DIRECTOR: John Schlesinger

CAST:

Dustin Hoffman, Laurence Olivier, Roy Scheider, Marthe Keller, William Devane, Fritz Weaver, Richard Bright, Marc Lawrence

REVIEW:

‘Is it safe?‘ No one who has viewed John Schlesinger’s gritty thriller Marathon Man will soon forget those three simple words, or look at dentists the same way again. The globetrotting plot involves Nazi fugitives, shady government agencies, and diamond fortunes, all tied together in a not-entirely-clear web, but the central character is Thomas ‘Babe’ Levy (Dustin Hoffman), a bright young history student at New York’s Columbia University with dreams of being a marathon champion and haunted by his father being driven to suicide by the McCarthy witch hunts of the ’50s. Babe’s world is about to be shattered by a harrowing series of events stemming from his older brother Doc’s (Roy Scheider) involvement in a secret government organization. It’s never exactly clear what this ‘Division’ is, or what it does, but it seems to have its hands in a few dirty pies. And then there is Babe’s Swiss girlfriend Elsa (Marthe Keller), who may or may not be what she seems. And at the center of the intrigue is a former Nazi ‘dentist’ named Christian Szell (Laurence Olivier), who’s emerging from hiding in Uruguay to collect his diamonds, and he thinks Babe knows something.

Marathon Man survives of the strength of its scenes and performances. The international intrigue involving Doc and Janey (William Devane) is a little hard to follow, and one character’s motives remain a little confusing. Things get more straightforward in the film’s second half, but at times, especially early on, Marathon Man is unncessarily convoluted. But the individual scenes are almost all well-crafted, and a feeling of tension and danger permeates the film from start to finish. The scenes manage to be suspenseful enough that we’re engaged, even when we’re not entirely sure exactly what’s going on. Then in the second half the plot narrows to focus on Babe’s harrowing encounter with Szell, and the pace quickens, the good and bad sides are defined, and the final third or so is particularly compelling. Any number of scenes stand out: an ominous encounter in an opera theater, two assassination attempts against Doc, a chase along a dark city street, the Nazi fugitive venturing tensely into a Jewish neighborhood to get his diamonds, a showdown at a farmhouse, and of course, ‘is it safe?‘.

For the most part, Dustin Hoffman, who tends to be at least a little theatrical at the best of times, is solid, although there are moments when his histrionics get a little excessive. We sympathize with Babe, which is important. Roy Scheider is solid as his enigmatic brother, as are Marthe Keller and William Devane, who keep us uncertain about their ambiguous characters. The late Richard Bright, a familiar henchman type (he was the Corleone hitman Al Neri in all three installments of The Godfather) and Marc Lawrence are Szell’s cronies. Fritz Weaver has essentially a cameo as Babe’s brilliant professor Biesenthal. Best, unsurprisingly, is Sir Laurence Olivier, who brings a smooth, cultivated viciousness to his sinister role, using a calm, cold demeanor and eyes that never seem to smile even when his mouth does, to make Szell a thoroughly menacing villain (Olivier was nominated for an Academy Award). The infamous scene in which he casually uses dentist’s tools as torture devices to extract information from a helplessly squirming Babe is the stuff of cinematic legend, and thirty years later, while not particularly graphic, it remains uncomfortable to watch. This features Marathon Man at its strongest.

Director John Schlesinger gives the film a gritty feel which adds to the immediacy and tension. He also effectively practices restraint in the notorious torture scene, letting close-ups of Babe’s terrified face and Szell’s impassive one speak louder than the violence could have. The film version is very much faithful to its novel origins, although prolific author and screenwriter William Goldman was reportedly not pleased with the way the filmmakers altered his original ending (the film’s version, while not radically different, is more satisfying). There are a few interesting other changes or omissions; the book’s Doc and Janey are homosexual lovers, which the film hints at so subtly only very astute viewers will pick up on it (pay attention to their first phone conversation). In addition to the book’s Doc being more fleshed-out, the shady international intrigue in which he is embroiled was made somewhat more clear (somewhat, not entirely), and Babe displayed an edgier side. Also, in the book, Szell has a father, not a brother. But none of these details affect the central storyline, and the plot and most of the individual scenes are brought intact from page to screen, often word for word.

The years have magnified Marathon Man‘s reputation; no other scene holds the power and intensity of the legendary torture sequence, and the sometimes murky first half keeps it from reaching the very top of the thriller genre, but it generates enough tension and unease for us to be brought along on its harrowing journey until the last shot has been fired and the end credits start to roll.

***

DIRECTOR: Oliver Hirschbiegel

CAST:

Bruno Ganz, Alexandra Maria Lara, Corinna Harfouch, Juliane Köhler, Ulrich Matthes, Thomas Kretschmann, Christian Berkel, Matthias Habich, Heino Ferch, Michael Mendl, André Hennicke, Ulrich Noethen, Doneven Gunia, Thomas Thieme

REVIEW:

The third major film depiction of the last days of Adolf Hitler (following 1973’s Hitler: The Last Ten Days, starring Alec Guinness, and 1981’s The Bunker, starring Anthony Hopkins) but the first internationally-released German production to feature Hitler as a main character, Downfall is director Oliver Hirschbiegel and screenwriter Bernd Eichinger’s frank confrontation of a man and legacy that has stigmatized and haunted Germany for sixty years.  Based on German historian Joachim Fest’s book “Inside Hitler’s Bunker” and Hitler’s secretary Traudl Junge’s own memoirs “Until the Final Hour”, Downfall validates the notion that perhaps, despite their reluctance, it was up to the Germans to make the first truly convincing Hitler film.  The results speak for themselves: Downfall is a well-crafted, morbidly engrossing, and occasionally wrenching war drama bolstered by an extraordinary lead performance by Bruno Ganz.

Downfall is bookended with brief snippets of interviews with Traudl Junge conducted shortly before her death in 2002, and the film uses Traudl as our entry point, starting with a prologue in November 1942 as the young secretary (Alexandra Maria Lara) is appointed to the Führer’s headquarters.  We next skip to April 1945, with Traudl and the rest of the entourage (an assortment of secretaries, cooks, aids, and top Generals) holed up with Hitler (Bruno Ganz) in his bunker beneath the Reich Chancellery in Berlin, which is now almost surrounded by the Russians, who are overrunning the city’s outskirts and pounding the rest into rubble.  Many of the Führer’s underlings, including Heinrich Himmler (Ulrich Noethen) and Eva Braun’s brother-in-law Hermann Fegelein (Thomas Kretschmann) urge him to flee, but Hitler is determined to stay in the besieged capital, still holding out hope for a last minute turn in the tide, and if that fails, resolving to kill himself in the bunker.  Many of his subordinates have already fled, and those who remain, including Traudl, are anxious to get out before it’s too late, but a small circle of diehard loyalists join Hitler in the bunker, including Eva Braun (Juliane Köhler), the Führer’s vacuous mistress, and the Goebbels family, led by Nazi Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels (Ulrich Matthes) and his wife Magda (Corinna Harfouch), both of whom are willing to sacrifice not only themselves, but their own six children.  Surrounded by this shrinking inner circle, Hitler becomes more and more disconnected from reality, moving armies around that exist only on his maps, refusing to evacuate the civilian population, and throwing frenzied rages when nonexistent forces do not come to the rescue.  Outside, last-ditch fighting pits old men and schoolboys against Russian tanks, including Hitler Youth Peter Kranz (Donevan Gunia).  SS physician Ernst-Günther Schenck (Christian Berkel) resolves to stay in Berlin to do what he can to care for the wounded and civilians.  General Helmuth Weidling (Michael Mendl) is given the hopeless duty of defending Berlin, much to his chagrin.  The hard-nosed SS General Wilhelm Mohnke (André Hennicke) is personally willing to fight to the last bullet but disapproves of schoolboys being sent into combat.  But the lion’s share of the movie takes place inside the labrynthine corridors and dimly-lit rooms of the claustrophobic, suffocating bunker, as the atmosphere grows increasingly unrealistic and unhinged, until time finally runs out and the Third Reich dies in an orgy of suicide, murder, and devastation.

Downfall was accompanied by significant controversy, much but not all of it taking place in Germany, about whether its portrayal of Hitler was “too sympathetic”.  Hirshbiegel and Eichinger have striven for rigorous historical accuracy and a frank, docudrama-style depiction of events without melodramatic exaggerations or over-the-top histrionics.  Even the most disturbing characters–Hitler and Magda Goebbels–are not depicted with horns and forked tails or breathing fire.  Hitler’s famous (and sometimes exaggerated) rages are few and far between, and even then, Bruno Ganz does not go the cartoonish lunatic approach of many Hitler performers.  But an accusation that the movie portrays Hitler sympathetically seems to me that it must come from one who has not watched it.  Ganz’s Hitler shares a liplock with Eva Braun, once comes to the verge of tears, is a considerate boss to his secretaries, and from beginning to end, he is kind to Traudl Junge, but the overall depiction is not a flattering one.  Moments of kindness aside, Hitler is shown throughout to be a cold-hearted, hateful, unstable, and self-absorbed figure veering between wallowing in self-pity and flaring up into bursts of rage.  He seems to grow more delusional and paranoid by the day, grasping desperately at straws and seeing traitors everywhere, lashing out irrationally and tossing his own brother-in-law Fegelein to the firing squad on “evidence” that is flimsy at best.  When told that young German soldiers are dying in the thousands for a lost cause, he shrugs and says with searing callousness that that’s what young men are for.  To him, the German people are no longer fit to live because they have proven themselves weak, and “I will not shed one tear for them”.  If he is capable of shedding tears at all, it is apparently only for himself.

Alone among the many, many actors who have played Hitler over the decades, acclaimed Swiss actor Bruno Ganz achieves the herculean task of allowing us to forget for over two hours that we are watching an actor playing a role.  This is every bit as impressive, if not more so, an example of an actor embodying a historical figure as George C. Scott in Patton or Daniel Day-Lewis in Lincoln  (both of which received an Oscar while Ganz was not even nominated), in an even more difficult and controversial role.  Part of it is that Downfall is German-language; no matter how tremendous the performance of, say, Anthony Hopkins might be, Hitler with Hopkins’ voice just doesn’t quite compute, any more than an actor playing FDR would be completely convincing speaking German.  Ganz has the voice, body language, and mannerisms down almost perfectly, and while not a dead-ringer, the makeup job is more than adequate, but those are all scratching the surface.  The real triumph of Ganz that he plays Hitler not as an over-the-top caricature, but as a three-dimensional, albeit loathsome, individual.  Ganz manages the mighty feat of occasionally bringing us to the brink of feeling a scrap of pity for the physically and spiritually broken dictator, then in the next moment tossing out a comment of chillingly casual heartlessness and making us feel disturbed about how close we came.  His colossal rages are few and far between, interspersed by lethargic lounging around and rambling about everything from the best ways to commit suicide (he and Eva argue over cyanide versus a gun) to the senselessness of compassion, to poring over his unfulfilled architectural designs for a remodeled, grandiose Berlin, but when they do come, they are wild and frothy, spewing spittle, thumping tables, railing about treachery and weakness from all around him.  Ganz’s performance is a powerhouse tour de force with a chilling sense of authenticity, and easily the most convincing Adolf Hitler ever played by an actor.

Alexandra Maria Lara adds a needed dash of comparative normalcy and humanity as the impressionable Traudl Junge, who wants to believe in the Führer but witnesses the events around her with mounting horror.  “It’s all so unreal,” she despairs at one point, “like a dream where you can’t ever wake up”.  The audience will inevitably gravitate toward her as one of the only remotely sympathetic characters, making her an effective entry point into the bunker.  Ulrich Matthes plays Josef Goebbels as an icy fanatic, but he’s surpassed by the chilly Corinna Harfouch as his wife Magda, an ice queen with a will of steel so unshakably devoted to Hitler that to her warped mindset, killing her children with her own hands is kinder than leaving them to grow up in a world without Nazism, which she likens to a world without sunshine.  Juliane Köhler plays Eva Braun as a vacuous party girl, laughing and dancing as though nothing is happening, but we suspect that this is her way of blocking out the grim reality.  Her adored Adolf’s insanity and venom should be obvious to anyone, let alone his longtime mistress, but Eva either cannot see it or–perhaps more accurately–simply refuses to.  Heinrich Himmler drops by early on, played by Ulrich Noethen as a deluded self-important twit clueless enough to wonder whether he should give General Eisenhower the Nazi salute or shake his hand.  Heino Ferch is the dapper, inscrutable architect Albert Speer, who urges Hitler not to go through with his plans for total destruction but remains an enigmatic figure.  He’s obviously the most level-headed, composed, and realistic of the high-ranking Nazis, but he never wears his feelings on his sleeve, and we’re never entirely sure what’s going on inside his head.  The only member of the inner circle whose portrayal is a little disappointing is Martin Bormann, played by the buffoonish-looking Thomas Thieme, who despite generally being regarded as one of the most influential members of Hitler’s court, has so little screentime and dialogue that he seems to barely be in the movie.

The most disturbing scene Downfall has to offer does not even involve Hitler.  It is Magda Goebbels committing the most unthinkable act possible for a mother: the murder of her own six children.  The scene is eerily non-violent; having already given them a sleeping pill, she methodically goes from one to the next cracking cyanide capsules inside their mouths.  It’s a truly disturbing scene, one which many viewers will find difficult to watch despite its low-key, matter-of-fact bloodlessness.  A fraction of a second in which Magda’s face of stone threatens to crack makes her more human but not more sympathetic, instead a sad, sick, horrifically deluded woman.  While no other scene matches the horror of this one, there are various other moments of graphic violence that recall those in the likes of Saving Private Ryan: various characters shooting themselves in the head, wounded soldiers getting limbs sawed off, blood soaking walls and floors.  By the end, the bunker has become a tomb.  Along with such films as The Pianist, Downfall, ironically filming in Russia with St. Petersburg standing in for 1945 Berlin, convincingly recreates a city devastated by war.  Possibly to avoid offending their Russian hosts, the filmmakers gloss over the widespread rapes committed against German civilians by Russian soldiers, and the epilogue is perhaps implausibly idealized, but by then it comes as a welcome slight ray of sunshine after the two hours of madness, brutality, and destruction.

While Downfall is a must-see for many WWII buffs, its mainstream appeal is dubious–a group of detestable characters hole up in a bunker and eventually kill themselves–and the film is as far from “uplifting” or “feel good” as anything to be found.  But to those with an interest in the subject matter, it is one of the most finely-crafted WWII dramas ever made, by far the best onscreen depiction of the last days of Adolf Hitler, and a forceful, searing experience that can leave one thinking about its subject matter long after the credits roll.

* * *1/2

DIRECTOR: Henry Hathaway

CAST:

James Mason, Jessica Tandy, Cedric Hardwicke, Leo G. Carroll, Luther Adler, Everett Sloane, William Reynolds, Richard Boone, Desmond Young

REVIEW:

Field Marshal Erwin Rommel was undoubtedly Germany’s most famous General of WWII and continues to be regarded as one of history’s great military commanders. Gaining fame in North Africa, where his outnumbered Afrika Korps divisions pushed the British back for two years and nearly drove them off the continent, the Desert Fox was held in awe even by those fighting against him, both for his battle prowess and for his famously strict adherence to the rules of war. Recalled back to Germany before the end in Africa, he did not share the fate of his captured men, although he would have been more fortunate if he had. His star never again reaching its former heights after the African campaign, he tried and failed to defend Normandy against the Allied invasion and died a few months later, ostensibly of injuries suffered when his staff car was strafed by Allied planes little over a month after D-Day. Only after the war did both the Allies and the German people learn the more complex and dramatic truth: Hitler had forced his once favorite General to commit suicide when information regarding his involvement in or at least knowledge of the conspiracy to overthrow him reached his ears. While Rommel has been portrayed onscreen in a number of war films, by far the best-known and most extensive depiction came in 1951, only seven years after his death, in the form of Henry Hathaway’s The Desert Fox: The Story of Rommel. That such a sympathetic- indeed, practically sanctified- portrayal of Rommel could be made so soon after the end of the war is telling of the high regard in which Rommel was held even by his enemies. Unfortunately, a disjointed and episodic narrative structure, stilted dialogue and performances, and an interminable amount of WWII stock footage results in a mediocre production that doesn’t really do its subject justice.

The story is based on the same-named biography by Desmond Young, a British officer who had a brief encounter with Rommel during the war. Young appears as himself in an early cameo, but his rather heavy-handed narration is delivered by Michael Rennie. After a somewhat tedious pre-credit sequence detailing a failed British attempt to assassinate Rommel, and a second prologue portraying Young’s glimpse of the Desert Fox, we jump into the decisive Battle of El Alamein, at which Rommel, after a string of victories, was finally driven into retreat by General Montgomery. Rommel (played by accomplished British actor James Mason) still wants to believe in the Führer at this point, but is shocked and disgusted by suicidal orders ordering him to stand or die; with naiveté that smacks of willful denial, he chooses to blame these insane orders on the men around Hitler instead of Hitler himself, despite Hitler’s signature. Ill and discouraged, he is recalled to Germany before Hitler’s bungling finally destroys the Afrika Korps. Rommel feels Hitler has betrayed his men but is still making excuses for him, and plunges whole-heartedly into his next big assignment: preparing the Normandy coastline against the impending Allied invasion. Meanwhile, he proves less skillful in other matters, particularly when approached by an old friend, Dr. Karl Stroelin (Cedric Hardwicke), who sounds him out about a plot to assassinate Hitler. This is the real center of The Desert Fox; the internal conflict of a man who has only ever wanted to be a simple soldier, but must reluctantly confront the more complicated reality. Ironically, for this military man who never wanted anything to do with politics, it will be politics which will cost him his life.

This is inherently dramatic material, but The Desert Fox comes dangerously close to turning what has potential to easily be a rollicking war biopic into a dull and dreary movie. With its limited budget and narrow scope, it gives us the more personal side of a famed General, but anyone expecting plenty of epic war action won’t get enough here to satisfy their appetite. The battles consist entirely of WWII stock footage, which sometimes drags on for too long and isn’t always integrated well with the rest of the movie. We almost always see Rommel with his officers at headquarters; in fact, Rommel was very much a frontline commander who has been criticized by some military historians for impetuously dashing off to battle and often being out of touch with his staff for hours, personally leading tank attacks and once driving so far ahead of his troops on reconnaissance that he was mistaken for the enemy and shot at by his own men. The film doesn’t really bring that across. It is also worth noting that the film starts at the beginning of Rommel’s disillusionment with Hitler at El Alamein. Not only does beginning at the turning point of El Alamein mean we don’t see Rommel in his heyday and thus have to settle for being told- incessantly- how brilliant he is without ever really seeing for ourselves why he is such a legendary figure, it also conveniently omits the previous years in which Rommel held an exalted opinion of the Führer, even more so than some of his brother German Generals. Another problem with The Desert Fox is its structure. The opening failed British commando raid, while a true event, has nothing to do with the main storyline, and seems tacked on to provide an action-packed opening (and maybe bump up the still only eighty-eight minute running time). After that, The Desert Fox is a pretty basic skim through of Rommel’s final months, giving us a lot of scenes of characters standing around having dry conversations, occasionally interspersed with some stock battle footage.

James Mason is by far the best-known Rommel portrayer, and his performance has been much-praised, but Mason himself never felt he quite did the role justice, and I am afraid I would have to agree. Mason does not act badly, per se, but he seems ill-suited to the part. I admit part of this is because he is British. The cast of The Desert Fox is made up of British and American actors, only one or two of whom, in small roles, make any attempt at a German accent. Mason is more distracting than the others, partly because he is the main character, partly because his thorough Englishness is not only a matter of his accent, but also his manner. Rommel was from a lower-middle class family with a bulldoggish attitude and a rough tongue who was not afraid to snap at Generals of higher rank than himself. On the other hand, there were few actors who seemed more stereotypical stuffy, proper British gentlemen than James Mason, lacking the more blunt and rougher-around-the-edges demeanor that would have suited the part. In fact, while Mason’s Rommel is much better-known, Robert Hossein in obscure Italian B-movie The Battle of El Alamein fits much more with my image of Rommel. The narration repeatedly refers to Rommel as a ‘cool, hard professional soldier’, and a ‘single-minded warrior’, but Hossein seems to fit this image much more than Mason, and for that matter, for the fleetingness of his appearance, so did Karl Michael Vogler in Patton : more blunt, more hard-nosed and no-nonsense, with no time for Mason’s mannered melodrama. Arguably the best performance in the film, and the one which holds up the most, is a young Jessica Tandy, who is strong and underplayed as Rommel’s loyal wife Lucie. Cedric Hardwicke is also good as Dr. Stroelin, who must persuade Rommel to commit to the plot and tires of what he sees as Rommel hiding behind the excuse of military loyalty; he hits perhaps his strongest note when he asks why Rommel doesn’t display the same common sense and courage politically as he does militarily. Everett Sloane brings a veiled menace to General Burgdorf, relayer of Hitler’s final order to Rommel. Leo G. Carroll underplays a little too much as Rommel’s superior in France, Field Marshal von Rundstedt. Granted, von Rundstedt was a reserved aristocrat, but Carroll comes across as dreary and tediously dour. Luther Adler supplies a cartoonish cameo as Hitler. He looks basically nothing like him, and his over-the-top ‘vat is zat’ German accent proves that sometimes it’s just as well when actors don’t bother. A young, slim Richard Boone has a small role as Rommel’s faithful aid Aldinger.

Along the way there are a few effective scenes. Hardwicke has a nice bit where he eludes a Gestapo tail at the train station, the assassination attempt on Hitler works pretty well for its brief depiction, and most importantly, the final scene has not completely lost its poignancy. By 1950s standards, the filmmakers stick pretty close to the facts, even though the eighty-eight minute running time gives a pretty superficial skim through. The film also arguably goes overboard in its sanctifying of Rommel, who is so whitewashed of any unsavory aspects into such a paradigm of virtue that it threatens to make him a one-dimensional too good to be true character who only exists in movies. While Rommel was never a member of the Nazi Party, and in fact ignored orders from Hitler himself both to execute captured Jewish soldiers and British commandos, he initially idolized Hitler. Most modern historians also agree that Rommel’s alleged involvement in the plot against Hitler was probably exaggerated. According to those who knew him closely, it seems that, at most, he supported Hitler being arrested and placed on trial, opposing the actual assassination attempt on the grounds that it would make a martyr out of him, and even whether Rommel gave concrete support to the plot at all is an ambiguous subject of debate, although it seems clear that he at least knew of it and had some peripheral connections with the conspirators (his Chief of Staff in France, Hans Speidel, who is not so much as mentioned in the movie, was a prominent figure within the plot), which would have been enough to condemn him in Hitler’s eyes. At least one character trait The Desert Fox gets right is that in some ways Rommel was a curiously simple, naive man to whom it seemed to come as a jarring shock that his commander-in-chief was not all he initially believed him to be (Rommel is quoted by his son as remarking to him, about Hitler, that ‘sometimes you get the feeling he’s no longer quite normal’, in one of the great epic understatements in recorded history; later, unsurprisingly not so long before he ended up receiving a fatal visit from Hitler’s lackeys, Rommel was more forthrightly damning Hitler to his friends as a ‘damned fool’, ‘sadist’, and ‘pathological liar’). A warts and all portrait of Erwin Rommel, like the approach taken with George Patton in Patton, would be a much more complex and interesting character study. Rommel is entirely deserving of the center of attention in a lengthy, big-budget Patton-style biopic (Rommel’s overall story, which has always seemed like something that could have come out of a Shakespearean play, arguably provides even more fertile ground than Patton’s). Barring a suitable German actor, I think Ed Harris would be a good choice for the role. Unfortunately, a major big-budget biopic of a ‘Nazi’ General doesn’t seem likely anytime soon. As it is, I appreciate that this is the most extensive depiction of Rommel we are likely to get for the time being, but there is still plenty of room for another cast and crew to step up to the plate and give us the definitive depiction of The Desert Fox.

**1/2

DIRECTOR: Jean-Jacques Annaud

CAST:

Jude Law, Joseph Fiennes, Rachel Weisz, Ed Harris, Bob Hoskins, Ron Perlman, Eva Mattes, Gabriel Thomson, Matthias Habich

REVIEW:

The Russian front in WWII hasn’t gotten much attention in a big-budget war film, so French director Jean-Jacques Annaud deserves some credit for giving us a rarely-shown viewpoint. However, the result is a mixed bag.

In late 1942, the German Sixth Army advanced on the Russian city of Stalingrad. While of limited strategic importance, the city was of enormous symbolic significance because it bore Stalin’s name. The brutal siege carried on for months, resulting in over a million people killed in some of the most savage house-to-house urban warfare in military history. In the end, the Soviets’ dogged tenacity won out, an entire German army was obliterated for the first time in the war, and many historians mark this as the turning point of WWII. In the middle of this is the story of Russian sniper Vassili Zaitsev (Jude Law), who racks up scores of German officers and his propagandized by his friend, commissar Danilov (Joseph Fiennes, brother of Ralph), who sees a hero to build up, both to save flagging Soviet morale and to appease the bombastic Nikita Khrushchev (Bob Hoskins), who has arrived in Stalingrad to whip things into shape. Soon, Zaitsev has picked off so many Germans that they send an aristocratic sniper, the skilled and implacable Major Konig (Ed Harris), to hunt him down. Meanwhile, both Zaitsev and Danilov fall for a female sniper, Tenia (Rachel Weisz), whose parents were killed by the Germans.

Arguably Enemy‘s best scene is its first, as scores of insufficiently armed Russian troops are hurled headlong across the Volga into the ruins of Stalingrad, first enduring bombings and strafing runs by Stuka dive bombers, and then sent in a futile charge against a dug-in German position. There’s a bit of Saving Private Ryan in the bloody chaos of this opening sequence, and the brutality of the Soviet regime toward its own people is not glossed over; when the survivors try to retreat, they are gunned down by their own officers just as mercilessly as if they had kept charging toward the Germans. The recreation of the devastated city is effective and convincing, taking the audience on a tour of bombed-out buildings, underground tunnels, and huge empty factories where Zaitsev and Konig lie in ambush. From a technical standpoint, Enemy at the Gates is a well-crafted film.

Unfortunately, Enemy at the Gates also has problems, most prominently that it can’t seem to make up its mind whether it wants to be a gritty, realistic war movie, or a cliched wartime love story. We are plunged into one of the most brutal battles of WWII in which over a million people died horribly, and then spend most of our time, when we’re not watching a contest between two snipers, focusing on whether Tenia will end up with Zaitsev or Danilov. Annaud spends the money and the effort setting up epic battle sequences, and then, after the Zaitsev vs. Konig duel is resolved, doesn’t even bother to show us how the battle ended. Pearl Harbor-style, epic history is diminished to a one-on-one vendetta and a love triangle. It doesn’t really matter how the Siege of Stalingrad turns out, just so long as Jude Law and Rachel Weisz end up together.

Much more interesting than the love triangle hand-wringing is the cat-and-mouse game between Jude Law’s wide-eyed Zaitsev and the older, more professional, unemotional Konig. Zaitsev is a naturally prodigiously talented sniper, but Konig is not only at least as skilled as he is, but also far more ruthless. The real Zaitsev did not have the pretty boy looks- or the crisp English accent- of Jude Law, but if the accent isn’t too much of a distraction, Law is actually pretty good at playing both Zaitsev as a steely-eyed killer and the more naive and sensitive side. Rachel Weisz and Joseph Fiennes aren’t bad, either, but their characters are mostly on hand to supply the more soap opera-esque elements, and thus not as interesting. Incidentally, no one really makes any attempt at a Russian accent, so we have Law, Fiennes, and Weisz speaking in their natural prim English accents, and just to make the bag of accents a little more inconsistent, Ed Harris speaks with his normal American voice but shares a couple scenes with native German actor Matthias Habich (as Sixth Army commander General Paulus) who has a German accent. Americanness aside, however, Harris is still well-cast, and with his frosty blue eyes and stoic demeanor, brings a little extra something to an underwritten character. Ron Perlman provides a little comic relief in a small role as another Russian sniper, and Bob Hoskins, who looks the part pretty well, is suitably gruff and profane as Khrushchev.

The contest between Zaitsev and Konig is psychological as well as physical; Zaitsev’s confidence falters when he realizes the caliber of his opponent, while Konig seems to inexorably close in with cold, clinical, professional detachment. Unfortunately, after taking pains to provide Konig with his own (however harsh and ruthless) sense of honor, and a few admirable qualities- he’s too professional and all-business to pay any attention to Nazi propaganda, he admires Zaitsev’s cleverness, and can respect a Russian’s sense of loyalty to his own side even as it obliges him to kill him- the film throws in a gratuitous and unnecessary ‘evil German’ random atrocity scene, that like love triangles, seems a requisite in big-budget Hollywood WWII movies. Neverthless, it’s in this high-stakes chess game, where the only options are victory or dying unknown and unmarked, where the movie finds its focus and its interest. The rest- the love story, and the melodrama that too few WWII would-be epics have the confidence in the inherent drama of their material to do without- feels like unwieldly fat lumped onto a tight and streamlined frame.

**1/2

DIRECTOR: Steven Soderbergh

CAST:

George Clooney, Cate Blanchett, Tobey Maguire, Beau Bridges, Jack Thompson,Ravil Isyanov, Tony Curran, Christian Oliver, Leland Orser

REVIEW:

The Good German is director Steven Soderbergh’s (Traffic, Ocean’s Eleven) adaptation of Joseph Kanon’s 2001 novel, but Soderbergh chose not to simply do a straightforward filming of Kanon’s book, but used it as his chance to attempt a film experiment of his own- making the movie, set in 1945, as if it had actually been made in the 1940s. The Good German is Soderbergh’s ode to the old noir thrillers that might have starred the likes of Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman or Marlene Dietrich, and as far as look, style, and tone goes, he has achieved a virtually spot-on imitation. Unfortunately, Soderbergh is so intent on making sure the movie looks and feels right that he largely neglects another important step- actually making it interesting.

It’s 1945, shortly after Germany’s surrender to the Allies. Berlin is devastated and occupied by the US, UK, and USSR. Truman, Churchill, and Stalin are preparing to hold a conference at Potsdam to decide the post-war face of Europe. Into this comes American war correspondent Jake Geismer (George Clooney), who arrives in Berlin to cover the Big Three conference, but soon finds more than he expected, namely his old flame, Lena Brandt (Cate Blanchett channeling the likes of Ingrid Bergman, Greta Garbo, and Marlene Dietrich), on the arm of his weaselly driver, Tully (Tobey Maguire), who’s involved in the black market. Tully is in the middle of making some shady deal with Russian General Sikorsky (Ravil Isyanov) involving Lena’s supposedly dead husband Emil (Christian Oliver), a Nazi scientist who is now a sought after figure by both the Americans and the Russians. But Tully’s body is soon thereafter dragged out of the river at Potsdam, nearly causing an international incident, with both the Americans and Russians posturing to avoid embarrassing themselves, guilty parties scrambling to cover their secrets, and Jake finding himself sucked into something he wanted no part of, with Lena square in the middle.

The Good German is a prime example of a movie that’s longer on style than substance. Besides not being restricted by the rating codes of the 1940s (there is plenty of profanity and a brief sex scene), and the presences of modern film faces, most prominently George Clooney, Cate Blanchett, and Tobey Maguire, one happening upon The Good German could conceivably be mistaken into believing they were watching a film from the time period it emulates. Soderbergh actually filmed The Good German using only the tools, cameras, sound equipment, and lighting used in the 1940s, and the movie was shot entirely in black-and-white, with plenty of archival footage of 1945 Berlin. From a purely technical standpoint, Soderbergh has made a near perfect imitation of a 1940s noir film, but from a cinematic and storytelling standpoint, his product is more flawed. Soderbergh has concentrated so meticulously on a perfect faux ‘40s noir thriller that he neglected developing interesting characters and an engaging story. There is the requisite murky, convoluted noir plot in which seemingly no one can be trusted, but the characters inhabiting it and the way in which Soderbergh has filmed everything results in none of it being truly thrilling or gripping. Everything has a feel of clinical detachment to it, and the result is that while The Good German might be mildly intriguing, it’s not engrossing or absorbing, especially once the novelty wears off and there’s not a whole lot to keep us engaged beyond the gimmick. As a matter of fact, there are times, particularly as the movie goes on, when The Good German seems too gimmicky for it’s own good. Considering the amount of profanity on display, it seems a little pointless to keep up pretenses of being a 1940s film, and it’s a little distracting to have the old-school obviously-matted-in background behind people like George Clooney and Tobey Maguire, as if the movie is being too ‘wink wink nudge nudge’ and self-consciously artsy. What Soderbergh has attempted- and at least on a technical level, achieved- here is interesting from a filmmaking point of view, but one wonders if it was really the best way to bring Kanon’s story to the screen. There is a plot here, but it’s handled in too low-key a way to build up any sense of urgency as we follow Geismer meandering around Berlin. Overall, the movie itself, like stars George Clooney and Cate Blanchett, might look great, but it doesn’t have a lot to do.

George Clooney and Cate Blanchett seem perfectly in their element imitating old screen actors (the sex and language gives away that this isn’t actually a ‘40s film, but Clooney and Blanchett don’t). They’re not memorable performances, but if their ambition, like Soderbergh, was to capture the style of 1940s film, they both succeed. Tobey Maguire, given a chance to go against his Peter Parker persona, supplies a little more juice as the belligerent Tully, but he doesn’t make it past the one-third mark. Of the other cast members, Beau Bridges is effective in the shifty military man type role we might expect to see Brian Cox in, with Ravil Isyanov as his Soviet equivalent. Australian actor Jack Thompson is an American Congressman, and Leland Orser, who’s no stranger to WWII material (he had small roles in Saving Private Ryan and Pearl Harbor) is the US District Attorney stationed in Berlin.

Berlin in 1945, at the end of WWII, with the German capital in shambles and occupied by Allied powers between whom rivalries and fissures were already beginning to emerge as soon as their common enemy was vanquished, and an extensive black market network popping up under their noses, offers no shortage of material for a book or film, and The Good German does an effective job of capturing the look of the war-torn city (this is aided largely by incorporating snippets of actual 1940s footage, which blends in better with the black-and-white than if the film had been made in color). It also raises a few tricky moral dilemmas (albeit in its clinical, passive way): is it justifiable for an individual’s crimes during wartime to be overlooked afterwards if he possesses skills or information to benefit the victors? Lena may have done questionable things in the name of survival and self-preservation during the war, but how easy or fair is it for others to pronounce judgment on her after the fact? These are valid questions, but they are addressed flatly and not delved into in much depth. The Good German takes the view that in the murky politics and moral grays of post-war Europe, no nation (including both Germany and the victorious Allies) and very few individuals could honestly claim to have entirely clean hands.

The Good German shifts in its perspective three times- the first twenty minutes or so is mostly from the point of view of Tully, the middle section is Geismer, and the conclusion is largely Lena. Tully, a conniving bully behind his innocent apple-pie demeanor, is more interesting than Geismer or Lena, and the movie maintains interest during his opening section. Unfortunately once the closest thing we have to an antagonist is quickly disposed of, we follow Geismer all over Berlin and realize he’s not a very engaging protagonist. Geismer doesn’t seem especially smart or heroic, and never really seems to achieve much. He wanders around Berlin having tough-talking noirish encounters with a lot of shady military men, Soviet and American, who all know more than they’re saying, exchanges significant looks with Lena as the melodramatic 1940s music swells, and gets beaten up a few times. He’s dull, and as our focal point, he certainly leaves a lot to be desired. Lena, meanwhile, slinks around in the shadows, looking and acting like the prototypical 1940s noir femme fatale, but like the movie itself, there’s nothing more to her. She looks the part, but she’s never developed into anything more than a murky enigma, even when we learn some more information about her (including just how low she went to save herself during the war). The only interesting thing about this way of unfolding the plot is that as soon as the perspectives change, we are privy to information known only to one character. Tully knows things Geismer doesn’t, and Lena knows things both are oblivious to. The revelation of Tully’s killer is moderately unexpected, and the movie picks up somewhat as it reaches its climax involving an assassin pursuing our characters through a crowd watching a military parade thrown by the occupying powers. Unfortunately, we don’t really care about or have any interest in any of these people, and the plot remains too murky and convoluted.

Give Soderbergh some credit for trying something different. Filming a movie set in the 1940s as if it was actually being made in the time period was an audacious undertaking, and the novelty alone keeps our attention for a while. Unfortunately, viewed on its own as a movie, it’s only mediocre, not engaging or memorable. There are things to appreciate about what Soderbergh has accomplished here, but The Good German goes down as, at best, an interesting failed experiment.

**

DIRECTOR: Steven Spielberg

CAST:

Harrison Ford, Karen Allen, Paul Freeman, Ronald Lacey, John Rhys-Davies, Denholm Elliott, Wolf Kähler, Anthony Higgins, Alfred Molina

REVIEW:

As a child in the 1940s, George Lucas was enthralled by the serials depicting the hero ending every week in a cliffhanger, only to make a death-defying return the next week. In 1977, fresh off his first Star Wars film, Lucas vacationed in Hawaii, where he met up with Steven Spielberg, who had likewise suddenly made a name for himself with 1975’s Jaws, and the two budding visionaries decided they needed to work together. Their first joint project became Raiders of the Lost Ark, which introduced theatergoers to the character of Indiana Jones, soon to become an iconic figure in American film, and transformed the genre of action movies. Before Indiana Jones, James Bond was the reigning model for action heroes and the films that showcased them to follow. Indiana Jones was a new kind of hero who at the same time harkened back to the stars of the serials Lucas used as his inspiration. Unlike the debonair James Bond, Indy was a rugged, rough-and-tumble everyman (albeit an exceptionally skilled and daring one) who gets battered and bruised, wears “lived-in” clothes, and doesn’t always operate smoothly with the women. He’s not invincible, and his narrow escapes are partly due to skill, partly due to luck, mostly due to brazen derring-do. Rarely does a film have us asking “how’s he going to get out of this?” more times than Raiders of the Lost Ark.

1936: Part-time archaeology professor, part-time globe-trotting adventurer Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) braves a series of death traps to get his hands on a priceless artifact, only to have it snatched from his hands by his rival Belloq (Paul Freeman). Frustratingly returning empty-handed (and narrowly escaping unfriendly natives), Indy returns to Marshall College, where he and his friend and colleague Marcus Brody (Denholm Elliott) are met by Army intelligence officials who’ve intercepted a transmission from a secret German archaeological dig in Cairo searching for the Ark of the Covenant, whose bearer is said to wield the power of God. The race begins to find the lost Ark before the Nazis, which reunites Indy with an old flame, Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen), who holds a piece of the puzzle, and takes them to Cairo, where they meet up with another ally, Sallah (John Rhys-Davies), who has been recruited to work on the Nazi dig site. Indy learns that his nemesis Belloq is helping the Nazis look for the Ark, and the contest will involve street fights, car chases, snakes, trucks, ships, planes, a submarine, and the mysterious power of the Ark.

The reason for Indiana Jones’ popularity is simple and obvious; its sheer sense of fun. Indiana’s adventures are fast-paced, breezy entertainment. The story features sadistic Nazis, the Ark of the Covenant, secret chambers filled with spiders, snakes, pits, poison darts, arrows, fierce natives, and a huge rolling boulder (in probably the best-known sequence from the entire series), and the climax deals out a gruesome fate for the bad guys, but none of this is ever taken too seriously. Raiders walks the fine line between too jokey and too serious like a tightrope. It’s not quite an action-comedy, but there’s plenty of humor spread around. There’s a sense of freshness, enthusiasm, and spontaneity that none of its sequels quite matched (considering this is the original introduction of the character, that might be inevitable). One of the movie’s biggest laughs came from one of Ford’s improvisations- when Indy encounters a fearsome sword-wielder in Cairo, he simply draws his gun and shoots him. Another gag involves Ronald Lacey’s Toht pulling out a pair of nunchuckas and seeming poised to create some fiendish torture device before turning them into a coat hanger. The line ‘it’s not the years honey, it’s the mileage’ was ad-libbed by Ford. When Raiders came out, Harrison Ford had already been seen as Han Solo in two episodes of the Star Wars series, but while Han is undoubtedly a close runner-up, the role Ford is probably most associated with is Indiana Jones. It’s no surprise that the two are Ford’s best-known characters; while Indy is not a retread of Han, the two have a lot of similarities: roguish adventurous scoundrels with hearts of gold. Rarely has there been a more perfect match-up between an actor and character. Ford is not a great thespian, but Indiana Jones plays to all of his strengths: his rugged good looks, his everyman demeanor, his rough-and-tumble physicality, and his self-deprecating humor, creating a hero who might have shining armor somewhere under all the dust and dirt he’s accumulated. Indy might be a daring adventurer, but he’s no superman, nor a suave, dashing James Bond wannabe; his clothes look old and worn, he gets the crap beaten out of him more than once, he’s terrified of snakes, and he doesn’t always know what he’s doing. Ford has played many popular roles in many high-profile films, but he has never seemed more at home in any character’s skin than he does as Indiana Jones.

This isn’t the kind of movie for which acting awards are handed out, but the supporting cast is equally well-chosen. Karen Allen is a damsel who’s not always in distress; she throws one of the hardest punches in the movie, and has spunk, brains, and backbone. Marion is the most formidable and the most memorable of Indy’s various female entanglements, and the one who comes closest to being an equal partner rather than simply a love interest. Paul Freeman is the suave, cultured villain, the closest of any of the series’ baddies to an amoral version of Indy. His confrontation with Indy in a Cairo restaurant and a later scene with Marion are two of the film’s highlights. Ronald Lacey is perfect as the deliciously creepy Gestapo agent Toht, a role that decades before could have been played by Peter Lorre, and John Rhys-Davies brings his imposing, affable presence to Indy’s Cairo ally Sallah. Rhys-Davies’ Sallah is only along for part of the ride, and Denholm Elliott’s Marcus Brody, Indy’s friend and colleague at college, only appears at the beginning and the end, but both seemingly fairly minor characters make enough impression for their absence in Temple of Doom to be felt (both returned, Elliott in a much more sizable role, in The Last Crusade). Tall, blond, blue-eyed, square-jawed, prototypically Aryan-looking Wolf Kähler is the German commander Dietrich, and there is a small opening role for a young Alfred Molina.

Raiders blazed the trail not only for the following Indiana Jones adventures, but for obvious Indiana Jones-inspired characters like Michael Douglas’ Jack T. Colton in Romancing the Stone and Brendan Fraser’s Rick O’Connell in The Mummy, and thirty years later, it continues to be held up as a model of a virtually flawless action movie. It’s perfectly-paced, allowing enough breathing space in between the regular series of action sequences to allow the necessary minimums of exposition and character development. It wisely doesn’t get long-winded on exposition about the Ark, giving us a nicely concise summary early on, and while this isn’t the kind of movie for three-dimensional characters and Oscar-worthy acting material, Indy and Marion are developed enough for us to have an active interest in seeing them make it out of their numerous scrapes. Everything is done in just the right amounts, not too little or too much. The action sequences are crackingly tense, dynamic, and deftly-handled. Raiders is from the era before CGI, and while that’s not to say there are no special effects in the movie, stunt work, location-filming, and elaborate action set pieces had the largest role, not effects technicians behind a computer screen. Harrison Ford did most of his own stunts himself, with the cuts and bruises to show for it, and scenes like the car chase that involves Indy latching onto the bottom of a truck with his whip and being dragged behind it, remains thrilling because all of it is real. Prolific composer John Williams, who had provided the indelible scores for Spielberg’s Jaws and Lucas’ Star Wars, added another one of the most iconic and instantly recognizable scores of his long career.

Audiences at the time fell in love with Raiders and the character of Indiana Jones, and not only did this ensure Indy would ride again, it made Raiders the grandfather of many of today’s action films, most of which are vastly inferior, while Raiders itself remains mostly timeless due to the perfect mix of the right ingredients- a lot of action, a lot of humor, a likable hero, a dash of romance, hissable baddies, and a script that handles them all without overplaying or underplaying any of its hands. Raiders of the Lost Ark might not be a great film, but it is great entertainment, either in 1981 or 2008.

****

DIRECTOR: Steven Spielberg

CAST:

Harrison Ford, Sean Connery, Allison Doody, Denholm Elliott, John Rhys-Davies, Julian Glover, Michael Byrne, River Phoenix

REVIEW:

After the general disappointment over Temple of Doom – and the film’s occasional weirdness- Last Crusade, as if deciding to play it safe, takes us back into familiar territory- Indy revisits the deserts of the Middle East in search of an ancient legendary religious artifact, the Nazis are once again the bad guys, Denholm Elliott’s Marcus Brody and John Rhys-Davies’ Sallah return, and the most exciting and extended action sequence is a duel between Indy and the Nazis in the desert. To help avoid making Last Crusade seem like too much of a retread of Raiders of the Lost Ark , we have Sean Connery thrown into the mix as Indy’s never-before-seen father. In fact, it could very easily be argued- and might even be undeniable- that making the centerpiece relationship of the film a father-son dynamic instead of a romantic one is the most original part of the movie, and it opens up doors to plenty of fresh material that adds a very welcome spark.

The prologue also sets itself apart from others in the series in that it takes us all the way back to 1912 Utah, with a young Indiana Jones (River Phoenix) showing his already-developed knack for getting into trouble and making daring escapes from it, as he tries to get the Cross of Coronado away from a gang of robbers. He loses the cross, but in grudging respect for the boy’s daring and tenaciousness his opponent gives him his trademark fedora. After that, the rest of the movie takes place in 1938, with Dr. Jones once again drawn away from his teaching duties, this time for something more personal than priceless artifacts: his estranged father, Professor Henry Jones (Sean Connery), has gone missing while researching the location of the Holy Grail. Funded by a wealthy American, Walter Donovan (Julian Glover), with his own interests in the Grail- and a little too much interest in the supposed eternal life it grants to anyone who drinks from it- Indy- with his friend and colleague Marcus Brody (Denholm Elliott) tagging along- heads to Venice, Italy, where he meets an Austrian colleague of his father’s, the comely Dr. Elsa Schneider (Allison Doody). As the search goes on, Indy finds that the Nazis are again involved, all around him cannot be trusted, and meets back up with an old friend from Raiders, Sallah (John Rhys-Davies).

While Temple of Doom ventured into dark and creepy territory, Last Crusade stays more lightweight. Out of the three original Indiana Jones films, it’s probably the one that could most be described as an action-comedy, but that’s not a bad thing. The action and humor is spread around more evenly and better integrated than in Temple of Doom, where the tone veered from slapstick comedy to human sacrificing rituals including hearts being pulled out and victims lowered into pits of fire. Overall, if Last Crusade isn’t quite as deft as Raiders, it’s much more in the same vein, which is a welcome development. The prologue has a degree of wit to it, particularly in the way it acknowledges Ford’s chin scar and shows the origins of his fedora, and starts us off with an entertaining action sequence involving a chase on top of a train filled with circus animals. Other cliffhanger sequences involve a boat chase through the canals of Venice, and an escape from a German Zeppelin involving a dogfight between Indy and his dad and German fighters. Easily the most exciting and extended action sequence the film has to offer is the desert showdown between Indy on horseback and a tank commanded by Nazi Colonel Vogel (an enjoyably scenery-chomping Michael Byrne). This sequence took weeks to film and arrange, and harkens back to the truck chase in Raiders.

The six-year gap between Temple of Doom and Last Crusade does nothing to diminish Harrison Ford’s ability to don the fedora and whip and go off on another adventure as Indiana Jones (hopefully the same is true of the nineteen-year gap between the so-called Last Crusade and Kingdom of the Crystal Skull). Ford is in as fine form as Indy as ever, and enjoys great comedic rapport with Sean Connery (Connery was actually only twelve years older than his onscreen son Ford). Ford slips back into his character like an old, comfortable shoe, and Indy’s relationship with his father adds another dimension to the character and lets us see Indy as a little more than the famed adventurer. The former 007 Connery, cheerfully content to ride in the passenger seat and surrender the action hero reins to a (slightly) younger man, provides the vast majority of the movie’s comic relief, and is much more successful at it than Kate Capshaw was in the previous film. In fact, Connery is so delightful that it’s almost a shame he’s only in one installment. Allison Doody is more dubious than the other Indy women, with a touch of the femme fatale. Denholm Elliott, whose role is much expanded from Raiders of the Lost Ark, provides some additional comic relief as the doddering Brody (sadly, Elliott was diagnosed with AIDS shortly before filming began, and died in 1992). John Rhys-Davies is another welcome returning veteran as Sallah. As the lead villain, Julian Glover is adequate but not especially memorable. He’s too urbane to be truly nasty or menacing. Donovan is cut from the same cloth as Belloq, cultured men who have gotten in bed with the Nazis for their own purposes but aren’t used to personally dirtying their lily-white hands, but Belloq was more interesting. On the other hand, Michael Byrne is a great Nazi caricature- blond, blue-eyed, and maniacally gung-ho. His tank duel with Indy is the best and most extended action sequence in the movie, especially since he comes across as the most formidable and nasty of the baddies Crusade has to offer (he’s got a funny bit where he interrogates Connery and punctuates every sentence by slapping him with his glove).

While the father-son bickering between Indy and his father (who has the embarrassing habit of referring to him as Junior) forms the crux of the movie’s humor, probably the film’s most clever tongue-in-cheek bit involves Indy and his dad visiting Berlin in the middle of a Nazi rally where Indy, disguised as a German soldier, has a face-to-face encounter with Adolf Hitler. Certain he is trapped, Indy defeatedly hands his father’s diary detailing his exhaustive hunt for the Grail, only to have the Führer obliviously autograph it and hand it right back (in a bit of trivia, the actor who briefly appears as Hitler is the late Michael Sheard, best-remembered as the ill-fated Admiral Ozzel in The Empire Strikes Back, the first of several subordinates to be “Force-choked” by Darth Vader; Ronald Lacey, Raiders’ Gestapo agent Toht, is also glimpsed during the Nazi rally as Heinrich Himmler). Several of Connery’s droll pronouncements- ‘this is intolerable’ and ‘our situation has not improved’- are priceless, and of course there’s the requisite creature scene no Indy movie is complete without. This time it’s rats. There’s the ‘legendary object punishes bad guys’ climax, and a ride into the sunset that seems about as fitting a close to the adventures of Indiana Jones as can be expected from a film titled The Last Crusade, but with 2008’s Kingdom of the Crystal Skull , all is proven not so final after all. At the time, after scheduling conflicts with Harrison Ford and Steven Spielberg delayed its release for five years, Last Crusade was met enthusiastically by audiences and became the second highest-grossing movie of the year, second only to Tim Burton’s Batman and surpassing other such high-profile titles as Back to the Future Part II, Lethal Weapon 2 , and Star Trek V. Of the three Indiana Jones sequels, Last Crusade is the most similar to Raiders of the Lost Ark, and if it doesn’t quite equal it, it comes close, and does a worthy job of recapturing the breezy sense of fun and adventure that makes the series so popular.

***1/2

DIRECTOR: Joe Johnston

CAST:

Chris Evans, Hayley Atwell, Tommy Lee Jones, Hugo Weaving, Stanley Tucci, Toby Jones, Dominic Cooper, Sebastian Stan, Neal McDonough, Richard Armitage, Samuel L. Jackson

REVIEW:

Captain America is a competently-made, serviceable comic book superhero origin movie that doesn’t merit any scorn but also doesn’t generate overwhelming enthusiasm.  Tying in with Iron Man, Iron Man 2, and Thor, it’s the last of the Marvel comics movies introducing each of the individual Avengers who will be united onscreen in 2012’s The Avengers, and it’s debatable whether the Cap’n would have seen the screen otherwise.  Despite his long-running existence in the comics (since 1941), Captain America is no longer considered among the top tier of comic book superheroes.  Part of the problem is probably also that audiences and reviewers are suffering comic book superhero fatigue; with so many superhero origin stories hitting the screens, it’s hard to make them all stand out, and the fact that they all inevitably follow the same basic formula makes it start to seem generic after so many times.  I enjoyed the film, but was mildly underwhelmed.  There’s nothing really ‘wrong’ with it that I can put my finger on, but it lacks the certain spark that set Iron Man above the pack.

Captain America at least one has one distinction in its 1940s WWII setting.  Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) is a 90-pound asthmatic who has applied and been rejected for the army five times.  His tenacity gets him noticed by Dr. Abraham Erskine (an almost unrecognizable Stanley Tucci), a German scientist who like Einstein has defected to the Allies and is running a secret project to create a new generation of super soldier.  Erskine’s help lands Rogers in a camp under Colonel Phillips (Tommy Lee Jones, fun as usual) and British Agent Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell), where he undergoes an experimental procedure.  When he emerges, he is tall, buff, superhumanly strong and fast, and ready for action.  But Steve finds himself used only for propaganda selling war bonds to the tunes of cheesy theme songs, until he defies orders to go on a rescue mission after his captured friend Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan).  From there, he gets entangled with a plot involving HYDRA, a secret branch of Nazi special forces led by Johann Schmidt (Hugo Weaving).  Officially, HYDRA takes its orders from Hitler, but Schmidt is a megalomaniac with dreams of replacing the Führer and ruling the world.  He is also obsessed with finding artifacts he believes will give him the power of the gods, and has acquired a superweapon he intends to unleash on the capital cities of the world.

There’s nothing surprising about Captain America, and that’s part of the lack of excitement.  It follows the basic formula of the comic book superhero origin story to the letter.  There’s the underdog protagonist, the obligatory love interest, the megalomaniac villain with a mad scheme, a few action sequences, and a climactic one-on-one confrontation, all handled by Joe Johnston with competence but not a lot of flair.  Despite attempts to make her a tough go-getter, the ‘love story’ subplot between Steve and Maggie never feels more than perfunctory.  Equally underwhelming is the final showdown between Captain America and Schmidt/Red Skull, and the bad guy’s fate is left disappointingly ambiguous. Both the nature of the magic cube in Schmidt’s possession, and his motives, feel explained a little vaguely and could have benefitted from more development. Like both Iron Mans and Thor, Captain America includes an epilogue serving to set up The Avengers- and again featuring a cameo by Samuel L. Jackson’s Nick Fury. Unlike the above three, however, Captain America feels less like it can stand on its own and more like a two-hour preview serving less the purpose of a memorable motion picture then providing the last- or first- Avenger with a backstory.  In fact, it spends so much time on the central character’s origin story that the rest of the plot feels underdeveloped and there’s not enough time left to establish a compelling story.

The CGI work is exceptional, seamlessly transforming hunky Chris Evans into a five-foot tall, ninety-pound shadow of himself.  It’s tricky to pull off effects like this without it looking goofy, but the CGI here is undetectable, and ‘Little Steve’ never looks anything less than a real person.  No CGI is used when he hits the opposite extreme; Evans’ impressively bulked-up physique is the real deal. Also effective is the makeup transforming Hugo Weaving into the hideously disfigured Red Skull, an example of a character at least physically looking like they have stepped straight off the comic panel into the film.  While the climactic confrontation is disappointingly anti-climactic, there are a few memorable action sequences, including the upgraded Steve’s first fight with a HYDRA spy, a raid on a HYDRA base, and a train ambush.  The movie has some fun with the 1940s propaganda cheesiness of the Captain America theme song and dancing pin-up girls; less intentional cheesiness occasionally seeps into the action sequences with their overuse of slow motion shots of Captain America sending foes flying (then again, it’s hard for a movie called Captain America not to have at least a mild cheese factor).  There are also elements sprinkled around besides the Nick Fury epilogue that serve as tie-ins to the other Avenger prequels, most prominently the inclusion of Howard Stark (Dominic Cooper), a young Howard Hughes-esque engineer and entrepreneur who supports Dr. Erskine’s project and, as comic fans can tell you, will go on to father Tony Stark/Iron Man (an older Howard made a cameo in Iron Man 2, played by John Slattery).

There aren’t any terrible performances, but there also isn’t likely to be much writing done about the acting. Chris Evans, no stranger to playing comic book superheroes after The Human Torch in the Fantastic Four films, is suitably square-jawed and heroic as Captain America, and has an earnest, straightforward demeanor that makes him easy to root for, and no more is needed.  Tommy Lee Jones is what we expect, entertainingly barking out crusty one-liners.  Hayley Atwell gives a dash of feistiness to the obligatory love interest.  Hugo Weaving’s Red Skull is a ho-hum dastardly megalomaniac, with only his grotesque appearance lending him any distinction.  Maybe it’s the generically-written, underdeveloped character, or a lack of enthusiasm on Weaving’s part (he made unflattering comments about the film and his role after its release), or a combination, but he’s a little disappointing and nowhere near as delicious as his Agent Smith in The Matrix.  Toby Jones plays his scientist sidekick Dr. Zola, a role that in another era seems like it would have been played by Peter Lorre.  Arguably the best performance comes from a barely recognizable Stanley Tucci as the Einstein-esque Dr. Erskine, who probably also has the least screentime.

Comic fans will probably enjoy Captain America; it’s competently-made, does an efficient job of laying out the superhero’s origins in an easy-to-follow manner, it has a breezy pace and a few moderately exciting action sequences.  I’m giving the movie three stars because it fulfills the basics of what it sets out to do.  All the basic points are hit with efficiency and clarity.  Like Steve Rogers, the movie answers the call of duty, but unlike him, it doesn’t go above and beyond.

***

DIRECTOR: Marvin J. Chomsky

CAST:

Rutger Hauer, Blythe Danner, Sir Derek Jacobi, Sir John Gielgud, Sir Ian Holm, Maria Schell, Trevor Howard, Elke Sommer, Stephen Collins, Renée Soutendijk, Randy Quaid, Robert Vaughn, Michael Gough, Maurice Roëves, Derek Newark, David Shawyer, George Murcell, Viveca Lindfors, Zoë Wanamaker

REVIEW:

Inside The Third Reich, a lengthy, critically acclaimed TV miniseries from two-time Emmy winner Marvin J. Chomsky, is a film adaptation of the same-named memoirs by Albert Speer, a bright, cultured German architect who became Adolf Hitler’s personal designer and later Minister of Armaments and War Production, ultimately spending twenty years in Spandau Prison for his use of slave labor to keep the German war effort going, during which time he ostensibly reflected on his errors in judgment and began to write his memoirs. Although forbidden to do so in prison, Speer smuggled them out through a sympathetic guard and formed them into an autobiography upon his release. As one of the few surviving individuals to have had such intimate contact with Hitler, Speer lived well off of book sales until his death shortly before its film adaptation. While many believe Speer to have downplayed his own role in the Third Reich, and criticize the miniseries for not questioning his account, its historical value is undeniable. Inside The Third Reich was filmed on a low budget over a few months of winter in Munich, which is made apparent by the presence of snow in nearly every outdoors scene throughout the miniseries. While the vast scope and detail of Speer’s writings require numerous events to be skipped over, it serves to give the viewer the basics of the workings of the Third Reich.

After the credits play against archive footage of Nazi rallies and death camps (the only onscreen images of the Holocaust in the miniseries), we begin with a young but already notably intelligent Albert Speer (Graham McGrath) growing up during WWI with his upper-class parents (Sir John Gielgud and Maria Schell). Both give fine performances; Gielgud is particularly good as the dignified, aristocratic Albert Sr., a man who may seem somewhat stiff, but is warmer than he may at first appear. As Speer grows up (now played by Dutch actor Rutger Hauer in one of his first international roles) and falls in love with Margarete Weber (Blythe Danner), the anti-Nazi feelings of his father, his friend and mentor Professor Heinrich Tessenow (Trevor Howard), and his new bride Margarete (whose anti-Nazi feelings were pointed out by a Speer biographer as having been exaggerated by the filmmakers) make for an uncomfortable situation when Speer attends a speech by Hitler and likes what he hears.

Several times throughout the miniseries we switch to Speer’s post-war conversations with an American officer (Don Fellows), when Speer is asked one simple question: why? Why did a person such as himself: cultured, intelligent, even in friendly relations with Jewish colleagues, support Adolf Hitler? We see what may be part of the answer upon Speer’s first encounter with the future Führer. Although Speer has professed agreement with Professor Tessenow, who dreads the thought of the Nazis in power, curiosity compels him to go see Hitler for himself. What follows is one of the best sequences in the miniseries, as highly-regarded British actor Sir Derek Jacobi delivers a persuasive speech about the suffering of struggling Germans, starting out in calm, schoolmasterly tones and building into an impassioned harangue against those supposedly responsible for Germany’s woes, including bankers, Communists, and Jews. It is not impossible to see why Speer approves of what he hears and ultimately stands in open support; this is before the Holocaust, before the vast crimes against humanity which made Adolf Hitler a despised name in history, and what he says about the shattered German economy and the plight of German workers is true. By the time he finally, inevitably, lashes out at the Jews, the crowd is already won over.

Speer becomes an active member of the Nazi Party, and things quickly begin to snowball, as he first serves as a chauffeur alongside American-born Nazi supporter Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstaengel (Randy Quaid) and next commissioned by Karl Hanke (a gung-ho Stephen Collins) to construct a Party headquarters building. Speer is excited to have his abilities recognized and appreciated, but the price is the end of his friendship with Tessenow. His increasing success also persuades him to overlook the negative aspects of Nazism- the loss of personal freedoms and the accelerating persecution of the Jews, even when this includes a university colleague. His rise in Nazi circles brings him into contact with Josef Goebbels (Ian Holm), Magda Goebbels (Elke Sommer), Heinrich Himmler (David Shawyer), Hermann Goering (George Murcell), Rudolf Hess (Maurice Roëves), Martin Bormann (Derek Newark), and eventually gains him the personal attention of Hitler himself. At the same time, he is increasingly alienating himself from his father, who deplores his son’s association with what he recognizes from the beginning as a dangerous criminal gang bent on total domination. Feeling removed from the uglier aspects of Hitler’s rule, Speer gladly accompanies him to his mountain retreat where he makes the acquaintance of Eva Braun (Dutch actress Renée Soutendijk). His crowning achievement comes when he presents the Führer with his most magnificent construction: the massive Reich Chancellery. Hitler is delighted, and Speer comes ever more into his esteem and confidence. As Hanfstaengel tells Speer, “you are the nearest thing he has got to a friend”. When war breaks out, Speer is concerned, but continues to throw his support behind the Reich, appointed Minister of Armaments and War Production, in which position he and Field Marshal Milch (Robert Vaughn) keep the war effort going through the use of slave labor. Despite the eager-to-please faithfulness with which he is portrayed by Hauer, Speer is never made to seem as cold-hearted as the other leading Nazis- more an opportunist jumping on the bandwagon than a true fanatical Nazi, he is not entirely comfortable with using slave labor, even if he shoves his misgivings to the back of his mind, does not seem to be personally anti-Semitic, and uses his clout to protect the anti-Nazi Professor Tessenow from the fanatical Dr. Rust (an icy Michael Gough). When Hitler finally declares that Germany be destroyed rather than surrender, a horrified Speer contemplates assassinating him, and travels to the headquarters of German field commanders, persuading them to disobey his scorched-earth orders. Nevertheless, he feels guilty about betraying Hitler’s trust, confessing his actions and shortly thereafter crying upon news of Hitler’s suicide, which he confesses to his American interrogator as the only time he has cried in his life. The Nuremberg Trials are not included onscreen, and the miniseries ends with the aftermath, as Speer is taken away to begin his twenty-year imprisonment.

The miniseries depicts the war and Hitler’s inner circle in a basic, fundamental manner, and the extermination of the Jews is not mentioned during the war sequences, only discussed with Speer and the American officer in the post-war prison scenes, when Speer denies any knowledge of it and seems genuinely upset by the death camp footage he was shown during the trials. Rutger Hauer has a somewhat limited acting range, with a tendency towards playing variations of the same character, but he does a fine job as the intelligent, elegant, but morally confused Speer, and manages to come across as less of ‘himself’ than usual, although his portrayal of Speer may be distorted by the fact that the miniseries relies on the account of Speer himself. As played by Hauer, he is an idealistic and well-meaning but somewhat weak and obsequious individual who is willing to put unpleasant realities out of his mind because the attraction of fame and success promised by his closeness to Hitler is too strong. Speer partially redeems himself by countermanding Hitler’s orders for the destruction of Germany, an action which undeniably requires the summoning of some backbone, but this act of moral courage is a little late in coming. Most of the rest of the cast is fairly good, with a few standouts, including Ian Holm’s zealous, energetic, and venomous Dr. Goebbels, playing “the poison dwarf” as an intelligent but malicious and fanatical man who viciously defends his place in Hitler’s inner circle, and Derek Newark as Hitler’s power-mongering secretary Martin Bormann, who treats with open hostility from the moment he lays eyes on him. We see how Goebbels, Bormann, and the others resent Speer’s sudden entry into the circle, but are forced to accept him when he falls under Hitler’s good graces (Goebbels warms to Speer, but Bormann treats him as a bitter rival to the end). Holm and Newark do solid jobs with their venomous characters, but the other top Nazis are not examined in much depth. Hess, Hanfstaengel, and Hanke leave the stage early on, although Roëves as Hess does have one frightening moment where he berates Speer for referring to Hitler as “Chancellor” rather than “Führer”. Himmler (David Shawyer) does little more than stand in the background, and Goering (Italian actor George Murcell) is never raised above a foppish caricature. Derek Jacobi’s critically-acclaimed, Emmy-winning performance as Hitler is not without its virtues, but in my opinion is overrated and only partially convincing. Jacobi’s resemblance to Hitler is only fair, but he does a good imitation of Hitler’s mannerisms and his vocal patterns, especially in his speech scene. To his credit, Jacobi remains restrained for the most part, never engaging in the wild-eyed maniac approach of too many Hitler portrayers, and attempts to bring a measure of depth and nuance to the role. We see Hitler in banal, day-to-day situations where he seems like a less-than-impressive figure. He loves presiding over dinner gatherings where he can ramble pompously on about his favorite subjects (including the virtues of vegetarianism and his hatred of skiing), or sitting enraptured by a film he has viewed countless times before (his entourage is often obviously bored). But he also shows a sense of humor, entertaining his entourage by doing impressions of other world leaders like Mussolini and Neville Chamberlain, and earns a laugh from Speer and the crowd during the speech scene by poking fun at his own overuse of the word “unshakable”. He has a playful moment with the otherwise often-neglected Eva Braun in the snow at Berchtesgaden. In another moment of rare emotional openness, he confesses to Speer shortly before his death that it will be easy for him to end his own life and be “liberated from this painful existence”. But in the few scenes where he is supposed to throw a fiery Hitlerian tantrum, Jacobi is incapable of projecting menace, and that is a significant failing for any actor playing Hitler. Jacobi’s Hitler comes across as a doddering, rambling dreamer, never as dangerous or fanatical as he should. Since Hitler’s role is so key to the storyline, this is a drawback to the miniseries. In fact, Holm as Goebbels seems far more sinister than Jacobi’s Hitler.

There are a few other failings with the miniseries. We see Speer’s friendship with Eva Braun, played by Renée Soutendijk as a childlike innocent devoted to her Adolf despite the pain he often causes her, but we see little of Magda Goebbels, with whom Speer also had a friendly relationship. Speer’s wife is inaccurately portrayed as vehemently anti-Nazi. The low-budget shoot during winter in Munich means that the outdoors throughout the miniseries continually have a covering of snow, even in scenes set during the summer. The miniseries gives the basic story of Speer’s involvement in the Third Reich, but an interested viewer should by all means read the book, which contains infinitely more material and much more in depth examinations of the principal personalities such as Himmler and Goering. Ultimately the viewer and reader must place themselves in Speer’s shoes and decide for themselves when he should have placed his conscience ahead of his career.

**1/2

DIRECTOR: Bryan Singer

CAST: Brad Renfro, Ian McKellen, Bruce Davison, David Schwimmer, Joshua Jackson, Ann Dowd, Elias Koteas, Michael Byrne, Joe Morton, Jan Triska

REVIEW:

WARNING: THIS REVIEW WILL REVEAL “SPOILERS”

Apt Pupil is a morbidly engrossing psychological thriller crafted with enough professionalism and ability to sometimes persuade us to overlook its questionable taste, even if the bad aftertaste lingers.  An adaptation of a novella by Stephen King (a previous attempt at filming it was mounted in 1988, starring Ricky Schroder, but fell through), it uses that ever-convenient go-to-guy of villains–Nazis–as a launching pad for a psychological character study.  Those seeking a conventional “thriller” might be disappointed.  Apt Pupil is disturbing, sometimes chilling, but the horror is not of the “boo!” variety.  Apt Pupil is a slow-burn foray into the heart of darkness that resides within two seemingly very different men, and how they feed each other’s worst impulses.

In a 1984 suburban American neighborhood, high school honors student Todd Bowden (Brad Renfro) is nursing a growing morbid obsession with the Holocaust.  After his history class and trips to the local library only wet his appetite, he finds a way to go straight to the source: meticulously compiling evidence that Arthur Denker (Ian McKellen), a reclusive, elderly German immigrant living in his neighborhood, is actually Kurt Dussander, a former concentration camp commandant and Nazi fugitive who has lived in anonymity for forty years.  When Todd approaches Denker/Dussander, he subjects him to an unusual form of blackmail.  All he wants, as he explains to a bewildered Dussander, is to hear about it firsthand, “everything they’re afraid to tell us in school”.  Dussander is unenthusiastic about this, but he’s cornered, so he reluctantly gives in.  As Todd listens with an unhealthy, disturbing fixation to Dussander’s horror stories of his past atrocities, he begins slipping further into an inner darkness.  Meanwhile, Dussander finds dark impulses which have lain dormant for forty years rising to the surface.  The seemingly two very different individuals form a twisted bond with shades of mentor and pupil as each awakens the other’s worst impulses.  But complications arise when the distracted Todd’s grades start slipping, which could lead to his parents (Bruce Davison, Ann Dowd) and guidance counselor (David Schwimmer) getting a little too nosy about what’s going on, and Todd learns that Dussander may not be as easily controlled as he thinks.

Ostensibly, Apt Pupil is a study in the nature of evil.  The phrase “the banality of evil” comes to mind.  The movie generates the creeping sense that evil can lurk anywhere, including in a handsome all-American honor student, or a frail old man who you might sit next to on the bus every day.  Bryan Singer directs with a sense of eerie dread lurking behind every frame.  The scenes in Todd’s high school and idyllic all-American neighborhood are imbued with a gold-tinted hue usually associated with romanticized “glory days”, inverted here with the disturbing undertone of unseen evil.  Despite being fixated with Holocaust horror stories, doodling swastikas in class, and even forcing Dussander to dress up in a Nazi uniform ordered from a costume shop, one gets the impression Todd is not specifically fascinated with Nazism, per se, so much as the morbid allure of the horror it wrought, which enraptures his macabre imagination.  If you’re looking for a human embodiment of evil, where better to look than a Nazi, reliably used by Hollywood for the past sixty years as a universal representation of villainy?  The central relationship between the callow youth and the wily old man is darkly interesting.  It has aspects of mentor and pupil, with Todd being the titular “apt pupil” (especially when he climatically blackmails and manipulates someone in the final scene using the exact same words Dussander had used against him earlier), a twisted pseudo-friendship (the initially infuriated Dussander eventually admits he enjoys the company, despite the deep distrust between them), and a power struggle.  Initially, Todd seems to have Dussander under his thumb, with the old man meekly submitting.  But while Todd is naturally smart, he’s still young and naive, with Dussander far older, more experienced, and more cunning, and the plot thickens when the crafty old man whips the rug out from under the boy and blackmails him in turn.  At the same time, Dussander’s physical fragility makes him vulnerable.  Their shifting dynamic is enough to keep us interested, which is important, given it’s the central focus.  For a while, not much else happens besides Todd and Dussander’s disturbing conversations.  A series of plot twists and complications crop up in the last third or so, including a homeless drunk (Elias Koteas) who sees too much, the pesky guidance counselor, a Holocaust survivor (Michael Byrne), and a Nazi hunter (Jan Triska), but for most of its runtime, Apt Pupil is slow-burn.

Apt Pupil has its share of effectively disturbing moments, but also others where it is disturbing for the wrong reasons.  Singer goes overboard into excessive scenes of questionable taste, including Todd having a waking nightmare about sharing a locker room shower with emaciated Holocaust victims, Dussander going into luridly in-depth detail in several of his wartime stories, and a scene in which Dussander, his taste for murder reinvigorated by the boy forcibly dragging him down memory lane, tries to stuff a struggling cat into his oven (which is paralleled by Todd’s abuse of a crippled dove).  The cat scene is well-done enough that, at least in the moment, it’s more disturbing than unintentionally campy, but its taste and that of various other moments is certainly questionable.  There’s something unsavory about Singer throwing Holocaust imagery at us in so blatant and heavy-handed a fashion to generate a “shock and horror” reaction, and it lends another level in which Apt Pupil is sometimes troubling in a way the filmmakers may not have intended.  I also have mixed feelings about SPOILER WARNING the climactic plot twist in which Dussander is recognized by a Holocaust survivor sharing a hospital room.  Its long-odds contrivances aside, the scene generates a powerful emotional response–in fact, it’s easily the most moving moment in the entire film, mostly because it’s one of the few to center on a sympathetic character–but at the same time, there’s the same vaguely unsavory feeling of using a Holocaust survivor as a plot device to bring the slow-boiling storyline to a climax.

While I have reservations of some of the film’s aspects, I have none about the acting, especially that of Ian McKellen (made up to look much older and more decrepit here than in his role in the X-Men series years later) who easily steals the show and dominates the screen, throwing himself with relish into the role of the decrepit but shrewd Denker/Dussander, whom we might loathe for his past actions but whose intelligence we can grudgingly respect, doing a smidgen of scenery-chewing without getting carried away (the English actor also adopts and consistently maintains a believable German accent).  Interestingly, McKellen himself has admitted since that he didn’t like his character, finding him a one-dimensional personification of evil, but if there are times when Dussander flirts with escaping his one-note nature, it’s because of McKellen’s performance.  His young co-star Brad Renfro doesn’t command the screen with McKellen’s forcefulness, but he’s adequate–and at various points, more than adequate–as his foil/protege.  It’s troubling to try to imagine what becomes of Todd after the end credits; one could easily imagine a budding serial killer in the making.  McKellen and Renfro play effectively off each other, even if few would dispute that this is predominantly McKellen’s acting showcase.  The supporting cast, including Bruce Davison and Ann Dowd as Todd’s oblivious parents and Joshua Jackson as his best friend, is fine in insubstantial roles, although Friends fans may find David Schwimmer hard to take seriously as the guidance counselor.  Elias Koteas has an odd turn as a semi-incoherent wino who tries ingratiating himself to the wrong person.  The best acting in the movie apart from McKellen is by Michael Byrne in a bit part late in the movie, who is wrenching in only a few minutes of screentime, the kind of powerful impression in a bit part only possible with a talented character actor (ironically given his appearance here as a Holocaust survivor, some will remember Byrne as an over-the-top Nazi a decade earlier in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade).

Apt Pupil is morbidly engrossing, well-made and well-acted, especially by Ian McKellen, but Singer’s attempts to be disturbing are sometimes over-obvious and heavy-handed.  At best, it’s macabre but compelling.  At worst, it’s distastefully exploitative (although, to its credit, the movie actually tones down Stephen King’s novella, which featured various murders of homeless men instead of the one featured here, and a climactic shooting rampage which the film omits in favor of a more subdued conclusion).  Singer coats the somewhat broad and simplistic examination of evil with enough sophistication to give Apt Pupil the air of loftier psychological aspirations–although I’m not convinced the movie, or perhaps Stephen King’s original story, is as deep as it wants us to think it is–and leads us on our dark and disturbing ride with enough slick professionalism to keep us engrossed almost in spite of ourselves, even if we might feel slightly dirty afterwards.

* * *

DIRECTOR: Steven Spielberg

CAST:

Liam Neeson, Ben Kingsley, Ralph Fiennes, Embeth Davidtz, Caroline Goodall

REVIEW:

Oskar Schindler was an unlikely hero. German businessman and war profiteer, womanizer, slave laborer, and a member of the Nazi Party with prominent friends within the SS, he happily moved in on the heels of the conquering German Army and set up an enamelware factory in occupied Krakow, taking advantage of cheap Polish-Jewish labor in the service of the Third Reich. Yet coming into such close contact with Jews at a time when his own government was implementing plans for their total annihilation seems to have lit a spark of humanity within the opportunistic Schindler, and by the Nazis’ downfall in 1945, he had bankrupted himself and his factory and endured repeated arrests by the Gestapo to bring nearly 1,200 Polish Jews safely through the war and the simultaneously blazing Holocaust. This German war profiteer and nominal Nazi had saved more Jews than any other individual. And yet, for decades afterward, his story, and theirs, remained largely untold. In October 1980, author Thomas Keneally was on his way home to Australia after a book signing when he stopped en route to the airport to buy a new briefcase in a Beverly Hills luggage shop owned by Leopold Pfefferberg- one of the 1200 Schindlerjuden, ‘Schindler Jews’. In the 50 minutes Keneally spent waiting for his credit card payment to clear, Pfefferberg persuaded him to go to the back room where the shopkeeper kept two cabinets filled with documents he had collected. Pfefferberg- who had told his story to every writer and producer who ever came into his store- eventually wore down Keneally’s reluctance, and the writer chose to make the story into his next book. Martin Scorsese had the chance to translate book to screen in the 1980s, but felt he could not do as good of a job as a Jewish director. Then came Steven Spielberg, who began work on Schindler’s List in Poland while finishing post-production for his infinitely different hit of the same year, Jurassic Park, via satellite. Thus did the little-known story of Oskar Schindler and his Schindlerjuden finally receive the attention it deserved.

Krakow, 1939: The smooth-talking German businessman and opportunist Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson in an Oscar-nominated performance) arrives in the newly occupied Polish city. We soon learn that he is not as wealthy and well-connected as he seems, and gets his expensive clothes and fine foods off the black market, but is a handsome, suave man who masks his lack of real abilities or means beneath a dashing exterior, sweeping grandly into SS-frequented nightclubs, always dressed in the finest suits, and ingratiating himself with them and their girlfriends so quickly, showering them with the finest foods, wines, and cigars, that by the time anyone thinks to ask who this man is, he has already charmed them all so thoroughly that it doesn’t matter. He knows little of financially managing a business–his previous attempts have been failures–and for this he turns to Jewish accountant Itzhak Stern (Ben Kingsley), who runs his business and recruits Jewish workers from around the Krakow Ghetto, forging their papers to convince the Nazis that they are skilled laborers and therefore worth more alive than dead. They are quickly taught the basics, and Deutsche Emailwarenfabrik is opened, converted to manufacture equipment for the German Army. For a time, Schindler is happy enough to fill his own coffers and does not appear to question- or at least shoves to the back of his mind- the plight of his workers. But as the war, and the Holocaust, progresses, and as ‘his’ Jews are moved into Plaszow forced labor camp, where they live or die on the capricious whims of Kommandant Amon Goeth (Ralph Fiennes), Schindler begins to find it more difficult to ignore the suffering of the people who have brought him his success.

The gradual transformation which leads greedy war profiteer Oskar Schindler to deliberately run his factory at a loss to bring more and more Jews into his protection is the crux of the film, and is made all the more effective by the fact that the filmmakers do not pretend to know exactly when his lust for money was overridden by a genuine concern for the lives of his workers. Rather than reducing it to a sudden character overhaul, Schindler’s conversion is portrayed as a gradual awakening of dormant human feelings, although his witnessing of Goeth’s brutal liquidation of the Krakow Ghetto is shown as a pivotal event. The movie does not shy away from any of Schindler’s numerous character flaws, highlighted in harsh clarity as a Jewish family is evicted from their home and Schindler immediately moves in, not sparing a second glance for the streets filled with displaced Jews on their way to the ghetto, and later when his wife Emilie (Caroline Goodall) arrives and then leaves again when Oskar will not promise to end his womanizing. His initial callous selfishness is never more bitingly clear than when he narrowly rescues Stern from deportation and complains ‘what if I’d got here five minutes later? Then where would I be?’. It obviously does not occur to him to think of where Stern would be. That Schindler can transform credibly from a slimy opportunist to a selfless savior is a tribute to both the filmmakers and to Liam Neeson, who handle the transition subtly and gradually and make the character change work. Neeson is at his most charismatic, deftly handling the shift of his character. His Schindler is a subtle man, hiding his real thoughts behind a dazzling smile and a hearty belly-laugh, always with a joke on hand, a gleam in his eye, and a spring in his step. Neeson flawlessly projects both the suave charm and the internal conflict it increasingly masks, only stumbling once, at the film’s melodramatic climax. It’s the infamous ‘I could have sold…‘ scene, and it feels as clumsily tacked on as it is overwrought. Schindler’s choked-up speech is a moment of dramatic license on the part of Spielberg, and that’s exactly what it feels like. According to all who knew him, such an outpouring would have been out of character for Schindler, who was not a man to wear his emotions on his sleeve, and indeed it feels just as jarringly out of character in the movie. It is the only point at which either the film or its lead actor seem to take a misstep.

The rest of the acting is uniformly excellent. Ben Kingsley’s role of Schindler’s accountant Stern is much more understated than that of Neeson (or, for that matter, Ralph Fiennes), and has often been overlooked in talk of the film, but his low-key, in-the-background Stern comes across as the unsung hero in the shadow of Schindler, a quiet and unassuming man who is initially repulsed by this flamboyant, greedy German with whom he is forced to associate but uses his position to do what he can for his fellow Jews, at first under Schindler’s nose but ultimately serving as his conscience. Like Stern himself, Kingsley is never flashy or attention-grabbing, but he provides a solid anchor to balance the film’s principal acting triumvirate of he, Neeson, and Fiennes.

The film’s second Oscar-nominated performance is provided by the darkly intense Ralph Fiennes as Kommandant Amon Goeth, a man intoxicated by the power of life and death he wields over the workers, one of the most searing villains ever to appear onscreen, all the more so because, unlike the likes of Hannibal Lecter, Goeth existed.  Not only does Goeth have zero regard for the lives of people he views as less-than-human, he is also unpredictable and unstable, veering between drunken partying, an occasional moment of mercy, and casual wanton brutality.  The scene in which he stands on his balcony with a rifle and picks off random workers is searing in its callousness. At the same time, he selects a young Jewish woman, Helen Hirsch (Embeth Davidtz), as his maid, and finds himself simultaneously attracted to her and repulsed by his own feelings, stopping at the brink of consummating his sexual desire and instead delivering vicious beatings. The movie highlights the similarities between Schindler and Goeth; both love parties, food, drink, and women, and are occasionally shown doing the same activities (we cut back-and-forth between the two men shaving). Goeth is what Schindler could be a couple steps further into the dark. Fiennes avoids over-the-top stereotypical Nazi histrionics, and both he and Spielberg eschew the easy route of making Goeth a one-dimensional raving maniac. He is a repulsive individual, but a fully fleshed-out and three-dimensional individual with shades of depth and complexity, and from time to time he shows a flicker of humanity. Embeth Davidtz as Helen, who must endure both Goeth’s brutality and his sinister advances, holds our attention with limited screentime, and everyone else, down to the small roles, is credible.

Filming in stark black and white which brings to mind any number of innumerable documentary images of the Holocaust, Schindler’s List pulls no punches when it comes to portraying graphic violence. The most common mental pictures generated by the Holocaust are mass graves and mountains of emaciated corpses, and while such sights are to be found here, potentially more disturbing are the scenes of random, individual killings, complete with blood spurting from heads. Much is made of the casual ease with which Goeth and his fellow Nazis committed their atrocities; after all, they were dealing with people they considered vermin, comparable to lice and rodents. At the same time, while the movie does not flinch from either graphic violence or full nudity, neither is there a moment of gratuitousness onscreen. The decision to film in black-and-white only enhances the almost documentary-style tone in which the horrors are filmed, as if Spielberg has simply calmly pointed a camera and recorded the events, which require no exaggeration or sensationalism, and let the historical record speak loudly for itself. No one is gassed onscreen, and Auschwitz makes only a chilling cameo. There is even a little- not too much, but a little- comic relief, such as when the insatiable womanizer Schindler tries to choose a secretary; he ignores the best typist, a plain, middle-aged woman, while fawning over young, prettier candidates, ultimately finding picking just one an impossible task and ending up with a small army of secretaries. One criticism leveled at the film is that, with the exception of Itzhak Stern and Helen Hirsch, the majority of the Jews remain mostly faceless and interchangeable, but the core of the film is the personal transformation of Oskar Schindler intertwined with a broader overview of the monstrously systematic and inexorable progression of the Holocaust, and while the smaller stories within consist mostly of a series of vignettes, some, such as the struggle of Danka Dresner and her mother to survive during the liquidation of the ghetto, and a Rabbi who almost miraculously survives a close encounter with Goeth, are among the most memorable moments in the movie. A brief visit to Auschwitz is a masterpiece of atmosphere, filming the infamous death camp in heavy snow, the darkness lit by the fire belching from its always billowing chimney, the searchlight illuminating the shadowy figures of the Nazi guards. We only see it for a few minutes, but Spielberg permeates Auschwitz with a palpable sense of deep, nightmarish dread.

As the film progresses, Neeson adds a barely perceptible weight to Schindler’s shoulders and a tinge of sadness to his eyes. By the end, all the money he amassed has lost any meaning, and he has thrown it all away to bring every last person he possibly can through the war alive. At the climax, he is shattered and racked with guilt by his obsession with wondering what more he could have done, what he could have sold, to save just one more person. But as Stern tells him, ‘there will be generations because of you’. Today the descendants of Schindler’s Jews outnumber the entire Jewish population of Poland. It seems funny or even inappropriate to describe a movie centering around the Holocaust as uplifting, but in the end, that’s exactly what Schindler’s List is. Despite the incalculable horrors occurring everywhere around it, what the film’s core is really about is uncovering a small kernel of hope and human empathy and compassion in the face of monstrous cruelty and inhumanity. And that’s what makes Schindler’s List, either viewed as a saga of the Holocaust or the story of one man’s redemption, a powerful, haunting, but ultimately inspiring and life-affirming film.

****

DIRECTOR: Bryan Singer

CAST:

Tom Cruise, Kenneth Branagh, Bill Nighy, Terence Stamp, Tom Wilkinson, Carice van Houten, Kevin McNally, David Schofield, Eddie Izzard, Jamie Parker, Thomas Kretschmann, Christian Berkel, Tom Hollander, David Bamber

REVIEW:

During his twelve-year reign, Adolf Hitler survived over forty known assassination attempts, at least fifteen of which were made by Germans. But the most hated man of the 20th century was also one of the most extraordinarily lucky. Something always managed to go wrong; Hitler would cut speeches or conferences short, avoiding timed bomb blasts, the explosives themselves would fail to detonate, and the forces arrayed against him often proved to be unfortunately uncoordinated and indecisive. The final, most famous, and most nearly successful attempt on Hitler’s life came on July 20, 1944, orchestrated by a group of rebel German military officers and politicians spearheaded by decorated injured war hero Colonel Count Claus von Stauffenberg. The July 20th assassination attempt has actually been portrayed in a series of productions over the years- 1951’s The Desert Fox, two almost simultaneous German films of the ‘50s, Jackboot Mutiny and July 20th, the 1988 miniseries War and Remembrance, the little-known 1990 TV movie The Plot to Kill Hitler, starring the late Brad Davis, and a 2004 German television miniseries titled Stauffenberg, starring Sebastian Koch as the doomed Count. Valkyrie is of course the best-known of these films, and the first to give a big-budget mainstream Hollywood treatment to the story, starring superstar Tom Cruise (who also produced) and directed by Bryan Singer (The Usual Suspects, Apt Pupil, X-Men).

We start in 1943 Tunisia, where disillusioned Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg (Tom Cruise), disgusted by the destruction Hitler (David Bamber) and his Nazis are bringing down on Germany, and the atrocities committed in its name, has become convinced that ‘Hitler is not only the archenemy of the entire world, but the archenemy of Germany’, and change is needed. But Stauffenberg is put out of action by an Allied strafing attack which leaves him with one eye, one hand, and three fingers. Back in Germany recuperating from his war wounds, Stauffenberg is approached by likeminded men and brought into a group of military and political officials plotting the overthrow of Hitler and his Nazi regime, including General Henning von Tresckow (Kenneth Branagh), retired General Ludwig Beck (Terence Stamp), Field Marshal Erwin von Witzleben (David Schofield), Mayor Carl Goerdeler (Kevin McNally), General Friedrich Olbricht (Bill Nighy), and Olbricht’s subordinate, Colonel Mertz von Quirnheim (Christian Berkel). As time progresses, others join the conspiracy, including Stauffenberg’s faithful adjutant Werner von Haeften (Jamie Parker), and General Erich Fellgiebel (Eddie Izzard), who is in a position to cut communications between Hitler’s headquarters and Berlin but takes a little persuading. And finally there is is-he-or-isn’t-he-an-ally General Friedrich Fromm (Tom Wilkinson), head of the Reserve Army, a self-serving fence-sitter who pretends not to know what the plotters are up to but wants a prominent position in their new government if they succeed and may place them all under arrest to save his own skin if they do not.

Valkyrie is, for the most part, a meticulously historically faithful dramatization of the planning and execution of the July 20th assassination attempt on Hitler, as well as the confusion and disorganization in the following hours as everything started to go awry. Singer kicks off with two high-momentum sequences that get the ball rolling: first is the only real action scene in the movie, the Allied strafing attack that leaves Stauffenberg with an eyepatch and an empty sleeve, and next Hitler’s plane escort making a thunderous arrival at German headquarters on the Eastern Front, where General von Tresckow and an aid scramble to set a bomb to place onboard Hitler’s plane hidden inside a crate of brandy, only to learn it did not detonate, forcing Tresckow to make a nerve-wracking trip to Berlin to retrieve the undiscovered bomb. After that, we settle into a lot of discussion scenes of the conspirators standing around arguing, debating, and working out plans. Along the way, there are scattered moments that feel inspired, first when Stauffenberg and his wife (Dutch actress Carice van Houten) and brood are forced to take cover during an air raid, and a bomb concussion skips the album they were playing onto Richard Wagner’s Valkyrie, giving Stauffenberg his great light bulb moment: appropriating Hitler’s own emergency plan Operation Valkyrie, designed to mobilize the Reserve Army to seize Berlin in a national emergency, as the means of carrying out the coup; the story would be a manufactured SS uprising, and the Reserve Army would believe they were defending their government instead of unwittingly helping overthrow it. There is also Stauffenberg’s uneasy visit to Berchtesgaden to get Hitler’s signature for the revised plans, with the Führer essentially obliviously signing his own death warrant.  History and WWII buffs are of course the most likely to find all this enthralling, but in some scenes Singer’s attempts to ratchet up the suspense will work best on those who know little about the events. Anyone with even the most basic knowledge of WWII and/or of Hitler knows he was not assassinated by rebel Germans, so Singer undeniably had a bit of a challenge trying to inject tension when we already know the bomb is not going to kill Hitler. Singer handles the pivotal moment of the movie- the actual bomb blast- with about as much tension as can be expected. Unfortunately, the same workmanlike, point A to point B tediousness that slowed down the earlier scenes returns after the bomb goes off. Singer and cast and crew try to keep this all exciting, but later scenes are a little lost in montages of Stauffenberg and company burning the phone lines trying to rally forces to their cause, especially since we already see the hammer coming down on them with the inevitability of history, even if they take a while to realize it.

Another reason for the feeling of detachment is that we don’t get to know the characters very well. Valkyrie is more interested in the ‘how’ than the ‘who’ or ‘why’, with none of the plotters developed beyond the basics.  Passing mentions are made of shutting down the concentration camps and saving Europe from destruction, and we get perfunctory arguments between the political and military wings of the operation, but the ideological, political, and moral conundrums these people found themselves thrust into are only scratched at the surface.

On the other hand, Singer puts in a lot of time and effort detailing all the ways the coup came so close and then went so wrong. Stauffenberg’s inspiration to use the Reserve Army as an unwitting pawn to enforce the coup is a clever idea, but it only holds up as long as Reserve Army officer Major Remer (Thomas Kretschmann), who is loyal to Hitler, doesn’t realize what’s really going on. General Olbricht is overly cautious and disastrously hesitant when bold, fast action is desperately needed; meanwhile, Nazi Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels (Harvey Friedman) stays cooler under pressure, and in fact plays a key role in hammering the final nail in the conspiracy’s coffin.

The sight of Tom Cruise in a German uniform and an eyepatch might cause momentary snickering, but despite widespread online panning, Cruise manages to avoid falling flat on his face. I am not a particular fan of Cruise, nor do I feel he was anywhere near the ideal person to play Stauffenberg due to the large amount of offscreen baggage he brings to his recent parts, but his portrayal is fine, if not spectacular, and it’s not fair to single him out, as some have, for making no attempt at a German accent, as none of his mostly British co-stars do either (the exceptions being the two authentic Germans, Thomas Kretschmann and Christian Berkel, both of whom appeared in 2004’s German-language Downfall).  It’s also worth noting that criticizing actors for not putting on German accents verges on being a little silly when one considers that in reality, none of these characters would be speaking English in the first place.  The supporting cast, made up of a collection of distinguished British thespians, is reliably effective, but this is not an actor’s movie.  Bill Nighy, who’s done some recent comedic roles, plays it straight as the twitchy, nervous, overly cautious Olbricht. Kenneth Branagh, who can be a huge scenery-chomper, is low-key and subdued in a surprisingly small role. Terence Stamp is his usual authoritative, dignified self, but he doesn’t get that much to do; the same can be said of Kevin McNally and David Schofield.  Carice van Houten is nice but underused as Stauffenberg’s wife Nina.  Tom Hollander is Colonel Brandt, an obnoxious aid to Hitler who seems suspicious of everyone. Eddie Izzard seems a little overwrought in his one ‘big’ scene, but the rest of the cast is fine, including Jamie Parker, Thomas Kretschmann (who between this, The Pianist, and U-571, is becoming the go-to man for movies requiring German WWII officers), and Christian Berkel, and Bernard Hill makes a brief opening appearance as an unfortunate Afrika Korps General. David Bamber’s role as Hitler mostly consists of a few scenes standing around conference tables, but the physical resemblance is enough for him to be effective when he appears.  Arguably the standout in the supporting cast is Tom Wilkinson, who gets a couple juicy scenes as his character tries to keep a foot in both camps while committing to neither.

Some see it as an oversight that the film makes no reference to Field Marshal Rommel, but Rommel was probably not an active participant; more of an omission is the absence of Stauffenberg’s brother Berthold, who supported the plot and was executed along with him. It’s also a little curious that the movie goes out of its way to paint Colonel Brandt as a creep, and then doesn’t show his ultimate fate (Brandt died from the explosion, but the movie never shows or mentions him after the bomb goes off, leaving his fate hanging). The climax makes for a poignant ending, as the conspirators to a man face their ends with a defiant dignity, even if we didn’t get to know them too well. Some accuse the film of glorifying Nazis, but this is a feeble and ignorant argument, as none of the principal plotters were in fact members of the Nazi Party, and General Beck and Carl Goerdeler in particular had opposed Hitler since before the war even began, nullifying the oft-made accusation that the conspirators conveniently turned on Hitler only when he started to lose (not to mention the ridiculousness of accusing any ‘Nazi glorifying’ of coming from a movie directed by the Jewish and openly gay Bryan Singer- incidentally, despite or perhaps because of his background, Nazis are a recurring theme in Singer’s films, including Apt Pupil and the prologue of X-Men revealing villain Magneto’s Holocaust childhood). Overall, Valkyrie is a competently-crafted dramatization of an event that is often neglected in examinations of WWII, but a historical docudrama about a German conspiracy to assassinate Hitler isn’t the kind of movie that sweeps in blockbuster-level crowds, and its appeal to broad audiences is in doubt. It will be the war buffs who already know the story who will likely get the most out of the film.

***

DIRECTOR: Simon Curtis

CAST: Helen Mirren, Ryan Reynolds, Daniel Brühl, Tatiana Maslany, Katie Holmes, Max Irons

REVIEW:

Hollywood likes stories about lawyers crusading for a righteous cause.  On the surface, Woman In Gold is another generic entry, but its sometimes powerful true story, a split narrative chronicling two time periods, an unsurprisingly strong performance from Helen Mirren and, perhaps somewhat more surprisingly, capable support by Ryan Reynolds helps lend it more weight and impact than just a courtroom drama.

In the 1930s, Austrian Jew Maria Altmann (Tatiana Maslany) and her husband Fritz (Max Irons) escaped from Nazi-occupied Austria but were forced to leave family members behind to certain doom, along with a beloved painting depicting her late Aunt Adele done by famous painter Gustav Klimt.  In the late 1990s, the elderly Maria (Helen Mirren), who has spent the intervening decades in the United States, attempts to get the painting back, but “The Woman In Gold” has become “The Mona Lisa of Austria” and a national icon, and the Austrian government is unwilling to part with it, considering it rightful state property.  To aid in her legal struggle, Maria turns to family friend, young inexperienced lawyer Randol Schoenberg (Ryan Reynolds), who is himself of Austrian-Jewish descent as the grandson of famous composer Arnold Schoenberg and the son of a respected judge but wallowing in the shadow of his prestigious lineage under student loan debts and a failed attempt at starting his own law firm.  Initially, Randy is reluctant to get invested in Maria’s legal struggle but gets involved after a little grudging bonding (and after doing a little research and realizing the painting in question is valued at over $100 million).  But their efforts in Austria are rebuffed and, apart from Austrian investigative journalist Hubertus Czernin (Daniel Brühl), they have few allies.  But the initially leery Randy becomes dedicated to Maria’s cause (in fact, in an ironic turn-around, it’s Randy who keeps the case going for a time after Maria grows discouraged), ultimately suing the Austrian government in US court and taking the battle all the way up to the Supreme Court.

Opening in the “present” in 1998 Los Angeles, we periodically alternate back-and-forth in time between two storylines, Maria and Randy’s legal struggle (which spans 1998-2004), and flashbacks to the Altmann family’s plight in Nazi-occupied Austria of the 1930s and Maria and her husband Fritz’s getaway.  While the lion’s share of the screentime goes to the Maria/Randy story, the filmmakers manage to make both plotlines engaging, avoiding the annoyance of one interesting storyline being interrupted by a more mundane one, as is sometimes the case in narrative-splitting approaches like this.  For obvious reasons, there’s more tension and a darker tone in the flashbacks, where the stakes are literally life-and-death (the sequence depicting their actual narrow escape generates a surprising amount of suspense, considering we obviously already know Maria survives), but we also become engrossed in the details of the “present day” back-and-forth legal struggle.  The two time spans help connect the dots of how the past affects the present, as well as illuminating the ways in which the Nazis not only tried to exterminate the Jewish people, but also carried out wholesale theft of the possessions they left behind.  We learn that one of the Altmanns’ paintings ended up hanging in no less a place than Hitler’s private mountain retreat at Berchtesgaden, while Aunt Adele’s favorite gold necklace ended up on the neck of the wife of Hermann Goering.  At one point, Maria and Randy visit the very art studio where a young Adolf Hitler unsuccessfully applied to be an art student.  One theme the movie implicitly addresses is how easily people forget the past, especially an unpleasant one, with the present-day Austrian government wishing to sweep unsavory aspects of its history under the rug.  Woman in Gold repudiates the idea that time erases the sins of the past.  Not all Austrians are hostile to Maria’s goals (Daniel Brühl‘s Hubertus Czernin serves as a counter-example), but the extent to which the Austrian government obstinately digs in its heels and uses all the bureaucratic red tape it can muster to thwart she and Randy is sadly telling.  The crimes of the Nazis should not have a statute of limitations.  The modern-day Austrian government may not be responsible for events of WWII, but it does bear a moral and (as was ultimately determined) legal obligation to return stolen possessions to the surviving owners (or their heirs).

Helen Mirren, sporting dark hair and imbuing her regal British accent with a more Germanic tinge (though her Britishness sometimes seeps through), is her usual delightful self, playing the older Maria with a sense of long-suffering weary dignity, an acerbic tongue, and an unflappable determination.  Ryan Reynolds, looking toned-down and slightly nerdy behind glasses and a buttoned-down wardrobe, initially feels like a lightweight next to Mirren, but as Randy’s conviction grows, he does a capable job of traversing the cliched character arc of the initially disinterested lawyer who becomes emotionally invested in his client’s struggle, and he and Mirren make an effective “odd couple”.  In supporting roles, German actor Daniel Brühl (probably best-known to American audiences as race car driver Niki Lauda opposite Chris Hemsworth in 2013’s sports drama Rush) is their biggest Austrian supporter, Hubertus Czernin (whose previous claim to fame was exposing the Nazi past of former Austrian President Kurt Waldheim), and Tatiana Maslany (of television series Orphan Black) plays the younger Maria.  Other smaller roles include Max Irons (son of Jeremy) as the young Maria’s husband Fritz, Katie Holmes as Randy’s wife, the ever-stern Charles Dance as Randy’s law firm boss, Frances Fisher as Randy’s mother, Jonathan Pryce as Chief Justice William Rehnquist, and Antje Traue (Man of Steel‘s Faora) as Aunt Adele, the “Woman In Gold”.

Woman In Gold occasionally feels that events are shallowly skimmed-through due to the compressed passage of time (1998-2004 in an hour and forty-nine minutes, not to mention the significant flashback sequences which take up a fair amount of screentime).  Randy’s wife seems to have an abrupt turn-around in attitude that might have seemed less arbitrary had Randy’s family life been more than fleetingly sketched-out.  But the movie serves up a history lesson worth hearing (one recalls George Santayana’s quote “those who do not remember the past are doomed to repeat it”) and has some poignant and moving moments while also, like most effective courtroom dramas, infusing the proceedings with a crowd-pleasing element.  Ultimately, it works both as a reminder of past wrongs and a demonstration that sometimes the truth prevails.  Justice and historical truth should not have a statute of limitations.

* * *

DIRECTOR: Sean Ellis

CAST: Cillian Murphy, Jamie Dornan, Charlotte Le Bon, Toby Jones

REVIEW:

WARNING: THIS REVIEW WILL REVEAL “SPOILERS”

Anthropoid is a spare, gritty historical thriller chronicling in unvarnished fashion the true story of the operation (code-named “Anthropoid”) to assassinate high-ranking Nazi Reinhard Heydrich.  To that end, it’s not necessarily the definitive film adaptation of the event (1975’s Operation Daybreak provides a more comprehensive overview), but it’s a tense and unromanticized docudrama illuminating one of the less famous stories from WWII.  

1942: Czech agents Jan Kubis (Jamie Dornan) and Josef Gabcik (Cillian Murphy), serving with the Czech government-in-exile in London, are parachuted back into their homeland on a top-secret and perilous mission to assassinate Reinhard Heydrich, the head of the SS and Gestapo in Czechoslovakia, subordinate only to Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler in the Nazi hierarchy, and tasked with wiping out the last remnants of the Czech resistance, an assignment at which he has nearly been successful.  After a treacherous journey from the countryside into the capital city of Prague, they find shelter with resistance agents and set their mission in motion.  Along the way, Kubis falls for a local girl and resistance collaborator, Maria (Charlotte Le Bon), but any fledgling attempt at romance might be doomed to a short life expectancy, along with all of the characters involved.

Character development is not the movie’s strong suit.  We get a basic sense of the two main characters’ personalities—Gabcik is all-business and laser-focused, accepting unflinchingly that this might well be a suicide mission, while Kubis is a little less prepared to die, a little more hopeful, enough to form a tentative romance with Maria which Gabcik views as a frivolous distraction—but the movie’s concern is more with the “how” than the “who”, which keeps the characters at something of a detached distance.  We understand what they’re doing and why they’re doing it, but we don’t really “feel” it with them on an emotional level.  In particular, the romance between Kubis and Maria is sketched out fleetingly (even more half-baked are the romantic undertones between Gabcik and Maria’s friend Lenka (Anna Geislerová), and supporting characters are hard to keep straight (the Czech names, which many American viewers will find nearly incomprehensible, don’t help in this regard).  A little more focus on the characters might have made Anthropoid a less cold and remote and more powerful viewing experience.

On the other hand, director Sean Ellis does a good job navigating the treacherous waters of Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia, where it’s hard to know who’s a loyal resistance agent or a Nazi informant.  Nazi-occupied Prague is a grim, oppressive place, pinned under the Nazi jackboot, accentuated by the film’s desaturated color tones.  Like Bryan Singer’s Valkyrie, chronicling the July 1944 assassination attempt on Hitler himself by renegade Germans, Anthropoid details in documentary-level detail the planning, brainstorming, setbacks, and abortive attempts leading up to the main event.  There are intriguing tidbits, such as Gabcik pretending to take photographs of a girlfriend as cover for actually taking reconnaissance pictures of Heydrich’s headquarters and daily routine, or the clever (albeit ultimately futile) scheme to smuggle the assassins to safety hidden inside a hearse.  The movie’s pace is slow-burn, but gradually and inexorably dials up the tension as the inevitable climax draws nearer.

The movie also touches on the infighting among factions of the Czech resistance, between the zealously patriotic Kubis and Gabcik, who are determined to fulfill their mission regardless of the consequences, and those who don’t see the death of Heydrich as being worth the terrible reprisals the Nazis will visit upon Czechoslovakia in revenge (in the wake of Heydrich’s death, the Nazis made an example of the village of Lidice, razing it to the ground, summarily executing 173 citizens, and shipping the rest to concentration camps).

The filmmakers obviously made a serious effort for historical accuracy and verisimilitude.  The film was shot entirely on location in Prague (where many buildings remain unchanged since WWII).  Scenes in the Orthodox Cathedral of Saints Cyril and Methodius were filmed in an exact replica.  The climactic battle and siege is reenacted with meticulous accuracy to firsthand accounts from both Czech citizens and the Gestapo.  The assassination plays out in real time.

Cillian Murphy and Jamie Dornan (putting a more respectable entry on his filmography than 50 Shades of Gray) are recognizable faces, at least to some audience members, but not really “big names”, which might make it easier to see them simply as Gabcik and Kubis.  They both get one or two standout strong moments, but this isn’t an actors’ movie.  The rest of the faces on hand are equally low-profile, or more so.  Apart from Charlotte Le Bon (last seen as Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s girlfriend in The Walk) and Toby Jones (as a prominent member of the resistance), the supporting cast is made up mostly of native Czech actors.  Anna Geislerová (as Maria’s best friend and fellow resistance collaborator who demonstrates to the doubting parachutists that she knows her way around a gun) and Marcin Dorociński (as a conflicted member of the resistance who opposes the mission out of fear of what it will mean for his country) make impressions.  The little-seen target Heydrich remains offscreen for the most part, appearing as himself in archive footage and then fleetingly represented by German actor Detlef Bothe, who only appears briefly during the assassination sequence and was obviously chosen for his physical resemblance.

Incidentally, Anthropoid makes an interesting companion piece to the 1975 film Operation Daybreak, starring Timothy Bottoms and Anthony Andrews and chronicling the same events in the same unvarnished docudrama fashion (the two movies are sometimes virtually identical from scene-to-scene, although Operation Daybreak had a broader scope including a larger role for Heydrich himself and the more modern Anthropoid unsurprisingly features more graphic violence).  Like Operation Daybreak, the assassination occurs halfway through, and the true climax is the aftermath, as the Gestapo hunts the resistance agents down with ruthless determination, culminating in the cornered assassins’ tenacious last stand in the cathedral leading to a lengthy battle sequence.  When it comes to the ruthlessness of the Nazis, Anthropoid doesn’t beat around the bush, with the Gestapo’s brutal torture of a teenage boy (Bill Milner) being uncomfortable to watch.

Anthropoid might tell of a victory in a sense, but there’s an air of grim futility that hangs over everything.  Operation Anthropoid dealt the Third Reich a daring blow of defiance (Heydrich was the only major member of the Nazi hierarchy to be successfully assassinated during the war), but at terrible cost.  The “villain” may receive his comeuppance, but there is no happy ending for our heroes or for many innocents affected directly or indirectly by their actions.  The climactic battle is not a rousing victory, but a defiant last stand, the Czech resistance’s version of the Alamo.  It could be considered a “spy thriller”, but of a more grimly down-to-earth, unglamorous, and unromanticized variety.  Needless to say, it’s the kind of movie that will appeal more to WWII buffs than mainstream audiences, but for those who consider themselves part of that niche, it’s worth a look.

* * *

DIRECTOR: Mick Jackson

CAST: Rachel Weisz, Tom Wilkinson, Timothy Spall, Andrew Scott

REVIEW:

Denial is a courtroom drama that relies less on ostentatious Oscar clip wannabe closing speeches and theatrics than meticulous cross-examination, and a true story that doesn’t embellish the material to up the ante.  The result is a stately, dignified film that will bore those without an interest in the subject matter but plenty of appeal for fans of courtroom dramas or for those with an interest in the true story.

On September 5, 1996, prominent British historian and unabashed Holocaust denier David Irving (Timothy Spall) filed a libel suit in UK courts against Jewish-American professor Deborah Lipstadt (Rachel Weisz), charging her with damaging his academic reputation by calling him a liar in her book Denying the Holocaust.  Despite some urging her to agree to a settlement and make the matter go away quietly, the outspoken Lipstadt chose to fight, assembling a British legal team led by Richard Rampton (Tom Wilkinson) and Anthony Julius (Andrew Scott), while Irving elects to act as his own lawyer.  To Lipstadt’s outrage, she realizes that in British courts, the burden of proof is on her, not Irving, and her legal team will be obligated to prove the Holocaust happened.  But Rampton and Julius select a different strategy: rather than questioning the Holocaust, they will put Irving himself on trial, and comb through his prolific published works and copious diary entries spanning decades to expose him as a racist and anti-Semite who deliberately falsified history to favor his own slanted perspective.  But proving that Irving’s inaccuracies were deliberate distortions as opposed to honest mistakes—as is necessary to defend themselves against the libel charge—is easier said than done, and Lipstadt fears if Irving wins, it will validate Holocaust denial as a respectable opinion.

Denial deals with potentially difficult and emotional subject matter, but the film maintains a spare, reserved perspective suiting a legal drama while not completely neglecting the emotional aspect.  The screenplay closely follows the facts (all dialogue in the courtroom scenes is taken verbatim from the court transcripts) and the film resists the urge for overdramatics.  A more “Hollywoodized” adaptation would have ended with Lipstadt herself taking the stand for a big, rousing, righteous climactic speech, and some kind of final face-off between she and Irving, but we don’t get that here.  Lipstadt is chomping at the bit to take the stand, but that’s exactly the problem.  She’s too emotional, too close to the subject matter, and doesn’t see the wisdom in her legal team’s argument that it’s forensics, not feelings, that win trials.  Julius also firmly shuts down her wish to call upon Holocaust survivors as witnesses for fear of Irving heckling them and causing emotional trauma (a brief video clip of Irving mocking a survivor before an applauding audience of Holocaust deniers lends credence to Julius’ concerns).

The most penetrating sequence of the movie, a visit to Auschwitz early on, strongly demonstrates this “less is more” approach.  Denial doesn’t linger on graphic Holocaust imagery.  A simple, silent wide-panning shot of seemingly endless piles of shoes left behind by Auschwitz’s victims is powerful and haunting without anyone needing to give any tear-jerking commentary.  In fact, one of the most riveting scenes of the movie is a battle of wits and wills between Irving (on the witness stand) and the cross-examining Rampton, as Rampton tries to pin Irving down with evidence of Auschwitz’s gas chambers and Irving wriggles his way into increasingly flimsy alternative explanations.  Irving’s egotistical decision to take Lipstadt to court backfires as Rampton not only tears apart his historical conclusions, but also exposes him as a dishonest and biased scholar who (despite speaking fluent German) perpetuated inaccurate translations of German-language documents relating to the Holocaust to lend them more seemingly benign meanings, took things out of context, and relied upon disreputable or debunked sources to back up his assertions.  But, while his views could charitably be called misguided, Irving is not a stupid man, but a learned scholar and legal expert with decades of experience (even Lipstadt and her legal team grudgingly admit to his “riveting” courtroom presence) and media-savvy, and represents a formidable courtroom opponent.

This isn’t necessarily an actors’ movie, but the cast is effective.  Rachel Weisz (sporting a New York accent) plays Deborah Lipstadt as an impassioned woman whose sense of moral outrage sometimes makes her come off as self-righteous and abrasive (qualities which lead Rampton and Julius to keep her away from the witness stand).  Tom Wilkinson is a solid uneasy ally/foil as the more level-headed Richard Rampton, an experienced elder lawyer who is not immune to emotion (he has trouble restraining his disgust toward Irving during their courtroom confrontations) but understands that it will be cold hard facts, not emotion, that wins the case.  Late in the film, there is a low-key conversation between Lipstadt and Rampton where she finally comes to understand his perspective.  Likewise, Andrew Scott’s Anthony Julius (whose previous claim to fame was being Princess Diana’s divorce lawyer) is pragmatic and coldly logical until showing a flash of righteous anger.  Timothy Spall (probably best-known as Harry Potter‘s Wormtail) plays David Irving as both repellent and with small human shadings; we get a bit with him playing with his young daughter (whom we later learn he taught a racist poem), and at times he seems to have convinced himself of his own distortions (“But I’m not a racist,” he insists at one point with the slightly dumbfounded earnestness of someone who actually believes it, despite rather damning evidence to the contrary).

While Denial‘s script was finished before the 2016 presidential election campaign, its themes of repudiating bigotry and falsehoods in favor of incontrovertible truth takes on more resonance.  It’s disquieting to recognize a glimmer of similarity between David Irving and Donald Trump, men who seem with disturbingly flippant ease to simply dismiss documented reality in favor of what Rampton calls “whatever rubbish that pops into your head”.  While Irving may have been dealt a blow to his pride in court and has been discredited as a “serious” historian, he remains an active and prominent Holocaust denier with a legion of followers (Denial shows us a video clip of Irving addressing a crowd of skinheads hailing him at a neo-Nazi rally), and insidiously pervasive repellent ideologies are by no means exclusive to Nazis and/or Holocaust deniers.  Denial may feature one righteous victory of historical and moral truth over agenda-driven distortions, but it was one relatively small-scale battle in an ongoing war.

* * *

DIRECTOR: Frank Pierson

CAST: Kenneth Branagh, Stanley Tucci, Colin Firth, Ian McNeice, Kevin McNally, David Threlfall, Ewan Stewart, Brian Pettifer, Nicholas Woodeson, Jonathan Coy, Brendan Coyle, Ben Daniels, Barnaby Kay, Owen Teale, Peter Sullivan

REVIEW:

This Made-For-TV HBO original movie, based on the sole surviving copy of the transcript of the infamous Wannsee Conference, will likely be found “boring” by those without an interest in the historical subject matter—after all, at least on the surface, it consists of nothing but fifteen men sitting around a table talking—but for those with an interest, Conspiracy is a disturbing docudrama that embodies the phrase “the banality of evil”.

It is January 20, 1942.  Hitler’s dream of a “Thousand Year Reich” has become bogged down on the stalled-out Russian front, and the United States has entered the war, but far from the front lines, other matters are being discussed.  On the outskirts of Berlin, at an idyllic villa, the so-called Wannsee Conference is convened.  The conference is presided over by SS General Reinhard Heydrich (Kenneth Branagh) and organized by his loyal deputy SS Colonel Adolf Eichmann (Stanley Tucci).  The attendees: Dr. Wilhelm Stuckart (Colin Firth), lawyer and co-author of the anti-Semitic Nuremberg Laws, Gerhard Klopfer (Ian McNeice), Nazi Party representative and Martin Bormann’s deputy, Martin Luther (Kevin McNally), the Foreign Ministry’s liaison to the SS, Dr. Friedrich Kritzinger (David Threlfall), Reich Chancellery representative, Dr. Georg Leibbrandt (Ewan Stewart) and Dr. Alfred Meyer (Brian Pettifer), administrators of occupied Eastern territories, SS General Otto Hofmann (Nicholas Woodeson), Chief of the Race and Resettlement Office, Erich Neumann (Jonathan Coy), director of the Four Year Plan, economic initiatives decreed by Hitler and Hermann Goering, SS General Heinrich Müller (Brendan Coyle), chief of the Gestapo, Dr. Josef Bühler (Ben Daniels), administrator of occupied Poland, SS Major Rudolf Lange (Barnaby Cay), head of Nazi intelligence in Latvia, Dr. Roland Freisler (Owen Teale), Nazi judge, and Dr. Karl Schöngarth (Peter Sullivan), Nazi court official.  To be discussed: the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question in Europe”, namely what to do with the millions of Jews in Nazi clutches in both Germany itself and occupied territories.  Before the Wannsee Conference, the Holocaust had already begun, but the plans hammered out in this two hour meeting would organize it into the mass-coordinated, hyper-efficient killing machine it would become.

Conspiracy plays out much like a stage play, a sort of dark, twisted version of 12 Angry Men.  There is no Holocaust imagery; the setting never leaves the elegant Wannsee villa.  Like a play, the film is almost entirely reliant upon dialogue (taken directly from the sole surviving conference transcript), acting, and character interplay, all of which prove to be strengths.  The attendees banter, bicker, smoke, drink, and eat while discussing sterilizations and slave labor, arguing over what defines a Jew (what to do with those of “mixed blood” or intermixed marriages becomes a major point of contention), and debating the most efficient methods of extermination (or, as Heydrich winkingly calls it in one of various euphemisms, “evacuation”).  The most disturbing aspect of Conspiracy, besides discussions of forced sterilization, gas chambers, and mass shootings, is the casual atmosphere.  It could be any boardroom of any Fortune 500 company (Heydrich invites everyone to break out the wine and cigars, quipping “that’s how they do it at I.G. Farben, isn’t it?”), except that instead of discussing stocks and inventory, the attendees are discussing mass genocide.  Perhaps the most key thing that director Frank Pierson and his cast do is simply lay out the facts in no-frills, unvarnished fashion without reaching for histrionics or trying to make the conference more dramatic than it was, letting the transcript speak for itself.  The low-key, casual, matter-of-fact tone is more disturbing than any amount of overdramatics could have been.

Besides the “banality of evil” portrait it paints, the other fascinating aspect of Conspiracy is back-and-forth ensemble character interplay.  The men at Wannsee are not savages or brutes; of the fifteen who attend, eight hold academic doctorates, and there are many lawyers in the room (and a large amount of legal wrangling).  Nor are they a uniform monolith; there is as much rivalry and bickering as any other bureaucracy.  While technically outranked by several men at the table, it soon becomes apparent that Heydrich is the big fish, smoothly steering the debate toward its inevitable outcome, railroading opposition, and taking a brief tea break to have a one-on-one with a dissenting opinion and drop a veiled threat or two to convince them to get with the program (“I hope the SS does not take too keen an interest in you”, he muses coyly to the argumentative Dr. Stuckart).  Behind his veil of suave charm and the formality of group debate, it is clear that Heydrich is bent on having his way.  Colin Firth’s Dr. Stuckart initially seems as if he might provide a flicker of a voice of reason, but his strident objections soon turn out to be more due to legal hang-ups than moral ones.  David Threlfall’s Dr. Kritzinger’s misgivings might be more sincere, albeit limited (Heydrich mocks him for raising no argument against segregating and enslaving Jews, merely killing them), but he lacks the willpower to avoid ultimately knuckling under to Heydrich.  Jonathan Coy’s Neumann flits from person to person introducing himself with the title “Office of the Four Year Plan”, like a little fish in a roomful of big fish desperately trying to sound important.  There are interdepartmental rivalries (various representatives of other bureaus resent the SS taking over the entire operation and running roughshod over their own jurisdictions and authorities) and even fleeting moments when the enormity of what they’re discussing thuds home for several attendees; after Eichmann reveals Auschwitz’s capacity for eliminating 6,000 Jews per day, SS General Hofmann takes an abrupt restroom break, blaming the food.

The low-key, mostly low-profile, predominantly British (with the exception of Stanley Tucci) ensemble cast unanimously performs admirably avoiding try-hard overdramatics or scenery-chewing.  Likewise, no one is making any attempt at a German accent, which is a debatable choice but might have been the right way to go for this production, allowing the dialogue to speak for itself without any distractions.  Kenneth Branagh restrains his hammy tendencies to play the ringleader Heydrich with an easy charm veiling an icy determination, backed up by Stanley Tucci as his number two man Eichmann, a glorified pencil-pusher, hyper-efficient with ever-ready statistics and spreadsheets, and occasionally showing a flash of a venomous bully behind his officiously bland demeanor (he terrorizes the harried kitchen staff early on, and later slaps a soldier for engaging in a snowball fight while on duty).  Branagh and Tucci’s portrayals most embody “the banality of evil”; they could be all-business bureaucrats in any other organization tackling any other operation, likely with as much ruthless efficiency as they approach genocide.  Of the others, the most distinctive personalities are Colin Firth’s legalistically-fixated Dr. Stuckart, David Threlfall’s conflicted Dr. Kritzinger, who leaves Heydrich with a philosophical warning, and Ian McNeice’s vulgar, piggish Klopfer, who cracks coarse sexual innuendos while discussing sterilizations and accuses Stuckart of being a Jew-lover (Colin Firth’s cue to launch into a vehement monologue revealing Stuckart, whom we might have previously thought semi-sympathetic, to be as ardent an anti-Semite as anyone in the room).

Conspiracy won’t appeal to everyone; it’s a dry, talky, entirely dialogue-driven affair consisting of fifteen men debating, arguing, and bantering in a smoky room over wine and cigars.  But for those with an interest in the subject matter, it’s a disquietingly spare, matter-of-fact docudrama portraying the undramatized true story of a two hour meeting which had massive and monstrous ramifications.

* * *

DIRECTOR: Chris Weitz

CAST: Oscar Isaac, Ben Kingsley, Melanie Laurent, Nick Kroll, Haley Lu Richardson, Michael Aronov, Joe Alwyn, Lior Raz, Torben Liebrecht, Greg Hill, Greta Scacchi, Peter Strauss, Russell Simon Beale

REVIEW:

Operation Finale is a well-crafted, sure-handed, engaging spy thriller chronicling in unvarnished docudrama fashion the (mostly) true story of the 1960 mission by agents of Mossad (Israeli secret service) to track down, apprehend, and extradite fugitive Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann from his hiding place in Argentina.  It’s not the first production about this subject (there is a 1996 TV movie, The Man Who Captured Eichmann, starring Arliss Howard as lead Mossad agent Peter Malkin and Robert Duvall as Eichmann), but it’s the most big-budget and the best quality.  It’s a good starting point for anyone unfamiliar with the story, and worth a watch for those who already are, even if it doesn’t really bring much new to the genre.

After an opening prologue in 1954 Austria, and fleeting sporadically interspersed Holocaust-era flashbacks, the bulk of the movie takes place in 1960 Argentina, where a colossal coincidence—Eichmann’s son Klaus (Joe Alwyn) embarking on a fleeting romance with the daughter (Haley Lu Richardson) of a Holocaust survivor (Peter Strauss), has exposed the cold trail of Nazi fugitive Adolf Eichmann (Ben Kingsley).  Eichmann, dubbed “the architect of the Final Solution”, was not a particularly powerful figure in the Nazi regime—actually, he was a mid-level bureaucrat—but his administration of the “Office of Jewish Affairs”, and his hyper-efficient organization and implementation of state-sanctioned mass murder left him with a top spot on Mossad’s hit list.  The stoic overseer of the operation, Isser Harel (Lior Raz), puts together a small team led by Peter Malkin (Oscar Isaac) and including Malkin’s ex-lover Hanna (Melanie Laurent), friend Rafi (Nick Kroll), rivals Zvi (Michael Aronov) and Yaakov (Torben Liebrecht), and the belligerent Moshe (Greg Hill).  Despite some on the team itching to put a bullet between Eichmann’s eyes, this is not an assassination.  Rather, Eichmann is to be captured and extradited to stand trial in Israel.  As Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion (Russell Simon Beale) states, “for the first time in our history, we will judge our executioner”.

The complicated preparations and capture of Eichmann occupy only the first half of the film.  By undertaking the operation, Mossad is wading into murky territory, violating Argentina’s sovereignty by pulling a snatch-and-grab of one of its citizens.  1960s Argentina is a friendlier place for Eichmann than it is for Jews attempting to apprehend him; the movie takes the time to show an underground Nazi and anti-Semitic resurgence taking root within the German immigrant community (many of them ex-Nazis), and the Peron regime Argentinean police working hand-and-glove to aid and abet them.  The actual apprehension of Eichmann is easy enough, but things only get more complicated and dangerous once he’s in their custody.  The Mossad agents must hide Eichmann in their safe house for days awaiting their flight out, running the risk of being discovered by the forces seeking to rescue Eichmann, including his son Klaus and pro-Nazi local politicians and the police in their pocket, who are scouring Buenos Aires looking for him.  And inside the safe house, tension mounts within the group and as their efforts to force or persuade the resistant Eichmann to sign a document deemed legally necessary for his transport to Israel seem futile.

The most interesting element of Operation Finale, especially in the second half, is the one-on-one interplay between Oscar Isaac’s Malkin and Ben Kingsley’s Eichmann as Malkin and colleagues struggle to get Eichmann’s signature.  Malkin, doubted by some of his colleagues for tendencies toward impulsivity and violence, tries an opposite approach with  Eichmann, seeking to relate to him and get the older man to let down his guard by appearing to do the same toward him.  However, by doing so, Malkin opens himself up to the risk of the shrewd Eichmann manipulating him in turn.  The most palpably tense moments are between Malkin and Eichmann, including a scene where Malkin contemplates strangling an oblivious blindfolded Eichmann, and another where Eichmann, who would prefer to be summarily executed rather than face trial in Israel (a wish some members of the team would be happy to oblige), uses personal information he has gleaned about Malkin’s family background to attempt to provoke the hot-tempered agent into killing him.

Chris Weitz makes Operation Finale a good-looking film, with postcard-esque cinematography of Buenos Aires, and practices restraint by refraining from graphic Holocaust imagery (the film maintains a PG-13 rating), although Eichmann’s exact role in the Holocaust—that of a pencil-pushing bureaucrat more than a hands-on executioner—could have been better-delineated; those who go in not knowing much about Adolf Eichmann won’t learn much about his Holocaust activities from this film alone.  There’s also a bit of gallows humor where the team gets in a bit of a contest over who lost the most family members in the Holocaust.  The back-and-forth interplay between Malkin and Eichmann, and Malkin struggling to keep his cool in such close proximity to an oh-so-ordinary “monster” is the film’s strongest element; the movie’s pumped-up and somewhat exaggerated attempts to inject conventional “thriller” elements in the form of a “nick of time” getaway from Argentina, sometimes feels a little tacked-on to inject more suspense.

The focus is more on the nuts-and-bolts details of the operation than the personalities of the people involved.  Only Malkin gets enough character development to understand a measure of what makes him tick (he is driven by the murder of his beloved sister and her children by the Nazis during the Holocaust), and Oscar Isaac (who also produced) effectively conveys Malkin’s barely-controlled cool.  He is offset by Ben Kingsley (doing a 180 from Schindler’s List’s Itzhak Stern), who remains low-key and subdued (restraining his occasional penchant for hammy scenery-chewing) and avoids any stereotypical Nazi mustache-twirling.  Eichmann is not a frothy villain, but a bland, outwardly ordinary man who makes an underwhelming impression and saw himself as merely a bureaucrat doing his job; he embodies what political theorist Hannah Arendt called “the banality of evil”.  No one else makes much individual impression, although it’s interesting to note that this is the second time Melanie Laurent has found herself as a vengeful Jew mixed up with Nazis, the first being Shoshanna in Inglourious Basterds. 

Overall, despite slightly pumping up the “thriller” elements for more dramatic effect, Operation Finale provides a docudrama telling of a true story without wildly distorting the facts, and engages the audience for its two hour runtime.  Of the various onscreen portrayals of the capture of Adolf Eichmann, it’s the most worthy production, even if it doesn’t bring many new insights.

* * *

DIRECTOR: Frank Pierson

CAST: Kenneth Branagh, Stanley Tucci, Colin Firth, Ian McNeice, Kevin McNally, David Threlfall, Ewan Stewart, Brian Pettifer, Nicholas Woodeson, Jonathan Coy, Brendan Coyle, Ben Daniels, Barnaby Kay, Owen Teale, Peter Sullivan

REVIEW:

This Made-For-TV HBO original movie, based on the sole surviving copy of the transcript of the infamous Wannsee Conference, will likely be found “boring” by those without an interest in the historical subject matter—after all, at least on the surface, it consists of nothing but fifteen men sitting around a table talking—but for those with an interest, Conspiracy is a disturbing docudrama that embodies the phrase “the banality of evil”.

It is January 20, 1942.  Hitler’s dream of a “Thousand Year Reich” has become bogged down on the stalled-out Russian front, and the United States has entered the war, but far from the front lines, other matters are being discussed.  On the outskirts of Berlin, at an idyllic villa, the so-called Wannsee Conference is convened.  The conference is presided over by SS General Reinhard Heydrich (Kenneth Branagh) and organized by his loyal deputy SS Colonel Adolf Eichmann (Stanley Tucci).  The attendees: Dr. Wilhelm Stuckart (Colin Firth), lawyer and co-author of the anti-Semitic Nuremberg Laws, Gerhard Klopfer (Ian McNeice), Nazi Party representative and Martin Bormann’s deputy, Martin Luther (Kevin McNally), the Foreign Ministry’s liaison to the SS, Dr. Friedrich Kritzinger (David Threlfall), Reich Chancellery representative, Dr. Georg Leibbrandt (Ewan Stewart) and Dr. Alfred Meyer (Brian Pettifer), administrators of occupied Eastern territories, SS General Otto Hofmann (Nicholas Woodeson), Chief of the Race and Resettlement Office, Erich Neumann (Jonathan Coy), director of the Four Year Plan, economic initiatives decreed by Hitler and Hermann Goering, SS General Heinrich Müller (Brendan Coyle), chief of the Gestapo, Dr. Josef Bühler (Ben Daniels), administrator of occupied Poland, SS Major Rudolf Lange (Barnaby Cay), head of Nazi intelligence in Latvia, Dr. Roland Freisler (Owen Teale), Nazi judge, and Dr. Karl Schöngarth (Peter Sullivan), Nazi court official.  To be discussed: the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question in Europe”, namely what to do with the millions of Jews in Nazi clutches in both Germany itself and occupied territories.  Before the Wannsee Conference, the Holocaust had already begun, but the plans hammered out in this two hour meeting would organize it into the mass-coordinated, hyper-efficient killing machine it would become.

Conspiracy plays out much like a stage play, a sort of dark, twisted version of 12 Angry Men.  There is no Holocaust imagery; the setting never leaves the elegant Wannsee villa.  Like a play, the film is almost entirely reliant upon dialogue (taken directly from the sole surviving conference transcript), acting, and character interplay, all of which prove to be strengths.  The attendees banter, bicker, smoke, drink, and eat while discussing sterilizations and slave labor, arguing over what defines a Jew (what to do with those of “mixed blood” or intermixed marriages becomes a major point of contention), and debating the most efficient methods of extermination (or, as Heydrich winkingly calls it in one of various euphemisms, “evacuation”).  The most disturbing aspect of Conspiracy, besides discussions of forced sterilization, gas chambers, and mass shootings, is the casual atmosphere.  It could be any boardroom of any Fortune 500 company (Heydrich invites everyone to break out the wine and cigars, quipping “that’s how they do it at I.G. Farben, isn’t it?”), except that instead of discussing stocks and inventory, the attendees are discussing mass genocide.  Perhaps the most key thing that director Frank Pierson and his cast do is simply lay out the facts in no-frills, unvarnished fashion without reaching for histrionics or trying to make the conference more dramatic than it was, letting the transcript speak for itself.  The low-key, casual, matter-of-fact tone is more disturbing than any amount of overdramatics could have been.

Besides the “banality of evil” portrait it paints, the other fascinating aspect of Conspiracy is back-and-forth ensemble character interplay.  The men at Wannsee are not savages or brutes; of the fifteen who attend, eight hold academic doctorates, and there are many lawyers in the room (and a large amount of legal wrangling).  Nor are they a uniform monolith; there is as much rivalry and bickering as any other bureaucracy.  While technically outranked by several men at the table, it soon becomes apparent that Heydrich is the big fish, smoothly steering the debate toward its inevitable outcome, railroading opposition, and taking a brief tea break to have a one-on-one with a dissenting opinion and drop a veiled threat or two to convince them to get with the program (“I hope the SS does not take too keen an interest in you”, he muses coyly to the argumentative Dr. Stuckart).  Behind his veil of suave charm and the formality of group debate, it is clear that Heydrich is bent on having his way.  Colin Firth’s Dr. Stuckart initially seems as if he might provide a flicker of a voice of reason, but his strident objections soon turn out to be more due to legal hang-ups than moral ones.  David Threlfall’s Dr. Kritzinger’s misgivings might be more sincere, albeit limited (Heydrich mocks him for raising no argument against segregating and enslaving Jews, merely killing them), but he lacks the willpower to avoid ultimately knuckling under to Heydrich.  Jonathan Coy’s Neumann flits from person to person introducing himself with the title “Office of the Four Year Plan”, like a little fish in a roomful of big fish desperately trying to sound important.  There are interdepartmental rivalries (various representatives of other bureaus resent the SS taking over the entire operation and running roughshod over their own jurisdictions and authorities) and even fleeting moments when the enormity of what they’re discussing thuds home for several attendees; after Eichmann reveals Auschwitz’s capacity for eliminating 6,000 Jews per day, SS General Hofmann takes an abrupt restroom break, blaming the food.

The low-key, mostly low-profile, predominantly British (with the exception of Stanley Tucci) ensemble cast unanimously performs admirably avoiding try-hard overdramatics or scenery-chewing.  Likewise, no one is making any attempt at a German accent, which is a debatable choice but might have been the right way to go for this production, allowing the dialogue to speak for itself without any distractions.  Kenneth Branagh restrains his hammy tendencies to play the ringleader Heydrich with an easy charm veiling an icy determination, backed up by Stanley Tucci as his number two man Eichmann, a glorified pencil-pusher, hyper-efficient with ever-ready statistics and spreadsheets, and occasionally showing a flash of a venomous bully behind his officiously bland demeanor (he terrorizes the harried kitchen staff early on, and later slaps a soldier for engaging in a snowball fight while on duty).  Branagh and Tucci’s portrayals most embody “the banality of evil”; they could be all-business bureaucrats in any other organization tackling any other operation, likely with as much ruthless efficiency as they approach genocide.  Of the others, the most distinctive personalities are Colin Firth’s legalistically-fixated Dr. Stuckart, David Threlfall’s conflicted Dr. Kritzinger, who leaves Heydrich with a philosophical warning, and Ian McNeice’s vulgar, piggish Klopfer, who cracks coarse sexual innuendos while discussing sterilizations and accuses Stuckart of being a Jew-lover (Colin Firth’s cue to launch into a vehement monologue revealing Stuckart, whom we might have previously thought semi-sympathetic, to be as ardent an anti-Semite as anyone in the room).

Conspiracy won’t appeal to everyone; it’s a dry, talky, entirely dialogue-driven affair consisting of fifteen men debating, arguing, and bantering in a smoky room over wine and cigars.  But for those with an interest in the subject matter, it’s a disquietingly spare, matter-of-fact docudrama portraying the undramatized true story of a two hour meeting which had massive and monstrous ramifications.

* * *

DIRECTOR: Joe Johnston

CAST:

Chris Evans, Hayley Atwell, Tommy Lee Jones, Hugo Weaving, Stanley Tucci, Toby Jones, Dominic Cooper, Sebastian Stan, Neal McDonough, Derek Luke

REVIEW:

Captain America is an adequate, serviceable comic book superhero origin movie that doesn’t merit any scorn but also doesn’t generate overwhelming enthusiasm.  Tying in with Iron Man, Iron Man 2, and Thor, it’s the last of the Marvel comics movies introducing each of the individual Avengers who will be united onscreen in 2012’s The Avengers, and it’s debatable whether the Cap’n would have seen the screen otherwise.  Despite his long-running existence in the comics (since 1941), Captain America is no longer considered among the top tier of comic book superheroes.  Part of the problem is probably also that audiences and reviewers are suffering comic book superhero fatigue; with so many superhero origin stories hitting the screens, it’s hard to make them all stand out, and the fact that they all inevitably follow the same basic formula makes it start to seem generic after so many times.  I enjoyed the film, but was mildly underwhelmed.  The self-consciously titled The First Avenger isn’t a terrible movie, but it lacks the certain spark that set Iron Man above the pack.

Captain America at least has one distinction in its 1940s WWII setting.  Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) is a 90-pound asthmatic who has applied and been rejected for the army five times.  His tenacity gets him noticed by Dr. Abraham Erskine (Stanley Tucci), a German scientist who like Einstein has defected to the Allies and is running a secret project to create a new generation of super soldier.  Erskine’s help lands Rogers in a camp under Colonel Phillips (Tommy Lee Jones, fun as usual) and British Agent Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell), where he undergoes an experimental procedure.  When he emerges, he is tall, buff, superhumanly strong and fast, and ready for action.  But Steve finds himself used only for propaganda selling war bonds to the tunes of cheesy theme songs, until he defies orders to go on a rescue mission after his captured friend Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan).  From there, he gets entangled with a plot involving HYDRA, a secret branch of Nazi special forces led by Johann Schmidt (Hugo Weaving).  Officially, HYDRA takes its orders from Hitler, but Schmidt is a megalomaniac with dreams of replacing the Führer and ruling the world.  He is also obsessed with finding artifacts he believes will give him the power of the gods, and has devised a superweapon he intends to unleash on the capital cities of the world.

There’s nothing surprising about Captain America, and that’s part of the lack of excitement.  It follows the basic formula of the comic book superhero origin story to the letter.  There’s the underdog protagonist, the obligatory love interest, the megalomaniac villain with an over-the-top scheme, a few action sequences, and a climactic one-on-one confrontation, all handled by Joe Johnston with competence but not a lot of flair.  Despite attempts to make her a tough go-getter, the ‘love story’ subplot between Steve and Peggy never feels more than perfunctory.  Equally underwhelming is the final showdown between Captain America and Schmidt/Red Skull, and the bad guy’s fate is left disappointingly ambiguous.  While the tone never gets overtly jokey, it stays fairly lightweight for the most part, hearkening back to the kind of cornball gee-whiz derring-do of Joe Johnston’s The Rocketeer.  Our bad guy, Schmidt, doesn’t get a lot of screentime or development, and being a stereotypical mustache-twirling Nazi obsessed with unearthing ancient magical artifacts makes him come across like an Indiana Jones villain.  A loss on the good guy team lacks effect because the character in question and their relationship with the hero is insufficiently developed.  Like both Iron Mans and Thor, Captain America includes an epilogue serving to set up The Avengers and again featuring a cameo by Samuel L. Jackson’s Nick Fury. Unlike the above three, however, Captain America feels less like it can stand on its own and more like a two-hour preview serving less the purpose of a memorable motion picture then providing the last- or first- Avenger with a backstory.  In fact, it spends so much time on the central character’s origin story that the rest of the plot feels underdeveloped and there’s not enough time left to establish a compelling story.  It’s perhaps not coincidence that the early set-up scenes before Steve becomes Captain America are more engaging than a lot of what comes after.

The CGI work is exceptional, seamlessly transforming hunky Chris Evans into a five-foot tall, ninety-pound shadow of himself.  It’s tricky to pull off effects like this without it looking goofy, but the CGI here is undetectable, and ‘Little Steve’ never looks anything less than a real person.  No CGI is used when he hits the opposite extreme; Evans’ impressively buffed-up physique is the real deal. Also effective is the makeup transforming Hugo Weaving into the hideously disfigured Red Skull, an example of a character at least physically looking like they have stepped straight off the comic panel into the film.  Of the several generic action sequences (which include a raid on a HYDRA base, a train ambush, and the final confrontation), the best is the first, pitting the newly upgraded Steve against a HYDRA spy (Richard Armitage).  The movie has some fun with the 1940s propaganda cheesiness of the Captain America theme song and dancing chorus girls; less intentional cheesiness occasionally seeps into the action sequences with their overuse of slow motion shots of Captain America sending foes flying (then again, it’s hard for a movie called Captain America not to have at least a mild cheese factor).  There are moments when Adam West-style “BAM!” and “KAPOW!” signs wouldn’t be too out of place.  There are also elements sprinkled around besides the Nick Fury epilogue that serve as tie-ins to the other Avenger prequels, most prominently the inclusion of Howard Stark (Dominic Cooper), a young Howard Hughes-esque engineer and entrepreneur who supports Dr. Erskine’s project and, as comic fans can tell you, will go on to father Tony Stark/Iron Man (an older Howard made a cameo in Iron Man 2, played by John Slattery).

There aren’t really any bad performances, but there also isn’t likely to be much writing done about the acting. Chris Evans, no stranger to playing comic book superheroes after The Human Torch in the Fantastic Four films, at least shows enough range to go from cocky womanizer Human Torch to strait-laced Steve Rogers, who gets a lot better at beating up bad guys after donning Captain America’s muscles but doesn’t get any less tongue-tied around women.  A character who’s this much of a “do-gooder” could either be cheesy or ring false in the wrong hands, but Evans imbues Steve with enough sense of sincerity and earnestness for us to believe in him (on second thought, maybe that’s not as easy an accomplishment as it sounds).  Tommy Lee Jones is what we expect, entertainingly barking out crusty one-liners.  Hayley Atwell gives a dash of toughness to the obligatory love interest.  Hugo Weaving’s Red Skull is a generic and underdeveloped dastardly megalomaniac, with only his grotesque appearance lending him any distinction.  Toby Jones plays his scientist sidekick Dr. Zola, a role that in another era seems like it would have been played by Peter Lorre.  Supporting performers like Dominic Cooper (as the Howard Hughes-esque Howard Stark) and Sebastian Stan (as Bucky Barnes, Steve’s best friend and later Captain America’s right hand man) provide adequate support, but their screentime is limited.  Still smaller roles include Neal McDonough and Derek Luke as two of Cap’s compatriots, Richard Armitage as a HYDRA assassin, and the closing cameo by Samuel L. Jackson that’s become obligatory in these movies.  The best performance in the supporting cast comes from an almost unrecognizable Stanley Tucci, who gives a nice character actorly turn as the Einstein-esque Dr. Erskine, but he’s not around for long.

Comic fans will probably enjoy Captain America; it’s competently-made, does an efficient job of laying out the superhero’s origins in an easy-to-follow manner, it has a breezy pace and a few action sequences. It fulfills the basics of what it sets out to do.  Point A to Point B is reached clearly and efficiently.  Like Steve Rogers, the movie answers the call of duty, but unlike him, it doesn’t go above and beyond.

**1/2

DIRECTOR: Simon Curtis

CAST: Helen Mirren, Ryan Reynolds, Daniel Brühl, Tatiana Maslany, Katie Holmes, Max Irons

REVIEW:

Hollywood likes stories about lawyers crusading for a righteous cause.  On the surface, Woman In Gold is another generic entry, but its sometimes powerful true story, a split narrative chronicling two time periods, an unsurprisingly strong performance from Helen Mirren and, perhaps somewhat more surprisingly, capable support by Ryan Reynolds helps lend it more weight and impact than just a courtroom drama.

In the 1930s, Austrian Jew Maria Altmann (Tatiana Maslany) and her husband Fritz (Max Irons) escaped from Nazi-occupied Austria but were forced to leave family members behind to certain doom, along with a beloved painting depicting her late Aunt Adele done by famous painter Gustav Klimt.  In the late 1990s, the elderly Maria (Helen Mirren), who has spent the intervening decades in the United States, attempts to get the painting back, but “The Woman In Gold” has become “The Mona Lisa of Austria” and a national icon, and the Austrian government is unwilling to part with it, considering it rightful state property.  To aid in her legal struggle, Maria turns to family friend, young inexperienced lawyer Randol Schoenberg (Ryan Reynolds), who is himself of Austrian-Jewish descent as the grandson of famous composer Arnold Schoenberg and the son of a respected judge but wallowing in the shadow of his prestigious lineage under student loan debts and a failed attempt at starting his own law firm.  Initially, Randy is reluctant to get invested in Maria’s legal struggle but gets involved after a little grudging bonding (and after doing a little research and realizing the painting in question is valued at over $100 million).  But their efforts in Austria are rebuffed and, apart from Austrian investigative journalist Hubertus Czernin (Daniel Brühl), they have few allies.  But the initially leery Randy becomes dedicated to Maria’s cause (in fact, in an ironic turn-around, it’s Randy who keeps the case going for a time after Maria grows discouraged), ultimately suing the Austrian government in US court and taking the battle all the way up to the Supreme Court.

Opening in the “present” in 1998 Los Angeles, we periodically alternate back-and-forth in time between two storylines, Maria and Randy’s legal struggle (which spans 1998-2004), and flashbacks to the Altmann family’s plight in Nazi-occupied Austria of the 1930s and Maria and her husband Fritz’s getaway.  While the lion’s share of the screentime goes to the Maria/Randy story, the filmmakers manage to make both plotlines engaging, avoiding the annoyance of one interesting storyline being interrupted by a more mundane one, as is sometimes the case in narrative-splitting approaches like this.  For obvious reasons, there’s more tension and a darker tone in the flashbacks, where the stakes are literally life-and-death (the sequence depicting their actual narrow escape generates a surprising amount of suspense, considering we obviously already know Maria survives), but we also become engrossed in the details of the “present day” back-and-forth legal struggle.  The two timelines help connect the dots of how the past affects the present, as well as illuminating the ways in which the Nazis not only tried to exterminate the Jewish people, but also carried out wholesale theft of the possessions they left behind.  We learn that one of the Altmanns’ paintings ended up hanging in no less a place than Hitler’s private mountain retreat at Berchtesgaden, while Aunt Adele’s favorite gold necklace ended up on the neck of the wife of Hermann Goering.  At one point, Maria and Randy visit the very art studio where a young Adolf Hitler unsuccessfully applied to be an art student.  One theme the movie implicitly addresses is how easily people forget the past, especially an unpleasant one, with the present-day Austrian government wishing to sweep unsavory aspects of its history under the rug.  Woman in Gold repudiates the idea that time erases the sins of the past.  Not all Austrians are hostile to Maria’s goals (Daniel Brühl‘s Hubertus Czernin serves as a counter-example), but the extent to which the Austrian government obstinately digs in its heels and uses all the bureaucratic red tape it can muster to thwart she and Randy is sadly telling.  The crimes of the Nazis should not have a statute of limitations.  The modern-day Austrian government may not be responsible for events of WWII, but it does bear a moral and (as was ultimately determined) legal obligation to return stolen possessions to the surviving owners (or their heirs).

Helen Mirren, sporting dark hair and imbuing her regal British accent with a more Germanic tinge (though her Britishness sometimes seeps through), is her usual delightful self, playing the older Maria with a sense of long-suffering weary dignity, an acerbic tongue, and an unflappable determination.  Ryan Reynolds, looking toned-down and slightly nerdy behind glasses and a buttoned-down wardrobe, initially feels like a lightweight next to Mirren, but as Randy’s conviction grows, he does a capable job of traversing the cliched character arc of the initially disinterested lawyer who becomes emotionally invested in his client’s struggle, and he and Mirren make an effective “odd couple”.  In supporting roles, German actor Daniel Brühl (probably best-known to American audiences as race car driver Niki Lauda opposite Chris Hemsworth in 2013’s sports drama Rush) is their biggest Austrian supporter, Hubertus Czernin (whose previous claim to fame was exposing the Nazi past of former Austrian President Kurt Waldheim), and Tatiana Maslany (of television series Orphan Black) plays the younger Maria.  Other smaller roles include Max Irons (son of Jeremy) as the young Maria’s husband Fritz, Katie Holmes as Randy’s wife, the ever-stern Charles Dance as Randy’s law firm boss, Frances Fisher as Randy’s mother, Jonathan Pryce as Chief Justice William Rehnquist, and Antje Traue (Man of Steel‘s Faora) as Aunt Adele, the “Woman In Gold”.

Woman In Gold occasionally feels that events are shallowly skimmed-through due to the compressed passage of time (1998-2004 in an hour and forty-nine minutes, not to mention the significant flashback sequences which take up a fair amount of screentime).  Randy’s wife seems to have an abrupt turn-around in attitude that might have seemed less arbitrary had Randy’s family life been more than fleetingly sketched-out.  But the movie serves up a history lesson worth hearing (one recalls George Santayana’s quote “those who do not remember the past are doomed to repeat it”) and has some poignant and moving moments while also, like most effective courtroom dramas, infusing the proceedings with a crowd-pleasing element.  Ultimately, it works both as a reminder of past wrongs and a demonstration that sometimes the truth prevails.  Justice and historical truth should not have a statute of limitations.

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