Paper Clips tells the unique story about a group of rural Tennessee middle-school students who set about the daunting task of collecting six million paper clips in an effort to better understand the enormity of the Holocaust. The innocence and sentiment of such a project is charming, and the students' dedication to it is inspiring. It's also commendable that people in a town of 1,600 should take it upon themselves to learn about diversity and prejudice. All of this is well and good, but let's not confuse the message with the movie.
We begin in 1998, when the faculty at Whitwell Middle School wanted to teach their eighth-grade students about intolerance and began a new study on the Nazi treatment of Jews in World War II. It's surprising to hear the teachers talk about how little they knew about the subject before they started. Lost on the filmmakers and subjects alike is the irony that this is taking place in the former heart of Ku Klux Klan territory.
When one of the students asks for a little help in visualizing the number six million, the idea to collect paper clips symbolizing the Jewish victims is born. Eventually the story is picked up by the Washington Post and NBC News, leading to donations from around the world in excess of 29 million. Even Tom Hanks and Bill Cosby chip in. If you're not crying by the time the students are meeting with survivors and building a monument involving a German railroad car, the overwrought musical score will get the tears flowing.
It's a simple tale, told modestly but with honest emotion. Part of the problem is there just isn't enough narrative to justify the film's feature length. When we see the students slavishly filing, sorting and documenting the names, locations and numbers of their inventory, it's hard not to wonder if the whole thing isn't a little absurd.
The filmmakers get downright pretentious when they attempt to tie in the significance of the project with 9/11. Most offensive, however, is how watered-down the impact is, how little it gets us to think about the atrocities. It's like Shoah for Dummies.
But I did learn a few things:
1. The paper clip was invented in Norway.
2. It isn't easy to find an authentic WWII-era German boxcar.
3. The people of Whitwell, Tennessee, have a lot of time on their hands.