MovieChat Forums > The Grey Zone (2001) Discussion > David Arquette's Performance

David Arquette's Performance

posted 20 years ago by wardicus
8 replies | jump to latest

i thought it was a great movie... especially for not being a big budget film. even though the setting is a nazi camp during the holocaust i still don't believe you can compare it to Schinler's List. they have entirely two different stories, perspectives, views and ideas. but the thing that really stuck out was david arquette's performace.

when i rented the tape i was like "oh great, david arquette is going to make the holocaust a big joke", well, turns out he shocked (yes, shocked) me in how power his performance was.

well, thats all i had to comment on - what do you ya'll think?

[–] 20 years ago

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[–] Chodewick 20 years ago

i agree. Who would've thought he was a powerhouse of emotions. I actually recently saw him in "Never Die Alone" and he was great in that too. I guess doing movies like "See Spot Run" doesn't taint your acting ability.

[–] 20 years ago

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[–] 20 years ago

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[–] chimpanzee72 20 years ago

I didn't even realize it was him until half way through the film

[–] Cannonis 20 years ago

Arquette's performance was the absolute best thing about the entire production. Not only that, but he did a damn good job. Unfortunately, the rest of it was inexcusable tripe. Nelson's judgement leaves much to be desired. "The Grey Zone", though relevant to Nyiszli, is better known through Primo Levi in his account of survival in auschwitz.
It's really disappointing that Nelson had to take Nyiszli's horror, dumb it down for Hollywood attention spans, and then throw in his own stage-crap-rewriting to make a buck.
1)The girl who survived the gas was shot a few hours after her revival.
2)Nazis would not make deals with what they considered to be "expendable elements".
3)The fiction of the powder in the women's barracks, and the fictional way in which the nazis handled it was crap. The barracks would have been liquidated and the contraband found afterward.

and, most importantly,
4)There was far to much hope implicite in the faces, voices, words, and actions of every actor(tress)/Jewish character.....Except for Arquette.

Arquette did an excellent job. It'd be nice to see him get/take the chance to do as well in the future; in a movie more worthwhile. It would also be nice never to see Nelson's name again.
The actions of the Sondarkommando cannot be rightfully judged by anyone who was not there.
The action of making a name for oneself AND a profit by fictionalizing their account is condemnable.

[–] dorylus 20 years ago

I did not think Arquette did that well, one or two times I thought he was going to break out laughing. I never believed him.

[–] mr_interlocutor 19 years ago

The writer has a chutspa (commendable only in English, despicable in Yiddish) to take the facts of the Holocaust, which are in almost every case much better studied as they are, and twist them into "drama" and "cinema", artistic license or no. To what end? The movie is neither educational nor factual -- indeed, it will doubtless eventually contribute to the efforts of deniers by muddling certain facts, but presenting them all in vintage "You Were There" style. Tim Blake Nelson may feel that he has raised important ethical questions, but I am loathe to extrapolate everyday morals from the unique circumstances of the gas chamber anteroom.

Nor do I buy it as art -- if it's the author's attempt to approach the sublime or profound, he does it only through wrongheaded simplification and unintentional profanation. He lifts the title of the chapter covering the Sonderkommando in Levi's "The Drowned and the Saved" in order to moralize upon the very happenings that Levi himself is loathe to judge! He very generously provides us with a movie of the gassings and cremations, since none exists -- but Claude Lanzmann's approach is infinitely more intelligent, sensitive, and compassionate. See http://www.egs.edu/faculty/lanzmann/lanzmann-sobibor-2002.html on why Lanzmann never uses archival footage, and photographs only rarely, in his documentary work.

I thought Spielberg had plumbed the depths of "Shoah-business" with the gas chamber scene in "Schindler's List", in which he whets the audience's appetite and then disappoints it by running actual water through the shower heads instead of cyanide. But "The Grey Zone" is not merely the obscene imaginings of a bored bourgeois, it is Nelson's Xbox/Playstation II reworking of the annihilation of European Jewry, it is the very destruction of the Holocaust as a unique historical event!

I remain indifferent to Arquette's performance, but Harvey Keitel, in channeling the low Dutch comic accent of Weber and Fields for his portrayal of Muhsfeldt, does an outstanding job of distilling the thoughtlessness that drives this film.