Michael Haneke’s “The White Ribbon” has won already won many awards, including the grand prize at the Cannes Film Festival and the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film. And it’s nominated for an Academy Award. On the positive side, Haneke is definitely exploring big ideas: that children exposed to emotional and physical abuse, to humiliation and betrayal, to anger and hate, to a rigid and unloving brand of Protestantism will develop into eager followers of Hitler, a future that includes the Holocaust. On the negative side, this movie is ploddingly slow, the images dark and forbidding and the view of humanity is that we are awful creatures, easily persuaded to do dastardly things. So why would be want to spend so much time with these unpleasant people?
The narrator of this chilling tale, filmed in stark black and white, is the local schoolteacher, who recounts the story as an older man. Mysterious and disturbing things have been happening in a small German town just before the outbreak of World War I: a death of a peasant, children beaten and mistreated, the serious wounding of the town’s arrogant doctor, a burning barn. The white ribbon turns out to be a tool of shame. The minister of the town ties one to the arm of his oldest son and daughter, a public reminder that they have failed to uphold his standards of purity. Yet the more he and others tighten their control over the children, the worse the unsolved crimes become. “The White Ribbon” might be an artful examination of the impact of cruelty on the younger generation, but at 2 ½ hours in length, it’s a difficult journey to take. Subtitles. 2/5/10
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