AMEN ***1/2
DIRECTED BY Costa-Gavras
STARRING Ulrich Tukur, Mathieu Kassovitz, Ulrich Muhe
France / Germany 2002 122 mins.
THE CORE ****
DIRECTED BY Jon Amiel
STARRING Aaron Eckhart, Hilary Swank, Stanley Tucci, Delroy Lindo
US 2003 135 mins.
By Preston Wilder
I’LL NEVER understand the exclusionists – those who refuse to watch any kind of sci-fi,or shun period dramas, or declare they’ll only watch films in English. Isn’t it the point to sample all the various types of movies, finding excellence where you’d least expect it?
This week’s duo could hardly be more different – one a sober tract on the complicity ofthe Catholic church during WW2, the other a cheerful action fantasy taking a journey tothe centre of the earth. Neither was a hit, or made much of a splash; both, surprisingly, arewell worth seeing.
Amen sounds unpromising. In the first place, it’s something of a ‘Euro-pudding’ -German, French and Italian actors speaking English, with Greek-born veteran Costa-Gavras (best-known for Z and Missing) at the helm. In the second place, it’s yet anotherfilm about the Holocaust, a subject done to death in recent years (most recently in The Pianist). Above all, perhaps, it smacks of propaganda, treating speculation as a matter offact – and twisting its facts to make a point, according to some. Yet it also paints a vividpicture of power being used and abused, in official powwows and behind-the-scenesmeetings; and of course it illuminates History, showing how and why the great and good- above all Pope Pius XII – failed to speak out even as they knew thousands of Jews werebeing massacred.
Why did no-one speak out? The Pope and his Cardinals held Hitler in very low esteem but were more afraid of Stalin and his Communists, seeing the Reich as a useful bulwark. The Allies felt that trying to save Jews at this late stage would slow down the war effort, and were also nervous about taking in huge numbers of refugees. Within Germany, people lived in a kind of cocoon, and the SS too were in denial, referring to death-camp inmates as ‘units’ to be processed. All this is shown in sharp, sophisticated scenes, always aware of the larger picture; a typical shot is of people in imposing, high-ceilinged official buildings, dwarfed by the trappings of power.
The film’s (real-life) heroes are a pious SS officer who tried to stop the Holocaust even while supplying the Zyklon B gas used in the crematoria, and a high-ranking Jesuit priest who tried to convince the Pope to take a firm(er) stand against the atrocities. Both were members of the Establishment – indeed, members of the elite – and the film is especially sharp in showing the moral ambiguity of “men who have learned to subdue their conscience”.
Educated SS scientists tell Hitler jokes when nobody’s looking yet do nothing to frustrate his plans, while the Pope himself deals in semantics, telling a flunky to inform the German ambassador of “Our anger and Our sorrow” then pausing to modify it to “Our sorrow and Our anger”. The film’s true subject is self-delusion, the way people salve their consciences to ensure they don’t have to act: we rebel in private, meaningless ways, then pretend it’s the same thing as rebelling in public.
Amen is too long, tending to repeat itself, but otherwise works very well. The only problem is deciding whether Costa-Gavras – a well-known Leftist, and no friend of the Catholic Church – is a credible witness. After all, Pius XII did in fact make his opposition to Hitler known during the war: a New York Times editorial in 1941 called him “a lonely voice in the silence and darkness enveloping Europe”. It’s true he never condemned the Holocaust explicitly, but you have to wonder if it would have done much good in anycase. Amen is based on speculation – the assumption that a single protest, even a wave of protests, could somehow have averted the death-camps. Looking at our own time – when millions of protesters in rich, peaceful democracies can’t even avert a war in Iraq – I somehow doubt it.
In the end, it doesn’t really matter. The film’s a polemic, and proud of it: Costa-Gavras, who turned 70 this year, is one of those old-style idealists, enamoured of the cut and thrust of politics. Amen may be bad History (I don’t know enough to be sure), but it makes a surprisingly riveting movie.
The Core may be bad Science (I don’t know enough to be sure), but it too is surprisingly riveting – very surprisingly, when you consider what a flop this expensive film has been with critics and public. “The Core, which comes down to a bunch of gifted actors trying to out-earnest each other as they sit around a cockpit and cruise through digital magma, feels like the sort of thing you might have caught on TV during a rainy Saturday afternoonin the late 60s,” scoffed Owen Gleiberman in Entertainment Weekly.
Personally I blame irony, the recent fashion for larding adventure films with nudge-nudge-wink-wink jokes and pop-culture references. In that sense The Core is quite old-fashioned,and Gleiberman has a point about the air of 60s-throwback – but he’s wrong about the earnestness because the film is gloriously light-hearted, just like its 50s and 60s antecedents. Certainly the bad ones, the ‘B’ pictures that became éclichs, overdid the stiff-upper-lip heroics, but the good ones had a real sense of fun (albeit not ironic fun): you only need to look at something like the 1959 Journey to the Centre of the Earth – which has the same basic plot, as described in its title.
The journey in this case is a mission to save the planet, which faces imminent destruction when the Earth’s ‘inner core’ stops spinning (thus destroying its electromagnetic field).Those on board include a NASA pilot (Swank) and a clutch of eccentric scientists, including dotty Delroy Lindo and magnificently self-centred Stanley Tucci (also stealing scenes in Maid in Manhattan). They head towards the core in a custom-built, laser-powered craft called Virgil, made of a secret material known as ‘Unobtainium”‘. They don’t meet any dinosaurs, as they did in the 1959 Journey, but you feel the film would certainly have included them if it thought it could get away with it.
The Core, in other words, is cheeky fun – but it’s also surprisingly human. Director Jon Amiel stages the action so it’s never just empty spectacle: when pigeons fall out of the sky in their dozens (don’t ask), we see it through the eyes of an increasingly terrified little boy; when a NASA space shuttle is forced to land in downtown LA it screeches to a stop inches away from an oblivious construction worker, who’s so busy welding he doesn’t notice. The humour too is human – Tcheky Karyo as a shouty French scientist (first seen kicking a Coke machine), Aaron Eckhart as our tousled professor hero. The team members are forever bickering, and a meeting with the top brass is prefaced by a fun throwaway scene where Eckhart tries in vain to tie a tie, with mad scientist Lindo offering suggestions.
The result of all this warmth is a real emotional commitment in the second hour – the journey itself, with heroism and self-sacrifice played (once again) without irony. Eckhart’s pain when one of his friends gets killed is startling, because he plays it as if starring in a proper drama; we’re not used to such raw emotion in a popcorn movie – hence perhaps the charges of ‘earnestness’ – but it works because the characters have been played so good-naturedly, and Death seems so unfair. Instead of square-jawed, Ben Affleck-type heroes – with snarky asides to ensure we don’t take them seriously – the film offers goofy, funny heroes, then asks us to care.
I can’t
say much about The Core except that it made me very happy, all the more so forbeing unexpected. Amen too is wort
h seeing, but I doubt many people will be seeing both: they’re in different camps, the sci-fi adventure and ‘serious’ moral drama, which is something I’ll never understand. Why exclude when you can have it all?
The Cyprus Mail is the only English-language daily newspaper published in Cyprus. It was established in 1945 and today, with its popular and widely-read website, the Cyprus Mail is among the most trusted news sites in Cyprus. The newspaper is not affiliated with any political parties and has always striven to maintain its independence. Over the past 70-plus years, the Cyprus Mail, with a small dedicated team, has covered momentous events in Cyprus’ modern history, chronicling the last gasps of British colonial rule, Cyprus’ truncated independence, the coup and Turkish invasion, and the decades of negotiations to stitch the divided island back together, plus a myriad of scandals, murders, and human interests stories that capture the island and its -people. Observers describe it as politically conservative.
