THE BOYZ FROM BRAZIL

Learning about evil things in the world is like eating spoiled food.  It sticks with you for a while, troubles your bowels, and makes you wish for death.  It moves through you with a sure, merciless snake-path while you scream inside, scream so loud that you wonder why nobody else can hear you, why they just keep going about their business and smiling at you.  You have to go home and quiver in the privacy of yourself, especially since everyone’s fucking stupid smiles just make you want to puke more.  You shiver and clutch your torso while you sweat in nauseous agony.  But you know it will be over at some point, so for now, you’re just playing the waiting game.  And most of the time, it’s true.  Even the most wicked cases of food poisoning leave your system eventually, and you can stop vomiting and return to work, and enjoy your lunch again, and relearn how to be happy.

But sometimes, you get infected with something that changes you forever.  It morphs your affinity for certain foods to sharp, allergic aversions.  Like the parasite giardia, for instance.  In a lot of people, the infection clears up just fine, no big deal.  But for others, it is a very big deal.  Even after you stop being sick, the parasite has sometimes altered your intestinal makeup and turned you lactose-intolerant; sometimes it’s temporary, sometimes it’s not.  Likewise, some horrible things that you have learned cause irreversible damage.  Even long after you’ve stopped having an anxiety attack over the whole thing, certain details about your wretched, newfound knowledge change the way you see or experience ordinary things.  Like if you saw a loved one die of a heart attack in the produce aisle?  Oranges might fuck you up for the rest of your life.  Or something.

Josef Mengele’s medical experimentation on concentration camp prisoners is my mental giardia.  It completely wrecked my shit for a good week.  Carrying the knowledge of his horrific cruelty was bad enough.  But when I saw a little child play an angel in a school Christmas pageant, it triggered my memory of learning about this so-called “Angel of Death,” and all the putrid shit I had been trying to forget came raging back into the foreground of my consciousness.  It wasn’t cool, and I’m still kind of pissed off about it.  (I also had to learn in-depth about the Donner Party that same year, and I was in eighth grade, and pretty fragile, not that you can tell, or anything.)

So when I found out that I would be covering Boys from Brazil, I was like, “Game on, motherfucker.  Let’s dance.”

I was fuckin’ prepared.  I wasn’t going to let Mengele make me look stupid again.  I had steeled myself for the onslaught of unanesthetized child cruelty.  By the time the ending credits rolled, I felt rather silly, since the film hardly dealt with any of that. There’s no outright horror in the film–it’s told as a mystery/crime thriller.  Which would actually be really cool, except for:  it’s longer than it needs to be; I often found myself backing up the scene and rewatching because I realized I had stopped listening; and when it’s not a snooze-fest, Gregory Peck and Laurence Olivier deliver up some ridiculous German accents and acting that’s hammier than a Midwestern Easter.  I mean, even by dinner theater standards, it was pretty atrocious.

Boys from Brazil, based on Ira Levin’s novel of the same name, deals with a fictional plot by Josef Mengele for a second chance at world domination.  Mengele (Peck) is hiding out in beautiful Paraguay without a care in the world, having only recently gotten away with history’s worst crimes against humanity, but he just can’t let that whole Aryan supremacy dream go.  So, he begins Phase 2 of his plan (of which the completed Phase 1 is still a mystery):  he calls together all his Nazi buddies with a list of 94 names of 65-year-old males all over the world(not Jews, though!) and instructs his men to assassinate each one.  Retired Nazi hunter Ezra Liebermann (Olivier) gets wind of the nefarious plot by way of a phone call from an enthusiastic college kid (played by the Gute?!?), who pays for the information with his life.  This exposition is so exciting and full of potential, but eventually gets bogged down by sluggish pacing

Another thing working against this film aging well is the bunk science involved–without giving too much away, it involves cloning a full human being.  (Okay, I just gave most of it away.)  True, it’s a little unfair to make this observation with the benefit of 35 years’ hindsight.  Science-fiction stories are usually disproven in time, and that’s no reason to hold it against them–it’s why it’s called science-fiction.  The problem is that Mengele was supposed to have attended the birth of the clones 14 years before the film even starts, at a time when DNA studies barely existed.  So the “fiction” part of this film’s science-fiction has already been ruled out as believable at the time of its making.  (It’s 2013, and we can barely make a sheep that lives longer than 5 years.)  (Also, while it’s true that Mengele and the Nazi movement were obsessed with eugenics and creating the “perfect” person, this was attempted through studying heritable traits and selective breeding–there was no way on Earth that anyone would have known how to actually manipulate DNA at that time.)  And when the long-awaited moment arrives, in which Liebermann becomes fully aware of what Mengele has done, the audience is already way ahead of him (and exasperated).  There are plenty of films that spoon-feed the subject matter to its viewers, but it’s rare to find a film in which the audience wants desperately to spoon-feed it all to the characters, just so they’ll shut up and get on with it already.  And if that wasn’t anticlimactic enough, they accomplish this by way of a lesson on the science of genetics with a lab technician, during which he actually STARTS A PROJECTOR and plays a corny, narrated educational film.  Yeah, try that in any movie made today (unless it’s funny, like the one in Inconvenient Truth.)

And while it ended up working out in my favor, the big reason this film comes up short decades later is the decided lack of horror.  Obviously there’s no way to top the atrocities that occurred in real life (although I’m not sure that any filmmaker would want to–and if they did, that would be disturbing as hell in its own right.)  But if a film were to be released about Josef Mengele today, it wouldn’t just be a well-dressed proper gentleman marking off names on a board.  Graphically or otherwise (which would be in better taste), it would include all the details and freakishness that strip the well-heeled veneer from a degenerate like Mengele.  The character has so much real-life horror surrounding him, which was completely at the film’s disposal.  It used barely a drop of it.  You might say that the film’s restraint is admirable.  I wouldn’t.

The ending, while labored, fulfills some of society’s righteous wishful thinking (although if you’re into some WWII revenge fantasy, I’d recommend Inglorious Basterds over this any day.)  And we do see a glimpse of Mengele’s vulnerability, as he is reduced to blustering, trembling reverence–which, yeah, like I said at the beginning, smells like a Honeyglazed.  (By the way, real-life Mengele evaded capture for the rest of his life.  Your move, theists.)  But there are still a lot of loose ends–94, to be exact.  Where they’ll end up, we don’t know.  But, 35 years later, we’ve gathered some clues…