This Ordinary Thing: Celebs Tell the Stories of Those Who Did the Righteous Thing
By Liam Lacey
Rating: B
“Star-studded” is not a term you typically associate with Holocaust documentaries, but This Ordinary Thing is not an ordinary film.
Released on video on demand on June 12, the birthday of Anne Frank, the film features the testimony from 45 non-Jews who saved the lives of Jews during the Second World War. This broadly inspirational stories are narrated by a cast of famous United Kingdom and American actors.
These include Jeremy Irons, Helen Mirren, Carrie Coon, Lily Tomlin, David Hyde-Pierce, David Straitharn, Ellen Burstyn, Hope Davis, F. Murray Abraham, Stephen Frye, Marcia Gay Harden, John Leguiziamo, Kelly Macdonald, Bebe Neuwirth and Rufus Sewell, among others.
As with every representation of the Holocaust, there are complicated questions about technique and themes. Nick Davis, the film’s director, is the author of Competing with Idiots: Herman and Joe Mankiewicz, A Dual Portrait about his famed grandfather and great uncle. He is also a prolific non-fiction filmmaker.
His most recent film, You Had to Be There — about the historic 1972 Toronto Godspell cast — premiered at TIFF last fall. He has drawn his stories from the testimonies of a few of the more than 28,000 men and women who have earned the honorific “righteous among the nations,” or colloquially, Righteous Gentiles, by Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem since 1963. Golda Meir, Israel’s foreign minister in the early 1960s, compared their heroism to “drops of love in an ocean of poison.”
He has weaved together the stories of the rescuers in a chronological progression from the rise of the Nazi party in the 1920s through to the liberation of the concentration camps, using both colourized and black and white archival footage. The images are grimly familiar: SS soldiers in the streets, starving children in the ghettos, parades of Jews wearing stars marched through the streets, bodies hanged in the public street.
As the images flash by, we listen to the personal accounts of individuals who hid Jews in their walls and furniture, and raised orphan Jewish children as their own. In one case, a woman exchanged sex with an officer to ensure the protection of Jewish guests. Several of the people who co-habited became close. There are a couple of marriages recorded here, and one rescuer who converted to Judaism, getting circumcised at 68.
The musical score by Adam Guettel is subdued and moving, and at 62 minutes, the film is mercifully concise and pointed. An anachronistic sequence reminds us of the recent rise of antisemitism, with footage of the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, with torch-carrying men chanting “Jews will not replace us.”
The film concludes with the overlapping voices repeating a phrase of universal empathy from the Talmud: “Whoever saves one life saves the entire world.”
At risk of seeming crudely insensitive to this collective celebration of goodness, I’m not convinced the lustre of the celebrity voice cast brings us closer to the experiences of the real-life subjects. As well, the collective narrative technique can be distractingly fragmentary.
There are 31 actors, some doing double duty, voicing 45 recurring characters, who are identified only by name and country of origin. They all speak English, sometimes with various European accents, sometimes not.
For example, the American actor David Straitharn is instantly identifiable by his voice, even if he is speaking the part of the Polish diplomat Jan Karski, who first warned Western leaders about the Holocaust in Poland.
Jeremy Irons, voicing another Polish subject, Alexander Roslan, adds a guttural quality to his natural English accent while Bill Camp, as his compatriot Stefan Raczynski, sounds like a guy you would meet at a New England diner. The French woman, Ermine Orsi, speaks in the startling Scottish lilt of Kelly Macdonald.
Thematically, there are scholarly questions about the concept of the Righteous Among the Nations paradigm which celebrates exceptionally altruistic individuals at the risk of obscuring broader historical and national context. The survival rates of Jewish people in different parts of Europe varied widely and the Holocaust in the Netherlands was different than in Belgium, Poland or Denmark.
The film is not concerned with collective efforts by collective resistance groups or Jews who helped rescue other Jews. Nor does This Ordinary Thing explore examples of the cases of ordinary individuals with mixed motives who saved Jewish lives.
Those issues aside, This Ordinary Thing has value as an audience-friendly introduction to some of the rare positive stories that emerged in the wake of the Holocaust. And implicitly, it raises the familiar ethical question: What would you have done in similar circumstances and what are you willing to risk today?
This Ordinary Thing. Directed by Nick Davis. With F. Murray Abraham, Eric Bogosian, Ellen Burstyn, Stephen Fry, Marcia Gay Harden, Jeremy Irons, John Leguizamo, Helen Mirren, Bebe Neuwirth, David Strathairn, Lily Tomlin and others. Available June 12 on video on demand including on Apple TV and Amazon.