The worst movies inadvertently make us question the skill and care that went into them. The good ones temporarily make us forget we are in a theater or at home, propped up on the couch or in a chair, expectant of the next twist or plot development. The great films make us forget completely, transport us and envelop us for several hours, a brief aside from a world that often doesn’t play by the rules.
Then there is a special breed of film, made with considerable skill and an innate feel for the confines of the silver screen. Films that aim, if they’re successful, to trap you and force you to directly experience the character’s torment. “Lebanon,” Samuel Maoz’s reconstruction of his own experiences as an Israeli tank gunner during the 1982 war between Israel and Lebanon, is one such film. To put it simply, with the exception of the first and last two shots of the film, “Lebanon” takes place entirely inside an Israeli tank supported by a team of paratroopers who move in to enemy territory on the first day of battle.
The Maoz stand-in Shmulik (Yoav Donat) remains holed up in this contraption for the duration of the film, along with Hertzel (Oshri Cohen), Yigal (Michael Moshonov) and Asi (Itay Tiran), the tank commander who grapples with his men’s conflicting personalities. You’re no doubt familiar with the expression that when you put multiple people in a room for a long period of time, seams will inevitably come apart and they’ll come to blows. In “Lebanon,” the tank is barely a room and the men will either live or die by the day’s end – and if not today, then tomorrow. The tank gives protection, but it is also a trap, one that has no way out, no emergency exit. If the tank burns, the flesh does too.
Still, you will not remember “Lebanon” for the men or the woman seen in one of the most difficult-to-watch scenes of the film. You will remember it for the feeling it leaves you – the inescapable dirt and grime, the sweat and blood, and eventually, briefly, a young man’s tears. Whatever Maoz’s attempt, whether therapy or something more, he has made a film that crosses boundaries. The war could be any war, the tank any heavy weaponry that removes the observer and eventual trigger-man from direct responsibility. And yet it doesn’t. “Lebanon” sears itself into your mind, if not in the skillfully delivered imagery, then the notions it carries like so many great sins. This is balls-to-bones filmmaking and it should be seen, experienced, but not necessarily celebrated. [B+] – Mark Zhuravsky
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You can’t watch Samuel Maoz’s “Lebanon” — book-ended by its obvious hokey shots of sunflowers in a field — which won the Golden Lion (best picture) prize at the Venice Film Festival last year, and not think, “of course Europeans love this movie,” as it seems more driven by blatant liberal message more than anything else.
A fairly manipulative and contrived anti-war film, the picture’s conceit is cramming four Israeli soldiers in a tank and incarcerating them (and the viewer) claustrophobically inside a tank for 90 minutes, utilizing only the tank periscope as as the viewfinder to the outside world. If there’s a school of unsubtle and anti-nuanced filmmaking in the middle East, this writer contends it’s very possible Maoz is a proud graduate.
None of that intensity is really any kind of reason why you’d want to sit through 90 minutes of a movie that is shot in get-out-of-my-personal-space close-ups, or one that purports the fabricated affectation that is the camera lens through a telescope.
What is meant to be gripping and seen as trenchant for some — this fervent locker of four men trapped inside — is actually quite annoying and insufferable at times. There’s not a lick of respite, save for the occasional quick cut away to a commander standing outside the tank looking in and/or the para scope shots, but those P.O.V.s are so hamfistedly manufactured, it’s not much of an adjournment.
Yes, this incident — the infamous 1982 war in Lebanon — is a tragic and horrible event and the soldiers are obviously motivated through fear throughout, but it’s hard to stomach a picture that’s difficult to watch and then has no redeeming characters either. Again, each one is a different variety of milksop and it’s hard to even feel sympathy for any of them. One is a huge whiner, the other is yellow-bellied to the point of aggravation and they’re all just a different kind of irritation.
Worst of all is the guileful and numerously aforementioned gun-sight shots that are about as unsubtle as a case of burning syphilis, whizzing around and zooming in on tragedy after tragedy; women wailing while their children and husbands are killed and all kinds of incredibly forced and uncomfortable moments. Yes, this is terrible, we get it, thank you. It’s not so much what is shown, but the execution which just feels clumsy and very imposed. This humorless picture also could have used even an acidly black laugh — see Danis Tanović’s “No Man’s Land,” which expertly used some occasionally twisted humor, but never at the expense of the subject matter
While also a very personal film– Maoz was a gunner in one of the first Israeli tanks in Lebanon at the ripe age of 20– there’s very little by way of complex emotions or textures involved. This is a picture that says: war is shitty (gee, thanks), tanks are hot as hell and human beings generally behave like savages during war. It’s a black and white screed/anti-war rant without the contours that generally make these kinds of pictures interesting and tolerable — it’s the dichotomies and contradictions that can make war pictures so poignant. “Lebanon” is the opposite of that.
The plaudits for this film seem to come from those who confuse the intensity as some kind of poignancy or profundity, of which there is almost none. If you’re going to watch a picture about this subject, let us point you in a far better direction: Ari Folman’s Academy-Award nominated animated documentary, “Waltz with Bashir.” [C] – Edward Davis