Word: oskar
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...Schlondorff must be conceded his nice touches. The film begins and ends with Oskar's grandmother in her Kashubian potato field, a Brechtian Mother Courage moving with time and walking in place, Mother Earth herself, born of the land and too old to travel far from her potato patch. She is an ugly, dirty (dirty-y) little woman who, quite by coincidence, spawns Oskar's mother, who in turn delivers Oskar...
Scholondorff is best at Oskar's birth, a womb-view of human re-entry. We stare with Oskar out of his mother's heaving port-hole, hurtle down the bloody, mucus-filled chute, and then, too soon, out the door into the glaring bulb-light of modern German, Western Middle-class civilization. "When little Oskar is three, he will have a toy drum," says Mama and his umbilical cord...
...Grass' Oskar speaks of himself in both the first and third person and Schlondorff tries admirably to integrate subjective and objective camera angles. His camera prowls, mimicking Oskar's roving, steely eyes, cutting neatly between the three-year-old perspective and the view of an omniscient, unobtrusive lens. But he fails to remain consistent, breaking now and then to leave Oskar's field of vision, sneaking in a shot that is too objective. A cleverer director might have found a way to convey images, like Oskar's mother's adultery with his Uncle Jan, without abandoning his point of view...
...even when he drops the subjective/objective technique, Schlondorff can be playfully brilliant. Following a sepia-toned clip of a Nazi rally comes a sequence in which Oskar's drumming turns the propaganda gathering into a waltzing Danube of Hitler Youth. As Oskar drums, the Nazi band picks up his waltz, a goose-stepping Nazi commandant adds a back-skip to his gait and a crowd of arms extended in "Seig Heils" begins to sway to the music. Aryan youths pair off to dance, leaving the SS confused and helpless...
However, Schlondorff fails to give a similar sense of irony to a Beckettian sequence with an eel fisherman on a stark beach. While Oskar keeps a cold, dark view on life, the film changes tone: now it is bleak and blue, now it is warm and red. Does Schlondorff misunderstand his little hero or has he simply made only token efforts at linking each sequence to the whole? He manages to reduce the most profound chapter of Grass' novel, a discussion about art and life between a midget magician and a soliderly artist to a frolicking picnic atop a cement...