“The Reader” (2008)
Setting a film in the post-war period has led to a number of classics from some of the greatest filmmakers to ever work in the medium. It also led to Stephen Daldry’s “The Reader.” Harvey Weinstein had been trying to make a film of Bernhard Schlink’s semi-autobiographical novel for close to a decade, finally finding his glittering team with writer David Hare, director Stephen Daldry, and producers Anthony Minghella and Sydney Pollack (both of the latter passed away before the release), plus stars Kate Winslet and Ralph Fiennes. Set principally in Germany in the 1950s and 1960s, it centers on Michael (David Kross as a young man, Fiennes as an older one), who has an affair as a fifteen-year-old with an older woman, Hanna (Winslet). Years later, as a law student, he attends a trial of a woman accused of a war crime as an SS officer, and is shocked to find Hanna is one of the defendants, doubly so when he realizes a secret she’s long kept that could help her defense (a secret that’s spectacularly obvious from the title: she’s illiterate). The attempt, presumably, was to make Hanna’s illiteracy a metaphor for an inability to confront the realities of the Holocaust, but it’s executed in an amazingly wrong-headed way: seemingly attempting at times to excuse her actions and failing to reveal much about the nature of Nazi evil, banal or otherwise. Moral dubiousness aside, it’s also dramatically turgid, flatly shot for a movie that utilized the talents of both Chris Menges and Roger Deakins, and Winslet aside, not even memorably acted. Nevertheless, it did what it set out to do, by which we mean it won Winslet an Oscar and netted the film a Best Picture nomination, despite having precious few insights to share on the collective guilt and shame of the Nazi generation, or the one that followed it.
“A Foreign Affair” (1948)
Very underrated in the Billy Wilder canon — perhaps because it was released in the same year as the duff “Emperor Waltz,” was denounced at the time, and came just ahead of his extraordinary 1950s run, beginning with “Sunset Boulevard” — “A Foreign Affair” marked the first feature Wilder had shot in Europe after fleeing the Nazis fifteen years earlier. But that’s not to say that Wilder takes it easy on his home country: it’s a complex and biting genre-bender that sees Wilder baring his fangs with total disregard for the film’s purpose as propaganda, for the most part. Funded in part by the government, who were looking for a film set in Allied-occupied Germany, it sees congresswoman Jean Arthur coming to visit the troops, and enlisting a U.S. Army captain (John Lund) to try and track down a cabaret singer (Marlene Dietrich, of course) thought to have been the mistress of Göring and/or Goebbels, sparking off a love triangle. It’s that very particular Wilderian mix of tones, of sincere romanticism and deep cynicism, a thriller of sorts crashed into a rom-com and a portrait of a city rebuilding in both body and soul, and though it feels a touch compromised in places (it was a rough shoot, with Arthur in particular clashing with just about everyone), it’s a gloriously smart and surprisingly complex picture. You can sense Wilder’s anger at the Nazis, and his hurt at the damage done to Berlin, but the U.S. military and politicians are just as much the target of his ire here. And while Arthur and Lund are both very good — the latter didn’t really get the career he deserved, judging by his turn here — it’s fittingly Dietrich, in the first of two collaborations between her and Wilder, who really shines, taking a difficult role and making it sing (quite literally, in a number of highly memorable cabaret numbers).
“The Idiot” (1951)
Japan’s role in the Second World War (and its conclusion with the bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima), and its changing nature under American occupation and beyond, haunted Akira Kurosawa’s work until the end of his career, but it was in the films made in its immediate aftermath (those collected by Criterion in the ‘Postwar Kurosawa’ boxset), that he grew enormously as a filmmaker. Among the most interesting is “The Idiot,” made in the aftermath of his international breakout “Rashomon,” and the only chance that the director ever got to adapt a book from his favorite writer, Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Updating the Russian author’s story to Japan in the aftermath of the WWII, the film focuses on Kameda (Masayuki Mori), a veteran and former POW camp internee who’s been in an asylum for epilepsy, who, with his new friend, Akama (Toshiro Mifune, of course), falls in love with another man’s mistress, Taeko (the bewitching Setsuko Hara). Kurosawa made films that more directly confronted Japan’s post-war existence, but it’s undeniable that by making Kameda a former soldier and captive, he turns the film into a larger metaphor for a nation traumatized, ashamed, destroyed and suffering a severe identity crisis. It’s possible that it might even have been more explicit at one point: the director originally intended the film to be nearly five hours long, and in two parts, but his backers, Shochiku, cut it to shreds, ending up a little shy of three hours. Sadly, Kurosawa’s original cut has never been found, so it’s hard to tell if the intended version would have been a lost masterpiece or an indulgent folly (there’s a little of both in the surviving cut), but what survives still shows Kurosawa beginning to really flex his filmmaking muscles, and using one great work of art to create another, one that says so much about the world in which he was living.
“The Good German” (2006)
Steven Soderbergh‘s airless adaptation of Joseph Kanon‘s novel works better as an experiment in homage and reference than it does as a movie, in fact on the level of stylistic recreation it is at times quite brilliant. But the difference between it and the films it references is that “Casablanca,” for example, (which the finale here mimics right down Cate Blanchett‘s hat brim) is not self-consciously a throwback: it was simply the best, most immediate and artful way of telling that story with the tools available at the time. That genuineness is what “The Good German” lacks, the clarity and the emotional punch of the films it loves, but cannot be. Instead we get a kind of clinical, intellectualized reanimation of the techniques Soderbergh admires, right down to him shooting a great deal of the film on soundstages, and in stately, theatrical, choreographed takes rather than the looser format more modern filmmaking allows. And so his actors often seem uncomfortably stitched into this rigid framework — George Clooney practically disappears while Tobey Maguire, rather miscast anyway, seems visibly uncomfortable. Only Blanchett really seems to thrive in this register — shame the film is not more about her, rather than the cardboard menfolk. A noirish murder mystery with a dash of international intrigue involving the U.S.’ attempts to whitewash a Nazi war criminal so as to use his rocket-making expertise, this should be a gripping journey. But, typified best by Blanchett’s doomy femme fatale’s final confession about just what she did to survive, this is not a story about the moral blacks and whites of war, it’s a film about the messy grays of post-war confusion. But that vital sense of uncertainty and moral relativism is choked under so much ersatz style.
