Movie Review: Foxtrot

Foxtrot **** / *****

Directed by: Samuel Maoz.

Written by: Samuel Maoz.

Starring: Lior Ashkenazi (Michael Feldmann), Sarah Adler (Daphna Feldmann), Yonaton Shiray (Jonathan), Yehuda Almagor (Avigdor - Michael's Brother).

 

Foxtrot opens with a knock on the door – on the other side are two military men there to tell Michael (Lior Ashkenazi) that his son has been killed doing his military service. Michael is a successful architect in Israel – a military veteran himself – and yet once he gets the news, he seems to walk through the rest of the first act of the movie in a daze – paralyzed by indecision and fear, unable to figure out just what the hell to do next. Act 1 ends in a shock, and then in act II, the tone of the movie shifts. We are now with Michael’s son Jonathan (Yonaton Shiray) and his unit, who have been assigned a remote roadblock. Not much happens there, there aren’t many cars coming by, and the men are bored. This section is surreal, and more than a little bit funny, as these bored young men cannot quite figure out what they’re doing, or how things ended up so crooked. It’s funny right up to the point when it isn’t anymore.

 

Foxtrot is the second film by Samuel Maoz – coming 8 years after his debut, Lebanon, which was based on his own experiences inside a tank in that war in 1982. In many ways, Foxtrot is a companion piece to Lebanon – Michael is a veteran of the same war, and also haunted by it. He doesn’t suffer from PTSD in the way we would normally expect him to – but he is clearly not being completely up front with everything that happened, and he hasn’t dealt with it. He’s tried instead to become successful, and in doing so, thinks that will just excuse whatever happened in the past – and that if he just doesn’t talk about it, no one will know. He’s wrong.

 

Foxtrot is a more ambitious and better film than his debut – which others liked more than I did (I thought it was fine, but hardly great). Here, Maoz mixes tone very well – the first act is deep and dark, edging, only into its final minutes, into something slightly more absurd. The second act is surreal – a kind of waking dream that turns into a nightmare, complete with dancing, and absurd comedy. Its turn towards tragedy is the mirror image of the one at the end of act one. Maoz isn’t cheating here – but he’s going for something larger. This messed up Israeli family of men incapable of expressing themselves is something larger.

 

The third act of the film is more melancholy than the first two. You can probably guess where the movie is headed in terms of its plot, but it goes there with sensitivity and compassion. The final act is quieter than the first two, and more perhaps more thoughtful – maybe even optimistic, despite the price everyone has paid by that point. It’s really in this act that having an actor like Ashkenazi helps the most, as he’s able to bring a lighter touch to keep this thing from becoming depressing. This is a movie about several generations in Israel – from Holocaust survivors, to modern day Israel soldiers, all of whom are struggling in their own way. The film takes chances, and zigzags throughout – so even if you sense where the plot is going, it’s still fascinating to see it get there. This is a fascinating, bold, funny, tragic movie – and it’s amazing just how Maoz is able to make all those elements cohere together, so that the whole is even better than the sum of its parts.

Movie Review: Lebanon

Lebanon ***
Directed By: Samuel Maoz.
Written By: Samuel Maoz.
Starring: Reymond Amsalem (Assna), Oshri Cohen (Herzel), Yoav Donat (Shmulik), Michael Moshonov (Yigal), Zohar Shtrauss (Gamil), Itay Tiran (Asi).

Watching Samuel Maoz Lebanon, I found it impossible not to think of Wolfgang Peterson’s Das Boot. That 1982 masterpiece was a war movie that took place almost entirely aboard a German U boat during WWII, and Peterson made the most of the claustrophobic atmosphere. Maoz film is about a different war, in a different decade in a different part of the world, but it reminded me of that film. Aside from the opening and closing shots of the movie, Lebanon takes place entirely inside an Israeli tank during the 1982 war with Lebanon. We only see the country the way the men in the tank see it – through their gun sights.

The movie begins when the new gunner assigned to the tank opens the hatch and drops in. He is joining a trio of men – an unsure commander officer, the constantly bitching loader who like Rodney Dangerfield feels he never gets any respect, and a driver who is just trying to keep the peace and survive his tour. For most of the movie, it is just these four men in the tank. Occasionally, the hatch opens and their commanding officer comes in to yell at them, or to drop in the body of a fallen solider before it can be airlifted out, or to store a prisoner, etc.

The movie is episodic in nature. There are long stretches of calmness, where the men just talk and bitch at each other, followed by intense war sequences where the gunner seems constantly frozen – he is finding out that shooting at people is a hell of a lot harder than shooting at barrels – and this doesn’t go away even after his inaction results in one of the men on the outside being killed. He finds he can only shoot with his eyes closed.

Lebanon must have been an extremely difficult movie for Maoz to make from a technical standpoint. After all, how can you make the interior of a dank, dark tank offset by shots through a gun sight cinematic enough to keep the audience’s attention? But somehow Maoz succeeds. The movie is a triumph of direction and the movie is not nearly as static or stagy than you expect it to be.

If there is a problem with the movie it’s that the characters never really rise above the level of clichés. Maoz, who also wrote the screenplay, establishes their basic outline early in the film, and they never really progress from there. On one hand, this is effective, because after all how much soul searching can you realistically expect during the numerous firefights in the film. On another, since the characters in the tank remain cookie cutters, and everyone outside not even that, it becomes somewhat hard to truly care about their fate.

Any movie about a war involving Israel is undoubtedly going to be political, but Maoz never beats you over the head with his message – in fact you never really get the sense that he has a message at all. He has the gunner be a sympathetic guy – a man who finds it hard to kill others, and in particular gets emotional when his firing could mean the loss of innocent lives. Yet the commander who drops in on them occasionally is much more of a hard liner – a man who says that this is war, and in war people die. And when we see members under his command die, it is hard not to see it from his point of view – even if at times, it is clear that what the Israelis are doing could constitute a war crime if anyone looked into that closely.

Lebanon is a fascinating movie – one that is political, but not overtly so, but rather one that simply wants to give the audience an idea of what it must be like to fight a war in a tank. There is not right or wrong, you do what you do to survive. On that level, the movie works.