Dir. Vicente Amorim, UK/Germany, 2008, 96 mins
Cast: Viggo Mortensen, Jason Isaacs, Mark Strong, Jodie Whittaker
Review by Carol Allen
Based on Scottish born writer C.P. Taylor's most successful play, first performed in 1981, this is a very interesting film, which is not totally successful, but is still thought provoking in its subject matter and execution.
The story attempts to answer the question of how did ordinary, apparently good men allow the rise of Hitler and the monstrosity of the Holocaust. John Halder (Mortensen) is a mild-mannered professor of literature in Germany in the 30s. He comes to the attention of the authorities in the person of censorship chief Bouhler (Strong) through a novel he has written about euthanasia. He then finds himself drawn into the Nazi establishment, rising almost without conscious decision until he finds himself inextricably part of the horror of the “final solution”.
Apart from Mortensen, Brazilian director Amorim has cast mainly British actors. As well as Strong, chillingly reasonable as Bouhler, Isaacs is particularly powerful as Maurice, Halder's Jewish psychiatrist and best friend, whom he betrays. The scenes between them are dramatically very strong. Whittaker is effective as the seductive student Anne, for whom Halder leaves his first wife Helen (Anastasia Hille) and Gemma Jones niggles nicely as his ailing mother. Mortensen's performance is very convincing in its scholarly tentativeness and apparent passivity. It makes an interesting change to see him playing a weak man.
While the film largely succeeds in the play's intention of raising the question in our minds “How would I have acted in Halder's situation?”, there are some problems in the adaptation, making it a sometimes uncomfortable hybrid. For example, Halder's life is punctuated by music, which only he can hear, until at the end of the film, when he visits a concentration camp, where a group of prisoners are playing a chamber piece and the music and musicians become real. It's a theatrical device which doesn't work on film. There seems to be no relationship between what is happening in his life and when he hears the music, so it's merely baffling. The structure in terms of moving back and forth in time from 1937 to 1933, which is then abandoned half way through for a more linear narrative, is unnecessarily ornate. The first scene where we see John rushing around coping with family life and problems veers dangerously close to sitcom, whereas otherwise there's little humour in the film. And while his situation is initially understandable and empathetic to us, once he procrastinates and prevaricates over helping Maurice to escape, our belief in him as a good man doing his incompetent best is badly shaken. There are also some situations, which work in the theatre but which challenge our belief in the more realistic medium of film, such as the way he accesses Gestapo files to discover Maurice's fate and his own wife's betrayal. As he and Maurice had served together in the army and, to quote from Halder himself “The Gestapo keep very efficient records”, his very question would put him under suspicion.
There are though some very telling examples of life under the Nazi culture of fear, as in a reference by ambitious officer Freddie (Steven Mackintosh) to how he and his colleagues are being encouraged to impregnate Aryan women and his later dismay and fear about his own infertility and what this could mean for his career. Anne's delight in her and her husband's progress through Nazi “high society” is telling, while the later remark by a concentration camp guard, who describes his work as “processing the items”, chills the blood with its detachment.
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