Uprising
DIRECTOR: Jon Avnet
CAST:
Hank Azaria, David Schwimmer, Leelee Sobieski, Stephen Moyer,
Donald Sutherland, Jon Voight, Cary Elwes
REVIEW:
In October 1940, a little over a year after the Nazi conquest of Poland, the Warsaw Jews were forced into the severely overcrowded Warsaw Ghetto. 50,000 per year died of starvation and disease, but this was not enough to suit SS Chief Heinrich Himmler, who ordered in 1943 that the Warsaw Ghetto be destroyed and the 450,000 inhabitants be deported to the gas chambers of Treblinka. His goal was to have Warsaw “Jew free” by April 20, Hitler’s birthday. On April 19, the first day of the Jewish holiday of Passover, 2,000 Waffen-SS soldiers marched into the ghetto to round up the remaining Jews. To their shock and the shock of the world, the Jews did the last thing anyone expected, least of all the Nazis....they fought back. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising raged for twenty-eight days as poorly armed Jewish rebels battled with trained, heavily armed SS troops for every street and every house. Ultimately the uprising was defeated, with most of the Jewish fighters killed in the battle or rounded up and shipped to Treblinka, but approximately one-hundred escaped into the forests outside of Warsaw, where some of them managed to elude both SS squads and anti-Semitic Poles and served as technical advisors for this television miniseries. It is a heroic and inspiring story, but unfortunately, while not without its merits, Uprising is a well-intentioned production which largely fails to do this story the justice it deserves.
The central characters of this miniseries are the leading figures of the uprising, the determined Mordechai Anielewicz (Hank Azaria), Yitzhak Zuckerman (David Schwimmer), Simha “Kazik” Rotem (Stephen Moyer), and Tosia Altman (Leelee Sobieski). All are defiant Jews who do not accept Nazi domination, especially when their ultimate intentions begin to become clear. Anielewicz pleads for support from Adam Czerniakow (Donald Sutherland), the Nazi-appointed head of the Jewish Council, whose only purpose is to carry out the Nazis’ orders, but the well-meaning Czerniakow is too passive and submissive to actively give aid, believing that an uprising would be doomed to failure and would only lead to harsher conditions for the rest of the Warsaw Jews. For a time, Anielewicz, Zuckerman, and their followers merely survive in the Warsaw Ghetto, enduring food shortages and arbitrary Nazi cruelty, but when Heinrich Himmler visits the ghetto and orders more deportations, they realize that the decisive moment has arrived when their choices have come down to either rebellion or death.
Uprising has a number of flaws, but it is generally not the acting. The lead performances are actually quite good; Hank Azaria and David Schwimmer, both Jewish and primarily known for comedic roles, take full advantage of their opportunity to prove beyond any doubt that they have serious dramatic acting ability, bringing real conviction and a fiery determination to their characters. Leelee Sobieski is just as good as Tosia, the Jewish girl whose fair complexion allows her to slip in and out of the ghetto and mingle with the Gentile Polish population without standing out. Sobieski creates an effective strong female character who can hold her own along with the men in a dangerous situation, and was nominated for a Golden Globe. Adam Czerniakow could have come across as a wishy-washy coward, but Donald Sutherland gives him depth and complexity, portraying him as a timid but kind man who truly wants to do the right thing, but naively imagines that he can gain better treatment for his fellow Jews by cooperating with the Nazis instead of fighting them. One of the most impressive performances, however, comes from Stephen Moyer as Kazik, the fiery young Jewish fighter who survived the uprising and the war and went on to write his memoirs and serve as a technical advisor for this production. Moyer, like Azaria, Schwimmer, and Sobieski, brings a real sense of defiance and passion to his role.
Unfortunately, while the Jewish rebels are well-played, the German characters are not given nearly as much depth. The only two really significant ones are Dr. Fritz Hippler (Cary Elwes), Nazi propagandist and director of Der Ewige Jude (The Eternal Jew), comparing Jews to rats as filthy parasites infesting civilized nations, and SS General Jürgen Stroop (Jon Voight), who is sent by Himmler to crush the uprising and destroy the Ghetto. Both are entirely one-dimensional; Elwes’ only character trait is his smug little half-smile as he forces Jews to play out parts in his farcical “documentary”, and Voight as Stroop comes across with virtually no personality whatsoever. It is beyond me why Voight, whom I usually like as an actor, won an Emmy for this role; Azaria or Schwimmer would have been far more deserving, and even Elwes is marginally better. Voight as Stroop seems oddly stiff and bland, and in my opinion at least appears to be an example of what critics sometimes call “picking up a paycheck”, a perfectly capable actor sleepwalking through a role without even trying. It isn't that Voight is "bad", per se, simply that there is nothing distinctive or memorable about his performance. In this cast made up mostly of relative unknowns and modest celebrities, the presence of a major star like Voight is a little distracting anyway; a German actor unknown to American audiences probably would have been more effective. Joachim Hansen was a better Stroop just in his couple of minutes of screentime in The Eagle Has Landed.
The biggest problem with Uprising is that it doesn’t make as powerful a connection as it should. The excellent drama The Pianist, which also briefly portrayed the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, contained genuinely shocking and unexpected depictions of casual Nazi brutality, but here similar scenes feel forced, exaggerated, and unrealistic, as though the filmmakers were trying too hard to shock us. The Pianist, War and Remembrance, and Schindler’s List were so effective because they presented the Holocaust in a methodical, un-hyped, almost documentary style. Here the scenes of cruelty don’t feel real, they feel like the filmmakers have gone down a list of every nasty thing they could think of for the Nazis to do just to make things more dramatic. The Warsaw Ghetto doesn’t seem nearly crowded enough, and the characters don’t look appropriately malnourished; again, The Pianist gives a much more realistic feel, and this is one of the areas in which Uprising has too much of a made-for-tv appearance. The camerawork is often fast-cutting and reminiscent of an MTV music video, inappropriate for this subject and resulting in a fragmented feel. The battle scenes are generally well-done and do highlight the bravery and tenacity of the lightly armed Jewish civilians against the experienced Waffen-SS troops, but the weakness of many other aspects undermines the overall effect. Also, as good as they are, when I read more about the historical characters I realized that Azaria and Schwimmer are miscast. Azaria is twenty years older than the real Anielewicz, and Schwimmer is much too Jewish-looking for the real Zuckerman, who used his Gentile appearance to blend in with Poles in his trips outside of the Ghetto to gather supplies.
Director Jon Avnet claimed that he wanted to make Uprising because he was tired of seeing Holocaust movies where the Jews are portrayed as helpless victims going meekly to their fate, and wished to highlight the heroic resistance of many. I have no doubt that his intentions were sound, but it is unfortunate that he only partially succeeded in doing justice to their story. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising is certainly a very important event, and Uprising deserves credit for bringing it to the attention of a larger audience, but the tale of the Warsaw Jewish fighters is worthy of better. The over-dramatization, the weakness of the German portrayals, and the lack of the grittier, starker depictions in the other films mentioned above undercuts Uprising’s success and results in an only sporadically effective film with not nearly as much emotional impact as it should have.
