No one will confuse “The Survivor” with “The Pawnbroker” by Sidney Lumet, but this new film from Barry Levinson tackles the concept of Holocaust survivor guilt from a clear and complicated perspective. The film is about Harry Haft, a boxer who lasted three rounds in 1949 with a much-loved Rocky Marciano. But of more importance is how Haft, a Polish-born Jew, got into boxing. Years earlier, an SS officer who met Harry, née Hertzka, in Auschwitz-Birkenau, called on him to beat up other Jews in attacks staged for the amusement of Nazi officers.
Adapted by Justine Juel Gillmer from a book by Haft’s son Alan Scott Haft, “The Survivor” continues interlocking flashbacks from 1963. A hardened but spirited and believably accentuated Ben Foster plays Harry. Mainly featured in the 1949 scenes, Peter Sarsgaard appears as a journalist interested in the moral gray areas of his story, making Harry an outcast even among fellow survivors. Vicky Krieps plays a potential romantic interest who helps him search for the woman he loved in Poland.
Levinson may not be a formalist enough to fully convey, assuming any film that could have taken the combined visceral and mental toll of professional boxing on a man pursued by brutalizing his comrades. (The director’s most heavy-handed touches come in the camp scenes, when he scores a montage of Hertzka’s battles with a Yom Kippur prayer that is eventually sung by a prisoner.) But while Levinson doesn’t work from his own history as he does in “Diner” or “Avalon,” “The Survivor,” partly because of its subject matter and post-war milieu, feels like a piece with those overtly personal films. Whatever its flaws, it is powerful.
The survivor
Rated R. Violence and brutality in the concentration camp scenes. Running time: 2 hours 9 minutes. Check out HBO platforms.
