Blu-ray Review: Amen. (2002)

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Alternate Titles: Der Stellvertreter; Amen

A well-intentioned, emotionally charged yet historically questionable passion project from Oscar winning filmmaker Costa-Gavras that’s been roughly forty years in the making, Amen. takes you on a behind-the-scenes journey of what should’ve been naturally engrossing terrain.

Hoping to investigate the question of who knew what, when and why more wasn’t done to stop the “Final Solution” that led to the mass execution of Jews during the Holocaust, Amen. initially resonates with viewers on a humanistic level.

Unfortunately, as the film continues the admirable motives of the piece get bungled by leisurely pacing, static editing and an overreliance on manipulatively manufactured melodrama to try and make points when understated simplicity would’ve been far more effective in driving the moral subtext home.

Based on Rolf Hochhuth’s divisive 1963 play The Deputy, a Christian Tragedy which was criticized by those from all nationalities and religious walks of life for the artistic liberties that were taken with real figures and events surrounding the horrific genocide that occurred during the second world war, Amen. confronts the controversies inherent in Hocchuth’s text head-on.

Adapted by Costa-Gavras as well as Jean-Claude Grumberg, the audacious script raises valid (if contrived) questions about the culpability of other leaders by daring to make the government officials of other countries and various organizations – most notably the Catholic Church and Pope Pius XII in particular – accessories to the crimes that occurred at the Nazi Death Camps.

Centered on a historical figure, the film revolves around the moral crisis faced by a hardworking German chemist named Kurt Gerstein (played by Ulrich Tukur) after he discovers that the vaccine that he’d created to provide a safe haven from typhus is instead being used in the form of a gas to murder men, women and children by the thousand.

Hoping to alert the Vatican in order to put a stop to the horrific actions of the SS officers he has no choice but to work alongside for fear they’d slaughter his wife and children, Gerstein’s pleas to reach the pope fall on deaf ears.

Finding an ally in a young Jesuit priest (played by Matthiew Kassovitz) who’s as passionate to stop the insanity as he is despite having no means or influence, the two men realize they cannot stand by while such atrocities are occurring nearby.

Needless to say, it’s easy to understand why the work riled up viewers for its shocking portrayal of the Catholic Church (and foreign governments) especially when you realize that portions of the plot in addition to the Jesuit priest character had been invented entirely out of thin air.

However after researching Gerstein out of curiosity in order to separate fact from fiction, I couldn’t understand why someone as drawn to political filmmaking as Costa-Gavras was had chosen to use the play as the basis of his film when the details available that chronicle Gerstein's real life are far more riveting on their own.

As debated as the facts are surrounding the man in question via Gerstein’s own handwritten accounts, rather than relying on fiction to formulate a clumsily crafted and overly contrived final payoff in the film’s meandering final act, Costa-Gavras could’ve instead crafted an intriguing, investigate thesis worthy of Oliver Stone.

The last film from the director to utilize an English language track to date, the rather heavily accented dialogue would’ve benefited from the inclusion of a subtitle option on this otherwise technically stellar high-definition Blu-ray that shows off the meticulous frame composition, production design and cinematographic quality for which a Costa-Gavras picture is known.

Likewise it’s the technical specs of Amen. as well as the moving performances by our two leads that serve as the saving graces of this otherwise uneven production.

Furthermore, just like subtitles would’ve heightened our understanding, another read-through of the onscreen text might’ve augmented the film overall.

In a mind-boggling juxtaposition of pictures and words, Amen. illustrates one fate for our character and then uses a decidedly contradictory word choice moments later that makes us wonder if we either missed something, misunderstood some vital detail, or if the screen cards had been given an unsupervised translation after being written in a different language altogether.

While any foreign film buff understands that typos are quite common, because Amen. had been so structurally all over-the-place (not even clarifying the years when time flies by), ultimately we’re left with one awkward final impression of a film that attempted to reveal the truth about the final solution without understanding the importance of the final act in doing just that.

Disappointingly underwhelming despite its original potential as a work so many decades in the making, Amen. will be of particular interest to devotees of Costa-Gavras, even if it’s a minor entry in an otherwise staggering career of major achievements (aside from the lukewarm reception of another WWII inspired effort via Music Box).

The rest of us will do better to opt for one of several finely crafted, emotionally riveting and historically sound films that brought the horrors of the Holocaust to life for the current generation – whether by way of The Pianist or Schindler’s List.   

Text ©2014, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. http://www.filmintuition.com Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy of this title in order to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique.

Blu-ray Review: Capital (2012)

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Alternate Title: Le Capital

They wanted someone they could easily control as the new CEO but instead of a typical puppet, the board of directors at a prominent French investment bank wound up with a lying Pinocchio-like puppet-master (comic actor Gad Elmaleh playing it straight) who desires to break free of his marionette strings and puppeteers.

With not only the French board hoping to call the shots made by Elmaleh’s Marc but also a group of American hedge fund “cowboy capitalists” (led by Gabriel Byrne) longing to do the same, the puppet quickly cuts the strings and plots to get even.

In one of several manipulative deals, negotiations and ventures, Marc threatens to fashion a financial noose he won’t hesitate to put around the neck of anyone who tests him.

As such, he takes his wrath out on anyone and everyone from his long-suffering wife who hadn’t wanted to wear a $22 thousand couture dress (until Marc guilts her into submission) or the 10,000 jobs he doesn’t hesitate to cut – axing the regular worker bees in a backroom move mere moments after giving a bravura, rousing video conference in which Marc championed their role.

And in his first true dramatic test, Elmaleh does a hell of a job playing a ruthless bastard cut from the same cloth of Wall Street’s Gordon Gecko. Likewise, Elmaleh’s Marc becomes that much grander when viewed through the lens of the Oscar winning filmmaker Costa-Gavras.

The director’s signature, stagy flourishes abound but his utilization of fantastical elements from soliloquies to dream sequences lose the film's briskly paced urgency and feel wrong for the just-the-facts efficient speed of their “time is money” environment.

Furthermore, one of Capital’s biggest problems is that (despite the unorthodox techniques) thematically and topically we’re not being told anything we haven’t seen and heard onscreen before. Inundated as of late with several films about the perils of capitalism run amok in both fiction and nonfiction features that entertain on a blockbuster level, 2012’s Capital is a few years too late to the party.

From both the fiction feature and documentary versions of Casino Jack to 2011's crisp Margin Call or the Enron documentary to Capitalism: A Love Story years earlier, in this country (at least) we’ve been bombarded with tales of big screen economic woe with a collection of films that have far more sympathetic characters than the ones in Le Capital.

A cold world with cold people, Capital plays at times like an overlong, humorless foreign episode of Netflix’s original series House of Cards. Yet without Kevin Spacey’s tongue-in-cheek line reads or knowing winks at the audience or his against all odds charm despite some pretty horrific deeds – it’s a hard movie to get behind as our main character sinks into greater depths of ego-driven amorality and depravity.

Essentially raping a supermodel whom he felt had been fleecing him for money (but was just about to pay him back) and predictably choosing wealth, power and position over love and loyalty by the film’s final moments, Le Capital may be much more open about its main character’s misogyny than Scorsese’s Wolf of Wall Street, but in the end, Martin Scorsese’s misguided epic still has much more to say.

Superlative production values help elevate the eye-candy of Marc’s luxury-driven lifestyle but unfortunately its surface level beauty prevents the film’s obvious “greed is evil” message from fully sinking in on the same level as Stone’s Wall Street or House of Cards episode director James Foley’s understated Glengarry Glen Ross.

Though it’s a capable, classy yet ultimately chilly adaptation of the Stephane Osmont novel, in this information age of recession when we’re inundated with similar stories about those who take the money and run on the nightly news, we need a new twist in our features.

Instead of centering a film around a CEO playing Robin Hood who steals from the poor and gives to the rich, it might be time for a different type of narrative. For example, it would be much more relatable to see a tale from the point-of-view of one of the 10,000 worker bees who – now laid off and a victim of cowboy capitalism – decide to stop being a puppet and get revenge not by workplace violence but by playing Robin Hood for real.

Yes, it’s wish-fulfillment cinema in a time when Death of a Salesman has become timelier than ever but it’ll also help get the message across better by giving viewers someone with whom we can identify instead of more of the same manipulated puppets or lying Pinocchios or privilege and power.

   

Text ©2014, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. http://www.filmintuition.com Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy of this title in order to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique.