Forced March Reviews

Despite capable performances and good direction by Rick King (HARD CHOICES), this behind-the-scenes drama suffers from an excess of thematic baggage in its attempts to come to grips with the Holocaust's meaning to its victims and their descendants. The film stars Chris Sarandon as Ben Kline, a Jew of Hungarian descent who is the star of a hit TV series. Ben's father, Richard (Josef Sommer), is a Holocaust survivor who has always refused to speak of his experiences and, especially, of the suffering of Ben's mother, a Catholic who was persecuted and died while Ben was still an infant. Ben has always been especially troubled by his father's silence, and also by the question of why his father and other victims didn't fight back against their own slaughter by the Nazis. Wanting to understand the Holocaust on his own terms, and over his father's protests, Ben quits his series to star in a low-budget docu-drama about Hungarian Jewish poet Miklos Radnoti, who was murdered by the Nazis as the war in Europe was ending. While the director of the film, Walter Hardy (John Seitz), is grateful to Ben--whose agreement to star as Radnoti has helped Hardy raise the production money--he is nonetheless a tyrant on the set, clashing sharply and frequently with Ben over the portrayal of his character. Hardy insists on sticking strictly to the historical record, according to which Radnoti kept out of trouble, even as Jews were being arrested in the street in front of his apartment building to be carted off to death camps, expressing his anguish and anger only in his poetry. Ben, meanwhile, leans towards portraying Radnoti in conventionally heroic, though historically inaccurate, terms. Radnoti's story, as related by the film-within-a-film, runs thus: Radnoti was imprisoned in a forced-labor camp, but freed when his publisher mounted a petition drive to have him released. Despite that support and the conversion of Radnoti and his wife to Catholicism, he was afterwards still forced to do periodic stints in labor camps, a form of civilian draft, to aid the Nazi war effort. The last of these stints, in Yugoslavia, occurred as the defeat of the Nazis was imminent. In the face of the Allied advance, Radnoti's camp was abandoned and the prisoners forced to march back to Hungary. During the march, Radnoti, exhausted and unable to continue, was killed by his captors, as were many others along the way. To play Radnoti, Ben enlists the help of an advisor, who helps the actor trace his own family's history. Ben also has an affair with his feisty costar, Mira (Renee Soutendijk), who plays Radnoti's wife and urges Ben on in his clashes with Hardy. As the action shifts to the labor camp, Hardy challenges Ben to probe his character's consciousness more deeply. Ben responds by forcing himself to endure as much as possible the suffering and privation Radnoti underwent, carrying realism to an unhealthy extreme that lands him on the cover of People magazine, but is clearly leading to an emotional breakdown. Both Mira (with whom Ben had a falling out when she ended their affair after her role in the film was completed) and Ben's father, disturbed by the Peoplef story, come to the set and try to shake Ben out of his obsession with Radnoti. Finally, during filming of Radnoti's death scene, Ben has a sudden revelation that leads him to understand the full horror of the Holocaust, and why his father refuses to talk about it. Finishing the film, Ben returns to California a changed man, though FORCED MARCH leaves open the question of whether it is a change for the better. There are plenty of good reasons to see FORCED MARCH. The performances are uniformly excellent in their low-key realism, and King's direction is similarly effective and straightforward. The film's depiction of life on a movie set, with its creative personalities engaging in daily clashes, alliances, and love affairs, has a sharply observed, insider's feel that almost, but not quite, compensates for the triteness of the script. As a character, Ben is never sufficiently developed to make his dilemma in any way comparable to that of the character he is playing. Also--and despite Seitz's best efforts--Hardy, with his nonstop rants and raves about Art and Truth, quickly becomes a windy bore. FORCED MARCH's film-within-the-film is so much more compelling than its framing story that, every time the camera pans to show Hardy yelling "Cut!" and jumping up to bawl out his actors, home viewers may well be tempted to hit the fast-forward button on their VCR remotes, speeding ahead to the next "movie" scene. Perhaps King has done his job too well: FORCED MARCH makes its best case for Miklos Radnoti's story getting a movie all its own--though with Chris Sarandon, not Ben Kline, as Radnoti. (Profanity, adult situations, brief nudity, violence.)