Critical Recommendation: Waltz With Bashir

"Memory is dynamic, it's alive. If some details are missing, memory fills the holes with things that never happened."

I'm aware of the fact that this is the first time I've ever posted about a documentary on this blog, to say nothing of recommending one. It may very well be the last time, too. Frankly, if I were writing about any other film, it probably wouldn't have ever seen the light of day on my site. But Waltz With Bashir is not just any other film. It is nothing short of a captivating, arresting masterpiece in every sense of the word, as well as bar none the greatest documentary I have ever seen. It was nominated for the highest honor at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival, the Palme d'Or. It became the first foreign film to be nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars, not just the first foreign documentary. It won the Golden Globe in 2008 for Best Foreign Language Film. It won the Critic's Choice Award for the same category. And perhaps best of all, it absolutely won my heart, ran it through the dirt, shattered it into a million pieces, and then, by the time the film concluded, had tenderly put those pieces back together whilst awing me with its utterly captivating understanding of how to find striking beauty amidst and in spite of the senseless brutality and tragedy of its subject matter. Sadly, it seems that a lot of people, especially Letterboxd users, completely missed the message of the film, and took it to somehow be propaganda by the Israeli Defense Force. Um, I'm not going to chime in on how exactly I feel about the war going on in the Middle East right now, but I've rarely seen a more shallow and thoughtless take on a film than this particular one, and I hope that by the time you're finished with this article, you'll understand why.

OK, so to sum up what the film is about, Waltz With Bashir, created by Israeli film writer and director Ari Folman, is an animated documentary - yes, you read that right - that Folman created in an attempt to piece together his own lost memories about his experiences as an Israeli soldier during the 1982 war in Lebanon as well as the infamous Sabra and Shatila massacre, where anywhere from 1,300 to 3,500 citizens of Beirut were massacred by fringe Christian militias and rogue Israeli soldiers acting in defiance of instructions from superiors.

So, right off the bat, this is some pretty serious and heavy subject matter, and while the film's animated format could have easily detracted from the overall result, the opposite happened in spades. The animated style of Waltz With Bashir crafts an intense surrealism I've not seen quite replicated by any other film, expertly putting us inside the head of Folman and his own search for answers amidst half-forgotten memories that often feel unreal to him. War is a strange thing indeed, and the visual aesthetic of Waltz With Bashir is one of the strangest things you'll ever see, in only the best of ways. In fact, I was reminded of two other incredible borderline-surrealist films, Arrival and especially Apocalypse Now, while watching it. This is definitely where the animation approach was at it's strongest because it ensured that the hallucination sequences and the "real" interview footage looked the same. Oftentimes in a documentary, there will be a disconnect when an interviewee is talking about stories from the past, because what's being said obviously does not have a one-to-one connection with whatever b-roll the filmmakers chose to use. But the consistent animation style on display here gave Waltz With Bashir a constancy that just demolished any distance between Folman's stories and me. I know it may sound strange, but the animated aesthetic and the arresting surrealism of this film made it seem more real than almost any other documentary I've ever seen, and I would argue that if you're making a documentary about heavy subject matter such as this, arresting an audience with your story is an absolute necessity to do justice to the people you're making a documentary about. This effect also lets the weight of the film rest in a really unusual place. Oftentimes when you're watching a good film, it will feel real, and you'll be periodically reminded that it's fiction. But in Waltz With Bashir, the film often feels mythical, and yet we're periodically reminded that what we're seeing is indeed very real, and really did happen.

Juxtaposing this occasional sense of surrealism even further is the wildly effective contrast that this film creates between not only Folman's life as a soldier and his life as a civilian, but also between what we as the audience see, hear, and feel. I never knew what to expect in this film, and the whole thing just feels like I imagine a really strange acid trip would, not just because of the surrealism present, but also because of how strikingly different the film acts when it's portraying Folman's perspective of warzones versus when it's portraying Folman's perspective of the home front in an exceedingly effective attempt to try and explain what it's like trying to adapt to life in peacetime when you've been living in a warzone for so long. And if nothing else, this film is just an exceedingly powerful watch, on the level of its subject matter, yes, but also from a purely audio-visual perspective. At the end of the film, we finally see some live-action sequences, and the switch from animation to live-action is executed in such a way that I can only describe it as potent.

By this time when I'm writing an article, I'm usually a little tired and ready to be done just so that I can post it to my site. But as of right now, I find myself wishing that my writing this article would never come to an end, because as I'm typing this, the film's just coming back to me in waves, and I realize something: I will probably never see a movie quite like Waltz With Bashir ever again, and while a part of me is sad that I can't go back and see it for the first time again, the other part of me is grateful that unapologetically vision-driven and excellent films like this exist in a narrative and documentary landscape dominated by corporate checklists and mediocrity. I would consider this a film you must watch at least once before you die. It's a remarkably powerful and undeniably one-of-a-kind look into the mind of a man who's trying to reckon with and come to terms with his regrets. I want to reiterate that it's unlike anything I've ever seen before, and probably ever will see again. However, I do want to make a statement that I hope gives you some pause before you watch it: the amount of adult content in Waltz With Bashir was almost too much for me, even in an animated context. The film is a very violent one, with a lot of very graphic violence, animated and unanimated. The profanity is really light for an R-rated flick, but the sexual content in this movie is conversely pretty heavy. One soldier watches some porn on his TV, and we see explicit intercourse. In the dreams of one soldier, three soldiers walk out of the ocean naked, with genitalia visible from afar. Most notably in this category, one soldier has a dream where a giant naked woman walks out of the ocean with full-frontal nudity visible. Geez, now that I'm writing this all down, I cringe a little bit at the fact that I'm recommending this film and all of its content while also reckoning with the fact that I'm a born-again Christian. So, I hope that this last section punches in just how much raw power this film can summon, because I don't recommend a movie unless I've got some really good reasons to. Waltz With Bashir is a creatively unparalleled, no-holds-barred look at humanity's struggle with our fallenness, a struggle that extends far beyond Israel's comparatively fleeting conflicts with its neighbors, and our subsequent attempts to cope with that fallenness. If you're of age, I think it's a movie everyone should watch. It's a broken look into the broken memories of a broken man who, because he can't remember all he thinks he should, goes looking for an informative word from those who can never forget.

Waltz With Bashir - 10/10

John 16:33