On a flatbed train, the soldiers survey their stock -- a pile of emaciated bodies, hundreds of men, dead or near dead -- and begin their work. With brute efficiency they toss the bodies into a deep, burning pit. Down the hill the bodies roll, toward incineration. They don't slide with the burly grace of stunt men; they topple clumsily, bumping into one another, robbed of dignity even in their dying. For agonizing minutes the carnage continues, until the soldiers' job is done and the pit smolders with an almost visible stench.
This is the climactic scene of Oles Yanchuk's Famine-33, a scarifying film about the real-life murder and starvation of more than 6 million Ukrainians by Stalin's bureaucrats in 1932-33. Not many Americans will see this picture, which opened last week in one New York City theater; stark, iconic, black-and- white Ukrainian movies, especially when their subject is "the hidden Holocaust," have limited mall appeal. But in its meticulously brutal imagery, in its theme of humanity enslaved and justice outraged, in its Manichaean categorizing of people as holy victims or soulless villains, Famine-33 has important similarities to Hollywood-financed pictures coming this Christmas to a 'plex near you.
Yuletide at the movies is often grim; Sophie's Choice, Scarface, Ironweed, Hoffa and most of Oliver Stone's psychodramas were December releases. The reason is coincidence: Christmas Day also marks the start of the last eligible week for the year's Oscar nominees to be released, and that's the cue for superserioso films. So audiences in search of vigorously vacant entertainment this holiday season will find Mrs. Doubtfire and not much else. The rest is state torture, mortal prejudice, mass death. Instead of tidings of joy, Hollywood offers the writhings of Job.
Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List, which opened last week, has already provided the elevated downer of the decade. But wait, there's more. Trailing Schindler, and in the line of Doubtfire, is a trio of high-minded horror shows:
-- Heaven & Earth. Oliver Stone is back for a third tour of Vietnam, after Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July. But for once in an American movie, the focus is on the Vietnamese, and on the sufferers: the land and the women. Phung Le Ly (played by newcomer Hiep Thi Le), growing up in the idyllic rice farmland of central Vietnam, becomes the victim of every possible atrocity as civil war heats up in the late '50s. She is tortured with knives, electric prods, snakes, even ants; she is brutalized by the republican army and raped by the Viet Cong. She is a stand-in for her lovely country, despoiled by successive invaders like a slave princess by jealous pashas. And when she escapes to the U.S. with her sergeant husband (Tommy Lee Jones), life doesn't improve. It's still sexual rapacity, guns and ammo, war games by other means.