Narrative, 2008
Director: Vincent Amorim
Germany, United Kingdom/ English
96 minutes
Based on British playwright C.P. Taylor's award-winning play, Viggo Mortensen stars as a German college literature professor who slowly allows himself to be seduced into the Nazi party. His character, John Halder, begins as a decent family man struggling to cope with two children, a an OCDish wife, and a senile mother. As the Nazis slowly begin their emergence and begin to infiltrate the university he is "encouraged" to join the party or it could endanger his career. At the time he believes that Hitler is a kook, the Nazis a phase, and pays little attention to them.
When a fiction novel he wrote about mercy killings garners Nazi interest and he is called in and asked to turn it into a paper in support of mercy killings, he doesn't even think of the implications of such a thing and can't help but revel in the power and attention as he becomes a golden boy of not only the party but the SS itself. At the same time he is seduced by an attractive, Nazi-sympathizing student who gives him a reason to escape his family and live the middle-aged crisis fantasy.
Each decision takes him further from the life he knows, the man he was, and cuts him off from his lifelong best friend Maurice, a Jewish psychiatrist. When he has a chance to help Maurice escape he doesn't, too afraid of endangering his new life. When things get heated and he, though non-military, is drafted into active duty with the SS to round up the Jews, he realizes he has to save his friend. Unfortunately, as he begins to see who he is really in bed with, both literally and figuratively, it may be to late to save him. In fact, when he sees the real horrors of hell on earth opening up around him and realizes that he, a once good man, allowed himself to be led astray in so many ways to the wrong side of the line, can he even save himself?
Excellent performances ground this tense, painful, if predictable story.
Lucy Cruell