An Inventor Trapped in Nazi Evil

[Dave Monroe]

The New York Times
Friday, January 24, 2003
An Inventor Trapped in Nazi Evil
By A. O. SCOTT

At least since "Z," his ferocious thriller about the
1967 military coup in Greece, Constantin Costa-Gavras
has specialized in dramas about fallible, generally
decent people who find themselves in intimate
confrontation with political evil — usually but not
exclusively some variant of fascism. His movies, more
often than not derived from actual events, tend to be
explorations of the untenable choices that fascism
forces on the liberal conscience.

For his heroes — the father in "Missing" searching for
his son in Pinochet's Chile, the daughter in "The
Music Box" reluctantly delving into her father's Nazi
past — evil turns out to dwell close to home. These
films explore how difficult it is to do the right
thing when that entails opposing your own country and
family.

The hero of Mr. Costa-Gavras's new movie, "Amen,"
which opens today in New York City and on Long Island,
faces an extreme version of this dilemma, since he
dwells at the very epicenter of murderous 20th-century
totalitarianism. Kurt Gerstein, a real historical
figure played by Ulrich Tukur, was a chemical engineer
and a lieutenant in the SS who developed Zyklon B, the
compound used in the Nazi extermination camps.

In the film, Gerstein, never a very zealous Nazi to
begin with, is horrified when he discovers the lethal
application of his invention, which he had thought was
intended to purify drinking water for German troops at
the front. He tries to alert the world about the
unfolding genocide and also to slow it down by
whatever bureacratic and technical means he can.

And so he finds himself ensnared in two terrible
paradoxes: his only hope of obstructing the machinery
of death is to continue to participate in it, but
because he is so centrally involved in it, his
testimony is ignored and mistrusted. (After the war
Gerstein was arrested by the Allies and either
committed suicide or was murdered while in their
custody. A denazification court posthumously declared
him tainted by Nazism. His name was cleared in 1965,
when his efforts to document Germany's wartime
atrocities and to prevent them from continuing were at
last acknowledged.)

Gerstein's story is inherently troubling, and Mr.
Costa-Gavras tethers it to some large and persistent
moral questions about the Holocaust. In particular, he
examines the record of the Roman Catholic Church and
Pope Pius XII, a record that has been the subject of
renewed debate in recent years ....

[...]

"Amen," which was loosely adapted from "The Deputy,"
Rolf Hochhuth's groundbreaking and controversial 1963
play, is laden with difficult, fascinating themes.
Unfortunately, Mr. Costa-Gavras, who has in the past
been deft at using suspense as a mode of ethical
inquiry, fails to bring them to dramatic life.

Gerstein's predicament, horrifying as it is, also
bears an element of black, Kafkaesque absurdity: his
only hope of halting the crime in which he is
implicated is to continue in his complicity. But while
the audience is invited to reflect on this nightmare,
we never experience anything like its full intensity.
In part this is because Gerstein's righteousness, like
Fontana's, is simply assumed, so that the only drama
we witness is the spectacle of frustrated goodness.

[...]

Visually, the film makes its points with more
concision and power. Rather than rub our faces in
graphic depictions of horror, Mr. Costa-Gavras uses
spare, haunting images to suggest the enormity that
surrounds Gerstein and Fontana. Several times we see
empty boxcars returning from the camps, their doors
open. The Vatican and its surroundings are filmed in
soft, luxuriant light, which, when contrasted with the
wintry harshness of Germany, conveys the detachment of
the church from the charnel house that surrounds it.

In the movie's most unsettling sequence, Gerstein and
a select group of SS officers, led by a reptilian
character called the Doctor (Ulrich Mühe, whose face
and supercilious manner suggest a leaner, meaner Kevin
Spacey), watch through peepholes as the Zyklon B does
its work. We do not see what they see. Instead we hear
the muffled thump of falling bodies and study the
faces of the murderers.

But in the end "Amen" is neither as moving nor as
illuminating as it should be. It suffers especially
when compared — as is inevitable, given the closeness
of their release dates — with "The Pianist," Roman
Polanski's movie about a Polish Jew during the Nazi
occupation.... the larger difference is in the extent
to which the filmmakers trust their art, and their
audiences, to approach a historical experience that
still, after so many years and so many movies, lies at
the very limit of human comprehension.

Mr. Polanski's ferocious discipline and his steadfast
refusal to explain or sentimentalize what he shows
have the effect of bringing us closer to an
understanding of evil and the ways it can be opposed
and, sometimes, overcome. Mr. Costa-Gavras, in
contrast, is devoted to explanation at the expense of
everything else, and the result is that this history,
in his hands, feels staged and studied rather than
lived.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/24/movies/24AMEN.html

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