ARossMartin

It's been a while since I've seen this German film but I am still struck by key images in the film and the overall tone set forth casually against a backdrop of the chaos of Nazi Germany's rise and fall.

I do wonder how much of my love for this film is owed to the Gunter Grass novel on which it's based It's a quirky slab of magic realism to be sure, like the film, but I have no idea how closely it hews to the original.

The performances are nuanced and striking in places. The cinematography is appropriately dreary and the editing crisp and unadorned. The centerpiece though, is the performance by the child actor at the core of the film. How much is owed to his voice-over narrative, I don't know, but the man growing inside of the still-grown little boy was handled just beautifully.

It's a disturbing and strangely uplifting movie at once. I recommend it -- especially for those who have seen only black and white view of World War II and the typically American view of our adversaries in German.

I really enjoyed learning about the artist profiled in this film and, while I admire the filmmaker's laid back approach to his subject, I often felt that there was such an even pace to the whole affair that one could take all the scenes of this film, place them in random order, and end up with basically the same film.

This is not to say that Goldsworthy's art isn't remarkable in it's own right. The painstaking process through which he constructs his installations out of found natural elements is itself beautiful and instructive. The music is inoffensive but keeps things in the same low-key arena as the other elements of the film. I wish I had seen this in the theater, though. The poetry of Goldsworthy's work and process would've resonated all that more deeply.