Our on-screen guide through all this is the bespectacled, puppyish Swami Krishnanand, a novice to the holy life, who hooks up with two earnest American students, Justin and Dyan. As for Benazzo and Day, they're about as gentle and unobtrusive as documentary makers can be—really, the only value judgment they make is that the whole thing's worth the trouble of filming. Beyond that, they step back and leave you to smile, nod in agreement, gasp in awe, or roll your eyes at everything their camera records. (NR) GAVIN BORCHERT
Watermarks
Runs Fri., April 29–Thurs., May 12, at Grand Illusion
Wyatt McSpadde
Very bad boys Lay (left) and Skilling in their gloating Enron prime.
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This Israeli documentary succeeds in part because its subject—Hakoah Vienna, a Jewish athletic organization founded in defiance of a 1909 Austrian law that banned Jews from sports clubs—is an underreported part of Holocaust history. Director Yaron Zilberman isn't a polished interviewer, and his premise is pure Hollywood formula: Reunite the old gang, seven core members of the women's swim team, for one last go-round. Still, Watermarks quietly celebrates the virtues of athletic competition and the complexity of memory in a way no formulaic sports movie could.
When we meet the septet of bathing beauties, they're in their mid-80s and scattered to the corners of the Earth (all fled the Anschluss as teenagers). Some are eager to return to Vienna's Stadionbad swimming facility to do a few more laps together; others have reservations. Shortly after arriving in Vienna, breaststroker Anni Lampl has an awkward conversation with a cab driver that illustrates his (and, by implication, his countrymen's) ignorance about Austria's role in the Holocaust. Lampl, now blind, subsequently describes the city as an "old lover" whom she no longer loves. Yet when her companion guides her around the Stadionbad, then asks if it sounds the same as it did in the '30s, the scene is tremendously poignant. Despite her memories of persecution, Hakoah remains an inextricable part of Lampl's youth. She can't fall completely out of love with Vienna, and her blindness only heightens her nostalgia.
Zilberman builds the film's emotional momentum toward the Vienna reunion, but the stops along the way are even more satisfying. A comparison of the 1935 Maccabiah Games (aka the Jewish Olympics, held in Tel Aviv) and the notorious 1936 Berlin Olympics hammers home Hakoah's higher purpose. By demonstrating world-class strength, its athletes rebelled against Hitler's anti-Semitism in a way that was physical, not philosophical, thus controverting Aryan theories of racial superiority. Yet the rewards of their athleticism run even deeper. Like all Holocaust survivors, the seven women experience moments of darkness, but Zilberman's scrappy perspective reflects their own unsentimental view of themselves. Freestyler Ann Marie Pisker describes her 1938 escape to London matter-of-factly, in athletic terms. "I emigrated with two suitcases and 5 pounds," she says. "You sink or you swim." (NR) NEAL SCHINDLER
Winter Solstice
Opens Fri., April 29, at Uptown
C.S. Lewis used to complain that looking for a good line in Paradise Lost is like looking for a good brick in a cathedral. But it's easy to find a good scene in writer-director Josh Sternfeld's Sundance-developed debut feature. They're pretty much all good, lapidary micromasterpieces of burnished ordinariness, with ace acting and dialogue as eloquently inarticulate as any minimalist novel. The problem is, there's no cathedral. Just a pile of disconnected bricks.
Star and exec producer Anthony LaPaglia does understated wonders as Jim Winters, a New Jersey gardener whose grief has barely thawed five years after the loss of his wife. He could beat David Duchovny and Peter Riegert in an underacting contest, and maybe even Peter Sellers as Chauncey Gardiner. With the slightest grunt, glance, shrug, or Mona Lisa smile, he can register emotions that connect as deftly as an Ali punch. He's got the best sparring partners imaginable: Allison Janney as a shyly romantic divorcée neighbor, Aaron Stanford and Mark Webber as his grunting, shrugging late-adolescent sons (Gabe and Pete, respectively), and Michelle Monaghan as Gabe's spurned girlfriend.
Solstice impressively and convincingly sketches the family's emotional landscape. Jim painfully fails to connect with his kids, but at least he tries. The boys, being boys, deal with emotions by ducking them. Big brother Gabe waits until the last second to tell everybody he's abandoning them and their one-Dairy-Queen town for a still-more-backwater burg in Florida. Kid bro Pete cultivates a stoner's indifference, vexing the kindly remedial-school tutor (Ron Livingston) trying to pry his eyes open to his own potential. The teenagers seem as authentic to me as the ones in Garden State. Everybody says plenty in as few words as possible. Few movies score so many true moments in a row.
And few add up to less. LaPaglia proves himself more than a character actor, but his lead role goes nowhere. His relationships with the kids are touching, but nothing gets resolved; his budding romance with Janney withers quicker than the flowers in the title sequence of Six Feet Under. The virtually plotless poignance is so muted that it's practically silent, like a cross between an early Bruce Springsteen ode to thwarted Jersey dreams and John Cage's composition 4' 33". (R) TIM APPELO
