Quartile rating: 7.5/10 · 1 rating
In 1924, Oskar Matzerath is born in the Free City of Danzig. At age three, he falls down a flight of stairs and stops growing. In 1939, World War II breaks out.
Volker Schlöndorff's adaptation of Günter Grass's novel is a singular, audacious work. The plot is genuinely extraordinary — Oskar's willful refusal to grow as a metaphor for Germany's moral arrested development is one of cinema's great conceits, rendered with dark surrealist wit and unflinching historical honesty. Cinematography is expressionistically rich, with striking compositions that balance grotesque carnival energy with the dread of encroaching fascism. Novelty is sky-high: this is an utterly one-of-a-kind film in voice, tone, and conception — bizarre, erotic, politically savage, and unlike anything before or since. Acting is strong overall, with David Bennent's performance as Oskar being iconic if occasionally uneven in sustaining across the film's length. The ending, while thematically coherent, loses some of the novel's cumulative power in translation and feels somewhat abrupt given the sprawling journey that preceded it.