Word: tinning
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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THERE WAS ONCE a drummer, his name was Oskar, and he stopped himself from growing on his third birthday. The world continued to grow around Oskar: the world, The War. But Oskar remained the size of a three-year-old, playing the role of a child, beating his tin drum, pounding for each passing syllable of history...
Gunter Grass filled his first novel, The Tin Drum (1959), with symbols that are not symbols, with allegories that are not allegories, with messages that are not messages. Volker Scholondorff has turned this sprawling, self-conscious novel of post-war Germany into a beautiful and disturbing film that recreates Danzig of the '30s and '40s without adequately illuminating Grass' novel. His film is both a magnificent success--well-acted, unblinkingly photographed, crisply edited--and a huge failure, an adaptation that dismally dissipates the epic power of the novel...
...Barbaric, Mystical, bored," writes Grass of the 20th Century. Historians will one day recognize The Tin Drum as representative of a universal 20th Century experience, yet Grass' novel is above all a German work, addressing the provincial guilt and unease of post-war Germans, drawn to Hitler like adolescents to pornography and unable to cleanse themselves under the searchlight of vengeful, scrutinizing time...
Little Oskar's story makes a fine scenario and Tin Drum is marvelously entertaining, even engrossing at times. Yet a question persists: why make this film? Must every literary classic stumble shell-shocked onto the screen? Time and a host of bad adaptations have shown that literature and cinema are not compatible cousins, that by their very nature, good novels will not make good films, just as the exciting visual effects of film cannot be duplicated in print...
WESLEY IS PISSING on his sister's 4-H diagrams of how to carve a broiled chicken. Emma, in a fit of anger, throws empty tin cans at the farmhouse because her mother took the broiler out of the freezer and ate it. Their father, Weston, came home drunk last night and broke down the front door. Ella, the mother, stands wearily in the kitchen and wonders, "What kind of a family is this...