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Tuesday, May 2, 2023

THE WINDERMERE CHILDREN (2020)

Lots of smart creative decisions aren’t quite enough to take this post-Holocaust docu-drama beyond acceptable/well-intentioned.  Fact-based, if highly compressed (so much left on the table), it follows 300 young Concentration Camp survivors as they struggle thru a program designed to help them jumpstart (rather than reclaim) lives thru a recovery program in rural England.  Lots of early missteps, beginning with the camp itself which for all intents & purposes comes across to the victims as a benevolent version of the hell holes they’ve come from.  But once the bumps get sorted out (and the unlimited bread-basket explained), other problems pop up as the kids, especially the older boys start to ‘act out’ and rebel in typical teenage fashion.  Bad behavior, but psychologically healthy; a sign of normalcy, if only the filmmakers weren’t afraid of losing sympathy by making these sorts of scenes as uncomfortable as they need to be.  On the other hand, having the younger children, as well as the older girls, largely drop out of the picture to focus on the young men over the four months of rehabilitation, may lose complexity, but gains in restraining soft-hearted (or is it soft-headed?) sentimentality.  (No mournful cellos playing like it's Yom Kippur service on the soundtrack.)  And it does build to an honest emotional coda when some of the actual boys, now old man, are juxtaposed with their youthful selves.  Maybe this tv movie just needed more running time (a lot more) to do the story justice.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Displaced WWII children in THE SEARCH/’48 (real ones, BTW) were the focus of professional breakouts for director Fred Zinnemann and actor Montgomery Clift.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/06/the-search-1948.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Director Michael Samuels too often leaves us in the dark . . . literally.  You get the idea, reflecting their dark recent past, but sometimes you simply can’t see what’s going on.

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