Survivor one thing left to do win movie#
Similarly, Peter Sarsgaard's newspaper reporter and photographer Emory Anderson at first seems like one of the most boring of all movie devices, the interviewer or witness that the main character tells their story to. Aaron Burr probably dropped a load there." The sequence is classic Levinson, filled, like the rest of the movie, with instantly quotable lines, as when Goldman exits an outhouse in the forest and grouses, "There's stuff in there from the Revolutionary War. The upshot is a lovely film-within-a-film wherein a Black man, a Puerto Rican, and two Jews go upstate and seem to spend as much time contemplating their relative status within WASP-run America as they do working on Harry's hooks, combinations, and footwork. Goldman, whose birth name is Israel, ends up offering Harry two days of training so that he won't be completely destroyed in the ring. John Leguizamo's Pepe and Paul Bates' Louis Barclay are introduced as two of Harry's trainers, and Danny DeVito at first fills a similar role as one of Marciano's trainers, Charlie Goldman, but any assumption that they're mainly here to cheer the hero on and train him up is intriguingly subverted by how "The Survivor" treats them as a way to discuss the cold-blooded and self-serving arbitrariness of hatred. When Harry shows up looking for help in finding his wife, whose disappearance obsesses him, you assume the film is positioning a love story wherein a man who is dead inside comes back to life, but that's not how it plays out.
Vicky Krieps plays Miriam Wofsoniker, who works at an agency that tries to help survivors find loved ones who vanished during the war but that they believe may still be alive. And none of their characters quite end up being the purely functional cardboard cutouts you initially assume they'll be. Gillmer's script gives Harry lots of opportunities to interact with the supporting ensemble, which is composed exclusively of pros who are so good at what they do you're always happy to see them. "The Survivor," surprisingly and often with unexpected buoyancy, is another work in this vein, always choosing character and dialogue over the mandate to constantly drive the plot forward to the next big event. Levinson burst into Hollywood with the low-budget drama " Diner" and never entirely departed from the "a bunch of guys hanging out and talking" impulse, whether in the capitalism satire " Tin Men," the family memoir " Avalon," or the gangster picture " Bugsy," starring Warren Beatty as a brutal Jewish gangster who founded Las Vegas. The bulk of the movie is set in the "present"-which is 1949, when Harry trained to fight heavyweight champion Rocky Marciano ( Anthony Molinari), who was so fearsome that one opponent described being in the ring with him as trying to fight an airplane propeller.īut while the above makes "The Survivor" sound like a sports movie with an element of Holocaust lament (and it definitely is that), what Levinson and screenwriter Justine Juel Gillmer have concocted is a psychological drama whose first inclination is to always think about what events felt like, and what, in a larger sense, they meant, rather than concentrating exclusively on what's next. Ordinarily the punishment for such an act would have been death, but Schnieder saw Harry as a way to make some money and stand out from the other officers thus a parasitic relationship born. Haft's champion back then was a Nazi officer named Dietrich Schneider ( Billy Magnussen), who got the bright idea of managing Harry after he saw him beat another officer for threatening violence against another inmate. The biographical drama then proceeds to surprise its audience, not with plot twists-we're told at the outset what the character's issues are, and have a pretty good idea of where the story is going to end up-but with how it keeps finding little ways to complicate and deepen every relationship and moment.īen Foster stars as Harry Haft, who made it through the Holocaust by fighting fellow inmates to the death in matches staged for the delectation of the camp's Nazi officers, who bet on the outcome. Like its lead character, and the actor who plays him, Barry Levinson's "The Survivor" initially presents as familiar and comprehensible.
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