgaard, Dar Zuzovsky, John Leguizamo, Danny DeVito, Saro Emirze Though the distinction between big- and small-screen work (where Levinson has a fruitful HBO collaboration) grows increasingly irrelevant, this is probably the best film the director has made for cinemas in the nearly quarter-century since Wag the Dog. Playing the real-life boxer Harry Haft, whose story was told in a book by his son Alan, Ben Foster goes through more than one striking transformation here, changing body and soul while neither shying away from nor overdramatizing the uglier aspects of the man’s life.Īn unconventionally structured screenplay by Justine Juel Gillmer downplays some of the plot elements a more commercial film would exploit, but nevertheless delivers enough emotional resolution to satisfy mainstream audiences. A Holocaust film that not only acknowledges moral ambiguity but is completely built around it, Barry Levinson’s The Survivor is the story of a Jew who, in order not to be killed himself, had to beat other Jews to death for the amusement of German officers. ![]()
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