First of all, it is beautiful.

Waltz with Bashir doesn’t feel like a movie at all. It feels like Picasso’s Guernica come to living, breathing life. It would rightfully be compared not to other movies but to books like Tadeusz Borowski’s This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen or Elie Wiesel’s Night. It is dense the way a book is dense. It resonates like literature. It engages it’s audiences on several different levels. Not that I’m a connoisseur of the genre but it is the first mature movie about war I’ve ever seen. Waltz with Bashir is an animated documentary from Israel. From the moment it begins - with a group of mad dogs running down the streets of a Middle Eastern city - 

 it is one stark, dream-like image after another. It is the first great movie I've seen in a long time.

It follows the filmmaker, Ari Folman, on his search to re-discover his lost memories from the 1982 Lebanon War and in particular, the Sabra and Satila massacre. It begins when he meets a friend who describes to him nightmares he’s having about his own experience in the war. From this moment on Waltz with Bashir has an unnerving proximity to reality. Somehow the animated veneer of the film brings you closer to the actuality of war. In most movies about war, the more they try to re-create the violence and the blood shed the more sensational the movie becomes. The fact of the matter is, of course, that you’re not actually on the beach at Normandy or in the jungles of Viet Nam, you’re not actually feeling that pain, that anguish, you’re just experiencing it from a safe distance…and it’s over in two hours. In those two hours you get a burst of adrenaline. It’s like taking drugs. The audience becomes high. In Bashir there is no rush. When these men trace their memories of war there is no thrill. There is only a struggle to understand, a deliberate, willful defining of the parameters of the actual.

Perhaps the aspect that most sets Waltz with Bashir apart is compassion. Suffering isn’t placed on display for us to gawk at. Accountability is explored. Reality is questioned. Truth is dissected. The movie does not take sides between victim and perpetrator. Everybody is a victim. In fact, it’s the only perspective towards war that really makes sense. This is a movie about how war exists in Real Life, how it breathes and sweats and eats the living and the dead. How it lives in a city, among a people. How it sleeps. The men in Waltz with Bashir aren’t terrible men but they’ve done terrible things, witnessed crimes no one should have to witness because war isn’t about an individual. War exists the way tornadoes or earthquakes exist…or God. It is a force of nature. Men don’t actively create war, they are swallowed up by it. It is the ultimate expression of masculinity unchecked but it will happen whether we want it to or not until we change something fundamental within ourselves. Men destroy. This is what Waltz with Bashir recognizes.

I have read that Waltz with Bashir has been perceived as “anti-Israeli”. That’s interesting for a movie that’s been banned in most Arab countries. Regardless, such a take on this film can only be a choice made by a given viewer. Bashir is extraordinarily honest and watching it you are aware of how rare a quality that is in any movie, perhaps in any work of art. If you’re honest about war you’re not “anti” anyone unless you’re “anti” everyone. Folman eschews agenda. He simply reveals. That animation feels more naked than filming people is itself a commentary on the world we live in. It makes the film not about this people or that people but about you and me. Someone who says Waltz with Bashir is about a specific group is thinking much too small for Folman’s vision. He’s not pointing fingers. If anything he wants humanity to save itself. We can’t do that without recognizing who we are first and that’s what Waltz with Bashir does better than any movie I’ve seen in years: it shows us who we are. This is the reality of our subconscious. This is what is going on underneath and at times, terrifyingly, in front of our faces.

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VA   |75.148.82.xxx |2009-04-02 20:05:27 You're a very good writer and obviously a smart guy. I'm curious though that everybody still refuses to hold Israel responsible for their actions. If any other nation had been responsible for such a massacre, either directly or indirectly there would be no assertion that the perpetrator of the crime suffers as much as the victim of the crime. I can't help but wonder about the unwillingness of the West to hold Israel accountable.

Midnight Butterfly   |76.115.19.xxx |2009-04-07 16:09:28 I'm not entirely following your line of bullshit, dude (or dudette). I don't have any particular predilection towards Israel one way or the other. And personally, I feel like there's always a reason, you know? Atrocities have been committed to and by everybody. At some point a different choice has to be made by humanity as a whole. And frankly, in my incarnation on this website I'm a movie reviewer. I can't hold anyone responsible for anything except bad art. When any great crime occurs I would argue that blame is meted out. Rarely, if ever, does just punishment then ensue. Otherwise people would stop doing it. But they don't. Has America been held accountable for the slaughter of the Natives? Did Belgium suffer for the rape of the Congo? Did the Hutus give up an eye for a million eyes in Rwanda? The list goes on and on. We're all guilty. We're all complicit. We have to make a different choice. That means you too, jackass. That's what I got from this movie.

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