12 N C The Passion of Sophie of Germany Weekly...
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NATIONAL CATHOLIC REGISTER 12 February 12 -18, 2006 film Sophie Scholl — The Last Days is a taut, well-choreographed sequence in which Sophie Mag- dalena Scholl (Julia Jentsch) and her brother Hans (Fabian Hinrichs), members of a tiny Nazi-era under- ground resistance movement called the White Rose, surreptitiously plant hundreds of leftover anti-Nazi tracts in a University of Munich atrium just before classes let out. Getting caught may cost them their lives. Though it involves little more than walking around a large empty room and depositing sheaves of paper, the scene’s white-knuckle suspense suggests the possibility of filming Sophie and Hans Scholl’s White Rose resistance as a thriller or engrossing episodic drama. (An earlier German film, Michael Ver- hoeven’s hard-to-find 1982 film The White Rose, may do precisely this; now would be an excellent time for a White Rose DVD release.) But Sophie Scholl has a more focused, intimate story to tell. Rather than recounting the whole history of the White Rose resistance, as worthy a subject as that is, Rothemund’s film examines six crucial days in its heroine’s life starting with her arrest on Feb. 18, 1943. Drawing on once unavailable Nazi transcripts from Sophie’s interrogation as well as previously available records and reports, the film, like Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, bypasses the events that lead its heroine to her trial by fire in order to contemplate how a young woman courageous enough to be brought to such an extremity acquits herself when it comes to the point. (Another 1982 German film, Percy Adoln’s The Last Five Days, covered essentially the same events in Scholl’s life, but from the point of view of her cellmate, based on the latter’s memoirs and not the then-unavailable interrogation records.) Rothemund’s film sketches an elusive portrait of a young woman of formidable intellect, dogged self-possession and excruciatingly steady nerves. At 21, Scholl is old enough to have outgrown the brash overconfidence of immaturity, but not yet too old to have lost the purity and ardor of youthful ideal- ism. She is also a devout Christian, a Protestant whose faith is both a source of personal strength and also a foundation for her critique of Nazi ideology and atrocities. In private moments, when she allows herself to be vulnerable and afraid, Sophie opens her heart to God. She pleads for help and strength and, in an hour of extreme need, gladly prays with a prison chaplain, receiving his blessing in the name of the Holy Trinity. Under cross- examination, Sophie boldly invokes God and conscience as the basis for her resistance, the source of human dignity and the necessary guiding light to put the German people on the path to recovery. An early extended interview sequence with Nazi interrogator Robert Mohr (Alexander Held) makes a calm conversation more riveting and suspenseful than the “action” scene in the atrium, as Sophie plays out a deadly chess game against an older and more experienced opponent in a stron- ger position. Subsequent interroga- tions morph from the strategizing of chess to the grace and power of a tennis volley as Sophie ably defends her actions, even turning the tables on her interlocutors. As the interviews progress, there are hints that even Mohr, a family man with a son of about Sophie’s age, has become somewhat taken with his prisoner’s luminous intel- lect and conviction. It is almost a kind of cognitive crisis for him: Here is this young woman, to all appearances the flower of German womanhood, an initially enthusi- astic member of the girls’ wing of Hitler Youth, educated at National Socialist expense — yet she inex- plicably rejects the world the Nazis are trying to build. “You’re so gifted,” he finally says in frustration. “Why don’t you think like us?” This ambivalence and even- handedness is rudely swept aside in a third-act trial scene that might seem heavy-handedly farcical but in fact is apparently a sober por- trayal of the People’s Court under raving, haranguing “blood judge” Roland Freisler (Andre Hennicke), here accurately depicted assuming the offices of judge, prosecutor and jury. Since Freisler is completely in charge and the outcome of the trial is plainly predetermined, without even a token argument from the in-name-only defender, one might wonder why Freisler found such strident abuse of the accused neces- sary when a simple “Guilty, guilty and guilty” would have done just as well. Yet Freisler’s penchant for courtroom histrionics is well docu- mented (some of his trials were even filmed). Sophie Scholl is part of a new wave of German films reexamining the Nazi era in a new light. Oth- ers include The Ninth Day, Down- fall, Blind Spot: Hitler’s Secretary, Napola and Edelweiss Pirates. Where earlier German cinema focused on the horror of the Holo- caust or the logistics of Hitler’s rise to power and the “final solu- tion,” these new films are preoc- cupied with the moral choices of individuals to collaborate or to resist. Regarding this new German WWII cinema, Sophie Scholl screenwriter Fred Breinersdorfer has commented: “The first gen- eration, who had lived through the war and the Nazis, were ashamed and despairing. The second gen- eration — my generation, actually — were more analytical and more pedagogical. We were educating ourselves as to what actually hap- pened. The new generation, Marc Rothemund’s generation, sees the Nazi period in more personal terms: ‘What would I have done in the same situation? Would I have had the courage to resist?’” Sophie Scholl is one of a very few films, like A Man for All Seasons, that accomplishes one of the rarest and most valuable of cinematic achievements. It makes goodness not just admirable but also attractive and interesting. Although she is articulate and con- fident, there is nothing shrill or fanatical about its heroine. Sophie is an ordinary university student, a biology major who enjoys music and philosophy. Faced with her own death, Sophie defiantly proclaims to her judges, “You hang us today, but tomorrow your heads will also roll.” Yet she is no social dis- content or misfit. Her extraordi- nary heroism has nothing to do with psychological needs on her part and everything to do with the pathologies of the time in which she lives. Content advisory: Much sus- pense and intimidation; a sequence of disturbing but implicit violence. Teens and up. English subtitles. Steven D. Greydanus is editor and chief critic of DecentFilm.com. ARTS & CULTURE o W E LIVE IN COMMUNITY . W E PRAY IN COMMUNITY . W E DINE IN COMMUNITY . ( New guy does the dishes. ) † The Oblates of the Virgin Mary 1105 Boylston Street, Boston, MA 02215 (617) 266-5999 www.omvusa.org For more information, call Fr. Peter Grover at (617) 266-5999. Light on plot and story logic but strong on narrative thrust and fantastic imagery, Jon Favreau’s outer-space adventure Zathura, just released, captures the spirit of writer-illustrator Chris Van Alls- burg better than previous adapta- tions (Jumanji, The Polar Express). Alas, Zathura is also a family film of the contemporary family as well as for it. The two young siblings Walter and Danny now come from a broken home (their parents’ mar- riage is intact in the book) and have a disaffected teenage sister. Where E.T., say, was raw with grief over the breakup of the family, Zathura is a family film for the no-fault divorce age. Though not without merit, what ultimately pushes the film just beyond the pale for me is the one-note sourness of Walter’s treatment of Danny for most of the running time. Though ostensibly about quarreling siblings learning to deal with their differences and get along, the film’s inevitable rap- prochement is too little, too late. Blasé atti- tudes about divorce are not a recent Hol- lywood inven- tion. This past week’s Cary Grant box set offers a pair of classic screwball comedies so highly regarded that I wish I could recommend them, but I can’t. His Girl Friday and The Awful Truth each co-star Cary Grant and Ralph Bellamy as two-thirds of a romantic triangle together with, respectively, Rosalind Russell and Irene Dunn, who in both films is divorced from Grant and engaged to Bellamy. Both films cast Bellamy as a slow-speaking, hon- est, decent, corn-fed type with short apron strings to his mother. Grant, by contrast, is sharp and shrewd, manipulating the situation to get his wife back while professing that he doesn’t deserve her and that Bellamy will do much better by her — though in fact he’s out to make Bellamy look ridiculous. In the end, a disillusioned Bel- lamy goes home with his mother, leaving Grant with the heroine. Some ro- mantic com- edies use divorce to teach the leads how much they really belong together. Awful Truth never gets there, spending so much time with the principals trying to show one another up that it never develops the bond between them, mak- ing their eventual reconciliation hollow. Girl Friday is worse. Russell is a former newspaper girl, Grant’s employee as well as his wife, who is trying to escape the fundamentally dishonest and callous life of a reporter to settle down marry Bellamy. Grant’s efforts to keep her around and show up Bellamy reach new lows here: He repeat- edly has Bellamy arrested on false charges and even has Bel- lamy’s gray-haired old mother carried off by a thug. The girl’s no better: Her callousness in the face of a condemned death-row inmate who seems to have gotten a raw deal is off-putting; she makes up a blatantly false rationale for his actions, not to get him off, but for political purposes. This, and an attempted suicide, are in very dubious taste. Though Russell knows Grant well enough not to put anything past him, when she discovers that his supposedly noble attempt to persuade her to escape the newspaper life and marry Bel- lamy is a sham, she concludes that Grant must really love her after all. Am I the only one not laughing? by STEVEN D. GREYDANUS Video Picks & Passes ZATHURA (2005) HIS GIRL FRIDAY (1940) THE AWFUL TRUTH (1937) CONTENT ADVISORY: Zathura contains much mod- erate sci-fi action menace and violence; some crude lan- guage; brief, oblique sexually related references; normal- ized depiction of divorce The Awful Truth and His Girl Friday contain much dissem- bling and romantic compli- cations in divorce-and-remar- riage plotlines; Girl Friday also includes an attempted suicide and dubious treat- ment of capital punishment theme. Weekly TV Picks by DANIEL J. ENGLER All times Eastern ALL WEEK Turin Winter Olympics NBC, CNBC, MSNBC, USA NBC’s Sunday coverage is at 3, 7 and 11:35 p.m. and 12:30 a.m.; CNBC’s is at 10:30 a.m.; and USA’s is at 1 and 6 p.m. Monday through Friday, NBC coverage is at 4 and 8 p.m. and 12:05 a.m.; CNBC’s is at 5 p.m.; and the MSNBC and USA coverage varies. NBC’s Saturday coverage is at noon, 8 p.m. and midnight; the sister networks vary. WEEKDAYS Family Unity in Today’s World Familyland TV Christine Vollmer, president of ALAFA (Alianza Latinoameri- cana para la Familia — the Latin American Alliance for the Family), cites lessons from her values-education program, Learning to Cherish, as she discusses how to strengthen families. Mondays at 10:30 p.m., Tuesdays at 8:30 p.m., Wednesdays at 1:30 p.m. and Fridays at 9 a.m. MONDAY, FEB. 13 Remembered Earth: New Mexico’s High Desert PBS, 10:30 p.m. Pulitzer-winning author and poet N. Scott Momaday, film- maker John Grabowska and cameraman Steve Ruth paint a beautiful picture of the wild- life, skies and landscape in Momaday’s childhood home, El Malpais (“The Badlands”) National Monument in rugged and picturesque northwestern New Mexico. TUESDAY, FEB. 14 Classroom: Jackie Robinson A&E, 7 a.m. In 1947, playing for the Brooklyn Dodgers, Jack Roos- evelt Robinson (1919-1972) became the first black major leaguer since Fleet Walker in 1889. His baseball skills and toughness, along with his Christian courage and forbear- ance, helped spell the end of segregation. WEDNESDAY, FEB. 15 The Blitz: London’s Longest Night PBS, 9 p.m. Archival film, computer-gener- ated images and interviews with survivors tell the story of World War II’s first German air raid on London on the night of Dec. 29, 1940. THURSDAY, FEB. 16 House Hunters: Sisters Join Forces Home & Garden TV, 10:30 p.m. When sisters Aimee and Jen- nifer Ellison decide to stop rent- ing their separate apartments and buy a house together, real estate agent David Wells helps them. SATURDAY, FEB. 18 Lives of the Saints: Little Margaret of Castello EWTN, 8 p.m. Penned up for years and finally abandoned by her par- ents because of her multiple physical challenges, Blessed Margaret (1287-1320) attained holiness. She is invoked by poverty-stricken, handicapped, unwanted and rejected people, and by pro- life activists. Dan Engler writes from Santa Barbara, California. The Passion of Sophie of Germany Christian heroism shines in Sophie Scholl — The Last Days by STEVEN D. GREYDANUS Early in Marc Roth- emund’s extraordinary Information To check availability of this movie in your area, go to sophieschollmovie.com and click on the “Where to See It” link. In the true story’s title role, Julia Jentsch plays a courageous German Protestant who stands on her faith as she stands up to the Nazis. (Zeitgeist Films poster)
Transcript of 12 N C The Passion of Sophie of Germany Weekly...
NATIONAL CATHOLIC REGISTER12 February 12 -18, 2006
film Sophie Scholl — The Last Days is a taut, well-choreographed sequence in which Sophie Mag-dalena Scholl (Julia Jentsch) and her brother Hans (Fabian Hinrichs), members of a tiny Nazi-era under-ground resistance movement called the White Rose, surreptitiously plant hundreds of leftover anti-Nazi tracts in a University of Munich atrium just before classes let out. Getting caught may cost them their lives.
Though it involves little more than walking around a large empty room and depositing sheaves of
paper, the scene’s white-knuckle suspense suggests the possibility of filming Sophie and Hans Scholl’s White Rose resistance as a thriller or engrossing episodic drama. (An earlier German film, Michael Ver-hoeven’s hard-to-find 1982 film The White Rose, may do precisely this; now would be an excellent time for a White Rose DVD release.)
But Sophie Scholl has a more focused, intimate story to tell. Rather than recounting the whole history of the White Rose resistance, as worthy a subject as that is, Rothemund’s film examines six crucial days in its heroine’s life starting with her arrest on Feb. 18, 1943.
Drawing on once unavailable Nazi transcripts from Sophie’s interrogation as well as previously available records and reports, the film, like Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, bypasses the events that lead its heroine to her trial by fire in order to contemplate how a young woman courageous enough to be brought to such an extremity acquits herself when it comes to the point. (Another 1982 German film, Percy Adoln’s The Last Five Days, covered essentially the same events in Scholl’s life, but from the point of view of her cellmate, based on the latter’s memoirs and not the then-unavailable interrogation records.)
Rothemund’s film sketches an elusive portrait of a young woman of formidable intellect, dogged self-possession and excruciatingly steady nerves. At 21, Scholl is old enough to have outgrown the brash overconfidence of immaturity, but not yet too old to have lost the purity and ardor of youthful ideal-ism.
She is also a devout Christian, a Protestant whose faith is both a source of personal strength and also a foundation for her critique of Nazi ideology and atrocities. In private moments, when she allows herself to be vulnerable and afraid, Sophie opens her heart to God. She pleads for help and strength and, in an hour of extreme need, gladly prays with a prison chaplain,
receiving his blessing in the name of the Holy Trinity. Under cross-examination, Sophie boldly invokes God and conscience as the basis for her resistance, the source of human dignity and the necessary guiding light to put the German people on the path to recovery.
An early extended interview sequence with Nazi interrogator Robert Mohr (Alexander Held) makes a calm conversation more riveting and suspenseful than the “action” scene in the atrium, as Sophie plays out a deadly chess game against an older and more experienced opponent in a stron-ger position. Subsequent interroga-tions morph from the strategizing of chess to the grace and power of a tennis volley as Sophie ably defends her actions, even turning the tables on her interlocutors.
As the interviews progress, there are hints that even Mohr, a family man with a son of about Sophie’s age, has become somewhat taken with his prisoner’s luminous intel-lect and conviction. It is almost a kind of cognitive crisis for him: Here is this young woman, to all appearances the flower of German womanhood, an initially enthusi-astic member of the girls’ wing of Hitler Youth, educated at National Socialist expense — yet she inex-plicably rejects the world the Nazis are trying to build.
“You’re so gifted,” he finally says in frustration. “Why don’t you think like us?”
This ambivalence and even-handedness is rudely swept aside in a third-act trial scene that might seem heavy-handedly farcical but in fact is apparently a sober por-trayal of the People’s Court under raving, haranguing “blood judge” Roland Freisler (Andre Hennicke), here accurately depicted assuming the offices of judge, prosecutor and jury.
Since Freisler is completely in charge and the outcome of the trial is plainly predetermined, without even a token argument from the in-name-only defender, one might wonder why Freisler found such strident abuse of the accused neces-sary when a simple “Guilty, guilty and guilty” would have done just as well. Yet Freisler’s penchant for courtroom histrionics is well docu-mented (some of his trials were even filmed).
Sophie Scholl is part of a new wave of German films reexamining the Nazi era in a new light. Oth-ers include The Ninth Day, Down-fall, Blind Spot: Hitler’s Secretary, Napola and Edelweiss Pirates. Where earlier German cinema focused on the horror of the Holo-caust or the logistics of Hitler’s
rise to power and the “final solu-tion,” these new films are preoc-cupied with the moral choices of individuals to collaborate or to resist.
Regarding this new German WWII cinema, Sophie Scholl screenwriter Fred Breinersdorfer has commented: “The first gen-eration, who had lived through the war and the Nazis, were ashamed and despairing. The second gen-eration — my generation, actually — were more analytical and more pedagogical. We were educating ourselves as to what actually hap-pened. The new generation, Marc Rothemund’s generation, sees the Nazi period in more personal terms: ‘What would I have done in the same situation? Would I have had the courage to resist?’”
Sophie Scholl is one of a very few films, like A Man for All Seasons, that accomplishes one of the rarest and most valuable of cinematic achievements. It makes goodness not just admirable but also attractive and interesting. Although she is articulate and con-fident, there is nothing shrill or fanatical about its heroine. Sophie
is an ordinary university student, a biology major who enjoys music and philosophy.
Faced with her own death, Sophie defiantly proclaims to her judges, “You hang us today, but tomorrow your heads will also roll.” Yet she is no social dis-content or misfit. Her extraordi-nary heroism has nothing to do with psychological needs on her part and everything to do with the pathologies of the time in which she lives.
Content advisory: Much sus-pense and intimidation; a sequence of disturbing but implicit violence. Teens and up. English subtitles.
Steven D. Greydanus is editor and chief critic of
DecentFilm.com.
A R T S & C U L T U R E
o
W E L I V E I N C O M M U N I T Y.W E P R A Y I N C O M M U N I T Y.W E D I N E I N C O M M U N I T Y.
( New guy does the dishes.)
†The Oblates of the Virgin Mary
1105 Boylston Street, Boston, MA 02215(617) 266-5999 www.omvusa.org
For more information, call Fr. Peter Grover at (617) 266-5999.
Light on plot and story logic but strong on narrative thrust and fantastic imagery, Jon Favreau’s outer-space adventure Zathura, just released, captures the spirit of writer-illustrator Chris Van Alls-burg better than previous adapta-tions (Jumanji, The Polar Express). Alas, Zathura is also a family film of the contemporary family as well as for it. The two young siblings Walter and Danny now come from a broken home (their parents’ mar-riage is intact in the book) and have a disaffected teenage sister. Where E.T., say, was raw with grief over the breakup of the family, Zathura is a family film for the no-fault divorce age.
Though not without merit, what ultimately pushes the film just beyond the pale for me is the one-note sourness of Walter’s treatment of Danny for most of the running time. Though ostensibly about quarreling siblings learning to deal with their differences and get along, the film’s inevitable rap-prochement is too little, too late.
Blasé atti-tudes about divorce are not a recent Hol-lywood inven-tion. This past week’s Cary Grant box set offers a pair of classic screwball comedies
so highly regarded that I wish I could recommend them, but I can’t. His Girl Friday and The Awful Truth each co-star Cary Grant and Ralph Bellamy as two-thirds of a romantic triangle together with, respectively, Rosalind Russell and Irene Dunn, who in both films is divorced from Grant and engaged to Bellamy.
Both films cast Bellamy as a slow-speaking, hon-est, decent, corn-fed type with short apron strings to his mother. Grant, by contrast, is sharp and shrewd, manipulating the situation to get his
wife back while professing that he doesn’t deserve her and that Bellamy will do much better by her — though in fact he’s out to make Bellamy look ridiculous. In the end, a disillusioned Bel-lamy goes home with his mother, leaving Grant with the heroine.
Some ro -man tic com-edies use divorce to teach the leads how much they really belong together. Awful Truth never gets there,
spending so much time with the principals trying to show one another up that it never develops the bond between them, mak-ing their eventual reconciliation hollow. Girl Friday is worse. Russell is a former newspaper girl, Grant’s employee as well as his wife, who is trying to escape the fundamentally dishonest and callous life of a reporter to settle down marry Bellamy.
Grant’s efforts to keep her around and show up Bellamy reach new lows here: He repeat-edly has Bellamy arrested on false charges and even has Bel-lamy’s gray-haired old mother carried off by a thug. The girl’s no better: Her callousness in the
face of a condemned death-row inmate who seems to have gotten a raw deal is off-putting; she makes up a blatantly false rationale for his actions, not to get him off, but for political purposes. This, and an attempted suicide, are in very dubious taste.
Though Russell knows Grant well enough not to put anything past him, when she discovers that his supposedly noble attempt to persuade her to escape the newspaper life and marry Bel-lamy is a sham, she concludes that Grant must really love her after all. Am I the only one not laughing?
by STEVEN D. GREYDANUSVideo Picks & Passes
ZATHURA (2005)
HIS GIRL FRIDAY(1940)
THE AWFUL TRUTH (1937)
CONTENT ADVISORY: Zathura contains much mod-erate sci-fi action menace and violence; some crude lan-guage; brief, oblique sexually related references; normal-ized depiction of divorce The Awful Truth and His Girl Friday contain much dissem-bling and romantic compli-cations in divorce-and-remar-riage plotlines; Girl Friday also includes an attempted suicide and dubious treat-ment of capital punishment theme.
Weekly TV Picks
by DANIEL J. ENGLER
All times Eastern
ALL WEEK
Turin Winter OlympicsNBC, CNBC, MSNBC, USA
NBC’s Sunday coverage is at 3, 7 and 11:35 p.m. and 12:30 a.m.; CNBC’s is at 10:30 a.m.; and USA’s is at 1 and 6 p.m. Monday through Friday, NBC coverage is at 4 and 8 p.m. and 12:05 a.m.; CNBC’s is at 5 p.m.; and the MSNBC and USA coverage varies. NBC’s Saturday coverage is at noon, 8 p.m. and midnight; the sister networks vary.
WEEKDAYS
Family Unity in Today’s World
Familyland TV
Christine Vollmer, president of ALAFA (Alianza Latinoameri-cana para la Familia — the Latin American Alliance for the Family), cites lessons from her values-education program, Learning to Cherish, as she discusses how to strengthen families. Mondays at 10:30 p.m., Tuesdays at 8:30 p.m., Wednesdays at 1:30 p.m. and Fridays at 9 a.m.
MONDAY, FEB. 13
Remembered Earth: New Mexico’s High Desert
PBS, 10:30 p.m.
Pulitzer-winning author and poet N. Scott Momaday, film-maker John Grabowska and cameraman Steve Ruth paint a beautiful picture of the wild-life, skies and landscape in Momaday’s childhood home, El Malpais (“The Badlands”) National Monument in rugged and picturesque northwestern New Mexico.
TUESDAY, FEB. 14
Classroom: Jackie Robinson
A&E, 7 a.m.
In 1947, playing for the Brooklyn Dodgers, Jack Roos-evelt Robinson (1919-1972) became the first black major leaguer since Fleet Walker in 1889. His baseball skills and toughness, along with his Christian courage and forbear-ance, helped spell the end of segregation.
WEDNESDAY, FEB. 15
The Blitz: London’s Longest Night
PBS, 9 p.m.
Archival film, computer-gener-ated images and interviews with survivors tell the story of World War II’s first German air raid on London on the night of Dec. 29, 1940.
THURSDAY, FEB. 16
House Hunters: Sisters Join ForcesHome & Garden TV,
10:30 p.m.
When sisters Aimee and Jen-nifer Ellison decide to stop rent-ing their separate apartments and buy a house together, real estate agent David Wells helps them.
SATURDAY, FEB. 18
Lives of the Saints: Little Margaret of Castello
EWTN, 8 p.m.
Penned up for years and finally abandoned by her par-ents because of her multiple physical challenges, Blessed Margaret (1287-1320) attained holiness. She is invoked by poverty-stricken, handicapped, unwanted and rejected people, and by pro-life activists.
Dan Engler writes fromSanta Barbara, California.
The Passion of Sophie of Germany Christian heroism shines in Sophie Scholl — The Last Days
by STEVEN D. GREYDANUS
Early in Marc Roth-emund’s extraordinary
InformationTo check availability of this movie in your area, go to sophieschollmovie.com and click on the “Where to See It” link.
In the true story’s title role, Julia Jentsch plays a courageous German Protestant who stands on her faith as she stands up to the Nazis. (Zeitgeist Films poster)
