The film tells a story of Oskar Matzerath who is a son of a local dealer and is a extraordinary boy. On his third birthday, he makes an important decision not to grow up after witnessing the dark side of the world at the eve of World War II. Then he is immersed in his tin drum to find the safe and sound.
Walks a taut, high rope between doubles and split selves, docu-realism and surrealism, brutality and naïveté, sacred and profane, and history and myth, without falling into the safety net of childish fantasy. (It only falters in its final half-hour.)
Fascinating allegory with war, death themes and little boy who won't grow up.
Scene-Stealers.com
January 16, 2013
There are many themes running through The Tin Drum: resistance against an unkind world, the need for acceptance, the horrors of romance and war, and the final idea that growth is inevitable and unfortunately, necessary.
In Volker Schlöndorff's restored version of his 1979 classic, Oskar Matzerath emerges as a tragic anti-hero, whose lustful imagination and prodigious magical gifts can't shield him from the juggernaut of war.
Oskar's story touches on so many facets of life it's hard to know where to start analyzing.
ColeSmithey.com
April 15, 2009
Context is everything. Although often mistaken as a black comedy, Volker Schlöndorff's bold adaptation of Günter Grass's abstractly autobiographical 1959 novel is an exemplary model of European magic realist cinema.
Schlöndorff has a tendency to sketch the rest of the cast as simple grotesques or symbols of decadence that are unconvincingly humanized in the final third.