Waltz With Bashir--A Review

The genre of the 'war movie' is one that I've always been interested in. What do filmmakers get right about World War II? (See: Flags of Our Fathers, Iwo Jima) and what do they get wrong? (See: Saving Private Ryan with it's complete lack of any other Allies and U-571 with it's complete butchery of history.) When has enough time passed to make a good movie about a conflict? And we tend to think of the 'war movie' genre in exclusively American terms- after all, what would the History Channel have to show during the week if it wasn't for World War II? But what do 'war' movies look like when it's another country's war?

'Waltz With Bashir' written and directed by Ari Folman is hard to pin down at first. Technically, it's an animated documentary recounting Folman's search for his lost memories from Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon. But it doesn't feel like a documentary- the photo-realistic style of animation combines with the music to create a haunting and harrowing portrait of the horrors of that particular war.

It opens with one of Ari's friends describing a dream he had of being chased by 26 dogs- the exact same number of dogs he had killed during the course of the war. This, in turn, brings back a fragment of a memory for Ari about where he was in Beirut and what he had seen- he witnessed some of the massacres in the refufee camps at Sabra and Shatila- but he cannot remember more than that and is unsure of the reality of his memory. Advised to talk to his friends and people who were there at the time to track down the truth, he embarks on a journey to discover his memories from the war and what he really saw that day in Beirut.

I think if people have a casual familiarity with the contemporary history of the Middle East, it helps with this movie- but it's not a requirement either. The horrors of war and the coping mechanisms people use to deal with that, if they aren't universal themes, they are certainly things that cross all frontiers. But you can see that the trauma of Israel's invasion of Lebanon left it's mark on not only the soldiers involved, but the psyche of that country as a whole. At the time, the goal seemed simple enough: drive to West Beirut, kick the PLO out and go home- which they managed to do, but they were invading a country that was ripping itself apart in a brutal Civil War at the time and got caught in it, as their Christian Phalangist allies committed the massacres at Sabra and Shatila. The reverberations from this invasion continued for a generation- Israel only withdrew the last of its forces from Southern Lebanon in 2000.

This was a profound, haunting look at the horrors of war- even though it's not a war that may hit home for a lot of Americans. But when Folman finally remembers what he saw after the massacres at Sabra and Shatila and the animation dissolves into actual footage from the camps, the horrors of war become all too real.

Overall: This was a haunting, brilliant movie. The animation was excellent, the music complimented it perfectly and it provided a glimpse of what happened to the soldiers themselves during a controversial and bloody war.