MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Triumph’: A Semi-’Rocky’ Saga of Auschwitz

At the heart of “Triumph of the Spirit” (selected theaters)--a movie that shows us the horrors of Auschwitz from ground level and ringside--there’s a schism: a battleground between drama and melodrama, inspiration and facile uplift. Unlike the many fights in the movie, this one is never truly decided.

The film--based on the real-life experiences of Salamo Arouch, a Greek Jew incarcerated with his family at the Auschwitz-Birkenau camps--keeps swerving between the awesome realities of the camps and something shallower: a prototypal tale of a skinny, indomitable boxer who keeps knocking down opponents as fast as his Nazi persecutors can set them up. This exaggerated, romanticized semi-”Rocky” saga, replete with suffering true love, was probably intended as a commercial hedge. But it’s the “unsalable” side of “Triumph of the Spirit,” the unflinching re-creation of Auschwitz, that gives it some stature and riveting intensity.

In life and the movie, Arouch--a Balkans middleweight champ before his arrest--fought more than 200 times before rowdy, carousing camp officers. He won regularly, often brutally, gaining nothing tangible but slight preferential treatment and days more of life. Yet the movie concentrates more on those meaningless external victories than the crucial internal ones, contrasting Arouch with his poor, tough old stevedore of a father (Robert Loggia), finally condemned to death for being unfit.

In the ‘30s and ‘40s, radical screenwriters like Clifford Odets (“Golden Boy”) or Abe Polonsky (“Body and Soul”) used boxing as a microcosm of exploitation and the boxers as tarnished proletarian knight errants. There’s an echo of that approach here, but the scenario is still an obvious patchwork, pawed over by many hands. There’s an improbable-looking Auschwitz revolt, sudden underground movements, daredevil bombings. And the writers have given Arouch a wholly fictitious Auschwitz romance--with the lovers eyeing each other wistfully or exchanging stoic vows during their grim captivity, though Arouch and his wife never met until after the camps were liberated.

Yet, despite all this, “Triumph” moves and holds you. Director Robert M. Young and his cast have approached it with absolute seriousness, high dedication. They seem obviously inspired--if not by the writing, then by the subject itself and the overshadowing presence of Auschwitz, where most of “Triumph” was shot.

This huge camp becomes a dominant character: a factory of death, ringed around with gray stone walls, encompassing vast cavernous barracks, where the inmates sleep all jammed together like rats; barren-looking work fields, and the ominous crematories, where the elderly or youthful are gassed. Young won’t show us the actual mass executions. He keeps suggesting them elliptically, with shots of the guards inserting the Zyklon B gas canisters or close-ups of witnesses seeing the bodies. But he doesn’t have to. The entire setting reeks of death. The very air around Auschwitz, as he and Curtis Clark photograph it, seems to have a stench of brutality.

In many movies, the backgrounds are important. Here, they’re crucial. Without Auschwitz, and our full awareness of its gruesome history, “Triumph” might have only a fraction of its impact, the performances only a small part of their power.

Dafoe suggests Arouch’s changes against the lines or between them and, though he doesn’t project much physical joy, he catches the quick resilience of a fighter who, in real life, was nicknamed “the ballerina.” Loggia plays against his usual strengths by showing machismo frustrated, gusto drained. When he cracks apart, it’s a truly piteous spectacle.

And Edward James Olmos--who has such amazing concentration that he can create a fascinating performance out of reaction shots--puts icy, ambivalent undertones into the trustie guard Gypsy. If, at first, Gypsy seems simply another prison rat-fink, Olmos soon brings out his subversive side: the mocking Gypsy song, behind an unctuous smile, that he sings to the Germans, his offhand toast to the invading armies.

There are only a handful of concentration-camp movie dramas (Andrzej Munk’s posthumous 1963 “The Passenger” may be the best and Alain Resnais’ 1956 “Night and Fog” the best film on the subject in any form). But Young, more than even Munk, gets a convincing sense of Auschwitz’s day-to-day routine--not in the events as much as the way he stages them, with huge floating vistas behind the characters, prisoners dwarfed by the galaxy of misery around them.

Young’s 1978 “Short Eyes” is one of the most authentic of all prison movies. That’s the quality he gets here too, on a more grandiose scale: the gray, deadly routine of the place, the somnolent, wavelike mass movement of the inmates, the quiet sadism of the guards. He’s very good at capturing slight eerie details of behavior, like the hair-raising moment when a German officer sends a mother off to die with her child, shooting her a soft sneaky look that she mistakes for benevolence.

Young can’t cover up the structural weaknesses of the story and he can’t build up to a big climax. The last scene of “Triumph,” with its strained romantic coda, is a biographical cheat that also plays phony on the screen.

But, unlike many contemporary American film makers, he can give us an experience. The shudder of revulsion that goes through us here is real. So is our pity and grief for the victims, our shock at the staggering cruelty of their jailers. To the extent that “Triumph of the Spirit” (rated R for violence and language) lets the enormity of Auschwitz and its crimes pour through, the film does manage a victory: compromised but real, flawed but searing.

‘TRIUMPH OF THE SPIRIT’

A Triumph Releasing Corporation release of a Nova International Films Inc./Shimon Arama presentation. Producers Arnold Kopelson, Shimon Arama. Director Robert M. Young. Script Andrzej Krakowski, Laurence Heath. Camera Curtis Clark. Editor Arthur Coburn. Music Cliff Eidelman. Costumes Hilary Rosenfeld. With Willem Dafoe, Edward James Olmos, Robert Loggia, Wendy Gazelle, Kelly Wolf, Costas Mandylor, Kario Salem, Hartmut Becker, Burkhard Heyl.

Running time: 2 hours.

MPAA rating: R (younger than 17 requires an accompanying parent or adult guardian).