The Tin Drum (Die Blechtrommel) (1979)

 

Bliktrommen

“The Tin Drum” (Die Blechtrommel) is a famous novel by Günther Grass and the movie adaption with the same name won lots of prices including the Palme d’Or and the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language movie and we are talking 1979 here, one of the great years of cinema. Yet, “The Tin Drum” is not my jam. As usual I am too stupid to get the point and the characters are generally too unlikable and annoying for me to really care about them. Considering how celebrated this movie is, I am obviously missing something.

Our narrator, Oskar (David Bennent), starts out telling us about his odd family. His mother, Agnes (Angela Winkler), is married to Alfred Matzerath (Mario Adorf), a Gdansk, or Danzig, chef, but has a long standing affair with her cousin Jan Bronski (Daniel Olbrychski). Which of them is Oskar’s father is uncertain, all four live together in what appears to be blissful ignorance.

In 1927 when Oskar is 3 he decides to stop growing, thinking that adult life is stupid. He also clings on to his tin drum as a child to his ipad and discovers a rare skill for blowing up glass with his scream. Yeah…

Oskar remains a three-year old boy with a drum for most of the movie and as time goes by, this becomes stranger and stranger. He witnesses the rise of the Nazis, the death of his mother by eating fish, and the outbreak of war. Throughout, Oskar seems to be an agent of misfortune that brings about bad things for those around him. Whether it is some perverse thirst for revenge or childish ignorance is hard to say, but what I see is a massively annoying boy who consistently is in the wrong place. His screams are horrible, his voice jarring and those eyes, Jesus!

The movie, and the freakishness, reach a crescendo during the war as Oskar becomes a young man in a boy’s body and starts to explore his sexuality. My wife watched this part with me and asked me to please stop watching this. I could only agree, this gave me the shivers.

There is a point to having this boy watching the craziness of the world and commenting on it, but I am quite certain I am not getting it. This could be something about naivety against the harshness of life, or an indictment of adult life, but it does not come through like that. We all know that Nazism was horrible, Holocaust terrible, that regular people got caught up in it for better or worse, but having this child as a narrator blurs rather than accentuate all this. The poignancy becomes grotesque and the evil, absurd. Why this choice is just beyond me. Worst of all, the Oskar child completely steals the focus and I as a viewer is busy being annoyed with him rather than the events he is talking about. Strange choice indeed.

On the plus side, the setting in German controlled Gdansk, between Germans and Polish was interesting. I cannot recall ever watching a movie on that location in that period before. Some of the scenes were shot on location and I have to admit that Gdansk looked a lot more interesting than in my own visits to this city.

Unfortunately, I cannot think of much else that I liked about the movie. I felt it just dragged on and could not wait for it to finish. That cannot be a good thing.

Clearly, I got it all wrong as I did not see the brilliance of this movie, so feel free to enlighten me.

Only recommended for masochists who like to torment their ears, eyes and sensibilities about children and sexuality.