HBO launches its movie, The Survivor, with a lavish premiere just in time for Holocaust Remembrance Day. Barry Levinson’s latest stars Ben Foster as boxer Harry Haft, Auschwitz survivor and refugee.
As Auschwitz stories go, Harry Haft’s exceeds the norm. Grasping his world in the camps and beyond in Brooklyn, Ben Foster, in the performance of the year, gets Haft --as boxer and as nightmare-ridden refugee-- in Barry Levinson’s adaptation of son Alan Haft’s book, The Survivor. Told in two-time frames, The Survivor pares down Haft’s experience: the Holocaust period in black & white when he is made to entertain the Nazis using his skill as a boxer. Nazi officer Dietrich Schneider puts him in the ring fighting fellow prisoners to their death. If you thought Billy Magnussen was “bad” in the recent James Bond movie, here he brings his super-bad game, “owning Haft,” as it were. In color, survivor Haft fights in the rings of Coney Island, fighting even Rocky Marciano, with one goal shaping his American existence. That is, to find Leah (Dar Zuzovsky), his love from before the war.
Picture Raging Bull meets The Pawnbroker. Imagine the violence, the searing impression of the blood oozing out of the fighters—with Haft so gaunt, so spent, you cannot even think of his having body fluids in his vividly depicted post-war visions, triggered even on his honeymoon when he marries Miriam, Vicky Krieps in a tender role. They go on as survivors do, having three kids, managing the past as best they can—singing “God Bless America” in Yiddish.
Then you must imagine the state-of-the-art spread at the party: filet mignon, meatballs the size of fists, a vision of New World splendor with everyone still processing the past. Alan Haft milled through the crowd—Laura Prepon, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Tovah Feldshuh, Oren Moverman, among many others-- showing covers of his dad in vintage boxing magazines. He let us know that Harry had actually survived six camps, and that some of the relatives refused to attend the premiere because of their own memories of his abuse as he struggled with—what we now call PTSD. When asked why the screenwriter, Australian Justine Juel Gillmer, was chosen over a Jewish writer, producer Scott Pardo said that only she of all the men they interviewed got the love story at the film’s center. “We did not want only Raging Bull,” he said.
The hope is that this film will have the “Schindler” effect, that it will raise the consciousness of Jews and gentiles alike to deter acts of dehumanization, and to respect those who seek safer places. Then again, it’s a very cool boxing movie. Then again, it’s a romance.
Barry Levinson said he took on this project, remembering when he was a boy, his grandmother’s brother showed up one day. Staying with them on the couch, he often had nightmares waking the family. Deeply impressed, Levinson could wrap his mind around such a character. Preparing, Levinson took his cast to Auschwitz for a look at the infamous camp. Ben Foster vowed to take his children there. For his own preparation, he eschewed the technology that could have changed his physicality; wanting to be real, Foster lost and gained 60 pounds: “This film is so important to me.”
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