It is insufficient to describe the mawkish documentary “Paper Clips” as heart-wrenching. The precise term is heart-stomping.
Beyond manipulative, this story of Tennessee children trying to make a connection with the 6 million Jews killed in the Shoah is the most banal Holocaust film ever made. If I’ve seen a worse movie on the subject, I have extinguished it from my memory.
Let the earnest and well-intentioned “Paper Clips” be shown in schools, where it can masquerade as an educational film, until the end of time. But no adult should pay to see it.
“Paper Clips” opens Friday, March 4, around the Bay Area.
The setting is Whitwell, a Protestant community of 1,600 people in the picturesque hills 24 miles northwest of Chattanooga. The town has a handful of black folks and one Hispanic family, but everyone else pretty much looks the same.
In 1998, middle school principal Linda Hooper and a couple of teachers conceived of a diversity project to give their students a better grasp of the larger world. Their idea was to collect 6 million paper clips, representing the Jews murdered by the Nazis long ago and far away.
The eighth-grade class took up the campaign, and their successors in following years carried on. The Washington Post and NBC News stories raised the profile of the project, which ultimately received 24 million clips and 20,000 pieces of mail.
The greatest contribution came from Peter and Dagmar Schroeder, German journalists based in Washington, D.C. Not only did they turn their colleagues at the Post onto the story, they located a dilapidated railcar in Europe that had transported Jews to the camps.
Donors, sponsors and local tradesmen helped the school bring the car to Whitwell, rehab it and fill it with paper clips. The result is a Holocaust memorial that looks ridiculously out of place.
That may not bother you in the least, and I understand completely.
For “Paper Clips” taps into a lingering Jewish dream, namely that every American embrace the Holocaust as his or her personal legacy.
“Schindler’s List” made some inroads, by giving the average American a visceral sense of what the Jews suffered and an understanding of why we continue to make a big deal of the Holocaust 60 years on.
It was gratifying to many Jews that the black-and-white epic was a box-office success. But the movie didn’t pull off the difficult trick of getting non-Jews to jump on the Holocaust bandwagon with us — although, to be sure, that wasn’t Spielberg’s aim.
“Paper Clips,” with its shots of apple-cheeked youngsters listening raptly to Holocaust survivors as if they were their own grandparents, peddles that fantasy. Directors Elliot Berlin and Joe Fab don’t stop until they wring tears, in a kind of emotional blackmail.
The filmmakers ladle on the schmaltzy music and feel-good close-ups to persuade us of the impact the project had on Whitwell students. All their manipulation, though, can’t hide that they are relating the story after the fact. We hear kids tell us repeatedly that they are transformed but we don’t actually witness it, and their statements have no power.
As a tribute to what a few teachers and many students can create, “Paper Clips” works just fine. As a portrait of the echoes of the Holocaust in contemporary mainstream America, it is excruciatingly trite.
“Paper Clips” opens Friday, March 4, in San Francisco at the Regal Galaxy, in San Jose at the Camera 12 and CinéArts at Santana Row, and in the East Bay at the CinéArts at Pleasant Hill.