In Darkness Review
By David Kempler
Dark in Many Ways
It's Holocaust time at the movies again. This time 'round it's "In Darkness", Agnieszka Holland's based-in-truth story about a group of Jews being rescued by a flawed but (in the end) good man, who rises to the occasion when called upon. Think "Schindler's List" Lite. This description is in no way meant to dismiss or demean either the subject matter or "In Darkness" itself. It's just that one could not help but conjure up Spielberg's opus while watching this one. "In Darkness" is good, but can't help but suffer by comparison.
"The Sewers of Lvov", the book upon which this is based, focuses on a small group of Jews hiding beneath the streets of Lvov, Poland. Leopold (Robert Wieckiewicz) is as anti-Semitic as the next guy in Poland. This translates to his being utterly ignorant and unfeeling. Because he is a sewer worker, he discovers the Jews in hiding, along with his buddy. At first, rather than turn them in for good money, he strikes a deal with them to bring them food in order to slowly get all of the cash and jewelry they have in their possession. In other words, his initial motivation is money, much like Schindler's was. And just like Schindler, he slowly discovers a sense of humanity and risks his own life, as well as the lives of his wife and daughter, to protect his flock.
Leopold moves his folks around the sewers whenever the Nazis get too close. This includes one of his old buddies that is a trifle cartoonish in both actions and looks. You know that at some point they will end up in open conflict and they do, with a predictable outcome.
One of the very good things here is that the Jews aren't presented as universally noble. There are a couple of creeps in the group. One in particular cheats in front of his wife with his mistress, before dumping her, too. Also, there is no shortage of sex here. The Jews in the sewer are quite active, in what I assume would have been a reality, considering that they were down there for 17 months. If the subject matter here was a tad lighter and this was an American film more likely to crash into America's collective conscience, you could come up with some darkly funny skits about sex in the sewers.
While I have been a bit hard on "In Darkness", in truth I think it is a tale worth telling and feel that it has been told quite well. The biggest problem it has is that it feels like it has been told too many times in similar ways. Whether that is a fair criticism or not, I am not sure, but on its own, it is suspenseful enough and acted well enough to endure its lengthy amount of time, clocking in at 145 minutes. If you can handle another Holocaust, unintentional-hero flick, it's still worth a visit to these sewers.
