No one will confuse “The Survivor” with Sidney Lumet’s “The Pawnbroker,” but this new film from Barry Levinson deals with the concept of Holocaust survivor guilt from a distinct and complicated perspective. The film is about Harry Haft, a boxer who, in 1949, went three rounds with a highly favored Rocky Marciano. But what is more remarkable is how Haft, a Polish-born Jew, came to boxing. Years earlier, an SS officer who met Harry, born Hertzka, at Auschwitz-Birkenau enlisted him to beat up other Jews in fights organized for the entertainment of Nazi officers.
“The Survivor,” adapted by Justine Juel Gillmer from a book by Haft’s son, Alan Scott Haft, unfolds through interlocking flashbacks to 1963. A hardened but lively Ben Foster with a believable accent plays Harry. Peter Sarsgaard, featured primarily in the 1949 scenes, comes across as a journalist interested in the moral gray areas of his story, which risks making Harry an outcast even among the other survivors. Vicky Krieps plays a potential romantic interest who helps him search for the woman he loved in Poland.
Levinson may not be formal enough to fully convey, assuming any film could, the combined visceral and mental toll professional boxing must have taken on a man haunted by the brutalization of his comrades. (The director’s most brutal touch comes in the camp scenes, when he marks a montage of the Hertzka fights with a Yom Kippur prayer that is ultimately revealed to be sung by an inmate.) But while Levinson isn’t working from his own story as in “Diner” or “Avalon,” “The Survivor,” partly because of its subject matter and post-war setting, feels a play with these overtly personal films. Whatever his faults, he is powerful.
The survivor
Rated R. Violence and cruelty in concentration camp scenes. Duration: 2 hours 9 minutes. Watch on HBO platforms.
