By Mike Faloon
Scene: There's a beautiful damsel tied to the tracks, steam engine approaching. The villain fondles his handlebar moustache and smirks at a job well done...until the good guy, dressed in white, leaps from his stallion to save the day. Whoever cast that mold could never conceive how long their template for moviemaking would last. Even though Westerns have faded from the Hollywood foreground, it's amazing how American movie makers cling to the dynamic depicted above, especially when a movie deals with racial or religious identity. One example that comes to mind is Men of Honor, ostensibly the story of the Navy's first African-American diver, Carl Brashear, played by Cuba Gooding, Jr. The film's true focus is on Robert Deniro's character, a grizzled veteran determined to see Brashear fail. Deniro, the good guy in white, gets the spotlight while Gooding remains bound and gagged on the tracks, a prop to make Deniro's character look virtuous. (Check out Radio, another Gooding gem or Alan Parker's Mississippi Burning for similar experiences in "You have to hand it to white folks willing to work with black people!") To some extent you see this in holocaust related films too. Take Schindler's List, for example, which the Village Voice dubbed "a feel good movie about the ultimate feel bad experience." The point? All of this makes Fateless such a welcome, if unrelenting, movie experience. Set in 1944, Gyura, a 14-year-old Hungarian, is sent to a labor camp. The healthy teen slowly disintegrates before our eyes. Every time it seems like he can fall no further, the bottom gives way and Gyura continues his descent; it reminded me of reading The Jungle. The pacing is a bit odd at times (a few scenes are cut short before they could develop their full impact), but it's directed by a cinematographer, Lajos Koltai, making his debut as a director so that, the pacing, is more than offset by the fact that Fateless is ceaselessly stimulating visually. Highly recommended.
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