Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Survivor’ On HBO, Where Ben Foster Plays Harry Haft, A Holocaust Survivor Who Became A Pro Boxer

The Survivor, directed by Barry Levinson, is based on the true story of Harry Haft (Ben Foster), who survived Auschwitz and other concentration camps on the strength of his ability to fight. He lived his postwar life in Brooklyn, putting together a respectable-enough professional boxing career to get a match with Rocky Marciano.

THE SURVIVOR: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: The film takes place in three timelines: In black and white sequences, we see a gaunt Haft in Poland, where he’s laboring in a concentration camp during the Holocaust, being just useful enough to stay out of the gas chambers. When SS officer Dietrich Schneider (Billy Magnussen), sees Haft fighting a guard, he takes Haft out of the camp so he can fight other Jews in a boxing ring for the officers’ entertainment. The boxing matches are supposed to be brutal, with the officers betting on the results; whoever gets knocked out gets a bullet in the head.

Haft is indeed brutal during these fights, his survival instinct kicking in despite the fact that he’s fighting other Jews. Memories of that time flash into his brain when we see him boxing professionally in 1949; he and his brother Peretz (Saro Emirze) survived the Nazis and now live in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn. Harry has some skills, and has had a bunch of victories to start his career, but he’s also been KOed in his latest fights, much to the dismay of his trainer, Pepe (John Leguizamo).

By some miracle, though, he gets a chance to fight soon-to-be-heavyweight-champion Rocky Marciano (Anthony Molinari). He goes to see Marciano spar and meets the contender’s trainer Charlie Goldman (Danny DeVito). Having lost a lot of his family during the Holocaust, Goldman connects with Haft and offers a few training sessions on the sly just so he can at least lose to Marciano with some dignity.

Haft is also trying to find out if Leah (Dar Zuzovsky), whom he considers the love of his life, is still alive. He’s helped in his search by Miriam Wofsoniker (Vicky Krieps), whom he eventually marries, and Emory Anderson (Peter Sarsgaard), a reporter that was intrigued about Haft’s survival story.

We then find Haft in 1963, owning a fruit and vegetable stand, married to Miriam and trying to make a man out of his oldest son Alan (Kingston Vernes), when a tip from Anderson sends the entire family to a beach resort town in Georgia.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The fact that the harrowing concentration camp scenes in The Survivor, shot in black and white, bring Schindler’s List to mind is likely not a coincidence.

Performance Worth Watching: Foster is essentially unrecognizable as Haft. Not only is he sporting a Polish accent, but in the concentration camp scenes, he’s gaunt to the point of being skin-and-bones. The pain of what he had to do to survive, and the fact that the choices he made during the war may not sit well with his fellow Jews, are etched all over Foster’s face. But Foster’s performance also show’s Haft’s determination to not only survive but thrive once the war is over.

Memorable Dialogue: In one of the toughest to watch scenes in the film, Haft is forced to fight a friend that he made in the camps. At first he refuses, even if that means that he’ll get killed by Schneider. But then his friend gets him in a clutch and says, “Let me die like a man,” later said, “I don’t want to die at the hands of the Germans.” That’s where Jewish lives were in the camps, where dying at the hand of another Jew in a boxing ring was preferable to the gas chamber or a bullet from a Nazi soldier’s Luger.

Sex and Skin: Naked and emaciated prisoners are wheeled out to a mass cremation site, which is where Haft is first seen by Schneider.

Our Take: Despite the 128-minute runtime, it seemed that The Survivor was one of the rare cases where Haft’s story would have worked better as a limited series than a film. Levinson’s direction is certainly sensitive to Haft’s real-life story and does a good job communicating just the level of horror he went through and the idea that he had to make impossible choices in order to survive. But there’s so much more to Haft’s story than what Levinson showed in the film’s final cut, that it made us just want to see more.

For instance, there is a scene where Haft runs during a “death march” between camps. We know that’s one of the reasons why he was able to survive, but there was also the fact that he hid by impersonating a German soldier, and also the fact that he killed some of the people who housed him when he thought they might turn him in.

There’s also the story of Leah, whom he met at a Displaced Person’s camp at the end of the war. There is really nothing to show their relationship developing, to the point where Haft is obsessed with finding her after he emigrated to the U.S. Levinson seems to devote most of the first 2/3 of the film to Haft’s boxing career, with a long segment devoted to his match with Marciano. That sequence brings the film to life, but we wonder if it was worth it if we had to sacrifice a large chunk of Haft’s story at the end of the war.

Our Call: STREAM IT. The Survivor benefits from Ben Foster’s searing performance as Harry Haft, which is underscored by harrowing Holocaust-related scenes. But there’s much more of Haft’s story that got left on the cutting room floor, which makes the film feel incomplete.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.