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By PAUL BRENNER
One can always tell a
Costa-Gavras film; they usually feature people in
a hurry, rushing in straight lines up stairways
and through large rooms. People are in a hurry
because a grievous political and moral issue is at
stake and his characters are either rushing head
long into it or dashing quickly away from it. One
step past true political events ("Z," "Missing"),
his films have an urgency and power that carry
them through their didacticism.
In "Amen," Costa-Gavras takes on moral
indifference -- a theme sadly appropriate to these
contemporary times. Costa-Gavras digs back to
World War II for his story -- the failure of Pope
Pius XII to speak out against the extermination of
the European Jews, even though he (and the
Catholic Church) was aware that it was happening.
Ulrich Tukur plays the real life SS Lieutenant
Kurt Gerstein, who naively discovers that the
Zyklon B gas he thought he was supplying to German
troops to purify water, is actually being used to
gas Jews in concentration camps. Gerstein also
naively decides that he could best serve humanity
by maintaining his high role in the SS as a
chemist supplying the gas in order to be a witness
to the Holocaust and surreptitiously push to
convince an outside moral force -- religious
leaders, Allied governments -- to speak against
the Holocaust and force Germany to stop its
program of death. Of course, no one cares --
except for an idealistic Catholic priest, Father
Riccardo (Mathieu Kassovicz), who collaborates
with Gerstein to convince the Pope to "take a firm
stand."
But even though urgency engulfs the film -- the
jittery music by Armand Amar and many shots of
locomotives barreling down the tracks -- the
efforts of the characters appear almost deluded
and comical because the film has a hollow core.
The effectiveness of Costa-Gavras's political
thrillers are in the specificity of the victims --
a sole victim and his family uncovers a vast
governmental conspiracy. But here the victims --
the Jews -- are an abstraction. And an abstraction
like Hitchcock's Maguffin. The Holocaust is there
to motive the plot and sent the characters
running, but Costa-Gavras is only interested in
the Jews as innocent victims. Unlike Spielberg in
"Schindler's List," we never get a sense of who
the Jews are except as a faceless group being
exterminated. As a result, the film plays out like
an absurdist tragedy where the high moral
character tells the apathetic moral character
"Jews are being killed even as we speak" and the
other character says, "Get out." "Amen" ends up
treating the Holocaust as hollowly as the Germans,
Italians, and Catholics in the film and
Cost-Gavras's political warning call for
contemporary times becomes diffused and schematic
and dissipates in the air like the smoke from the
crematoriums.
The special features of this Kino Video DVD
includes a 45-minute making-of documentary, a
scene comparison between Rolf Hochhuth's 1963 play
"The Deputy" (the play the film was inspired by)
and a scene from "Amen," the press book, and
trailers. |
