(Directed by Volker Schlondorff)
by Kevin Murphy
Amtrak estimated nine hours travel time from Charleston to Ft. Lauderdale. Scheduled to board at six, I cracked the dawn with depot coffee and the first page of Gunter Grass’s The Tin Drum.
The depot dappled with the broken smiles and weary eyes of my fellow journeymen. Like me, these people were beginning to believe in karma. We glanced the depot over, waiting for the first glimpse of the train to button through the distance. When the train didn’t arrive, the depot stirred with tension. Transformed from mere waiting room into something much more cruel and disruptive, I chuckled as Grass’s hero, the beneficent hellion Oskar Matzerath, opened the tale with this disclaimer, “Granted: I am an inmate of a mental hospital.”
Rising like a phoenix from Germany’s post war rubble, The Tin Drum was a tremendous literary achievement. Its timeliness and lyrical power harnessed the tension, sadness and anger of a culture utterly broken from years of hate and mismanagement. With Oskar Matzerath as his spokesman, Grass gave voice to the thousands whose lives were shattered by war. Adapted for the screen forty years after its publication, the movie version of this tale succeeded in translating a current of words into a visually arresting film. It avoids failure by crawling into the novel’s soul, and emerges as something creative and true.
Directed by Volker Schlondorff, the film is a hallucinatory montage of a society at the brink of collapse. Like an out of control racecar, the film veers from robust, beautiful images of Germany’s countryside to stark, skeletal depictions of Dresden after an air raid. Schlondorff equals the novel’s swift pace by congealing sprawling passages into succinct scenes. Much is learned in minutes here. People are revealed instantly; they seem to work backwards, trying to hide what they’ve already shown. Swabbed with vivid hues and pallid horizons, the film operates like a dream, splashing memorable events with corresponding colors. Even duality is given another set of hands. More than representing man’s dual nature, the film flags society’s influence, and shows how much and how far people experiencing extreme circumstances can stretch.
A good hand at adapting literature, Schlondorff also directed War and Peace. Adhering to a text’s true nature, the director proves insightful and ambitious with his moviemaking.
The Tin Drum is a willfully obscure historical reference. At age three, coinciding with the rise of Nazi rule, Oskar flings himself down his cellar stairs. His action is a protest against the fully-grown adults’ absurd methods of government. Stunting his growth yet aging all the same, Oskar is given a tin drum. Seduced, he becomes obsessed with the drum’s music. His percussion is the drumbeat that chronicles the encroaching tide of war. The movie follows Oskar’s attempts at love, his disruption of various social gatherings, his involvement with a circus troupe, and the disharmony within his own family. He also possesses a glass-shattering scream. If threatened the lad lets fly and brings down the windows. His vitriol is always near boil; he is a tender rogue, a one of a kind character whose meager frame does nothing to hamper his huge historical implications. He makes and breaks his family, affords love and snatches it away. He is a violent little man with an Arian’s saintly good looks, destined to rattle the lives of all those he encounters.
Novels of cultural relevance remain important because of their lessons. The mountain of information that documents World War II grows as it explains. As generations return to The Tin Drum, they will enjoy its glories under an umbrella of varying circumstances. The novel won the Nobel Prize for Literature and deeply influenced writers like Murakami, John Irving, and Paul Auster. The film won an Academy Award for Best Foreign Film and The Cannes Film Festival Palme d‘Or.
But for my money, I’d start with the book. Grass’s manipulation of language is a genuine force. He commands his narrative like a bird in the skyway. The plot, like Oskar’s grandmother’s skirt, is multilayered and warm. It’s enough to take your mind off a train trip that’s taken ten hours longer than expected, and breaks the ground for the movie’s unique destiny.
Therefore ripe for criticism and applause, the film version has its reputation to defend. It does a spanking good job transforming a novelist’s fictional creations into tangible things that breathe and move. The careful reader will notice aspects missing from the movie. But like traveling, you’ve got to take the good with the bad. Invariably, The Tin Drum is a reminder of how blessed, how terrible, life can be.
