FATHERLAND
A film review by Steve Rhodes
Copyright 1997 Steve Rhodes
RATING (0 TO ****): ** 1/2
As in many a mystery, the journalist is handed a picture by a mysterious stranger. In the old photo is a group of unknown people brought together during a key moment in WWII. What has happened to these people since, and what is the relevance of this photograph? Although this outline is standard issue, the circumstances surrounding it are not.
The book "Fatherland" is a taut thriller and author Robert Harris's first novel. I read this engrossing tale on vacation a few years back and thought at the time that a wonderful motion picture could be made from it. Although the script by Ron Hutchinson and Stanley Weiser borrows liberally from the novel, usually reliable director Christopher Menaul ("Prime Suspect 1" and FEAST OF JULY) manages to excise much of the suspense. Most of the key events from the novel are there, but in the 1994 film FATHERLAND they are laid before the viewer devoid of much of the energy and emotion present in the novel.
The story is set in the mid-1960s in a Europe renamed Germania and controlled by Adolf Hitler. Hitler has essentially won the war with a stalemated peace even if the US never signed a treaty, and the war on the Eastern front with Russia drags on ad infinitum. The US, led by President Joseph P. Kennedy, has begun to make some peace overtones to Germania. For the first time since before the war, Germania is letting American journalists into the country since Germania is celebrating Hitler's 75th birthday. All, however, is not well in the National Socialists' world. The knowledge of the Holocaust is limited to a few high-ranking Germans.
Into this carefully contrived calm comes a murder of a high ranking member of the SS. With the body found in a lake, an SS police officer, Major Xavier March, is sent to investigate. According to his dossier, the dead man turns out to have been an architect of "the Jewish resettlement program" and even designed certain new efficiencies in the program. (The Germans and the world believe that the Jews were resettled to the Eastern front. With the war with Russia dragging on forever, who could check the story's accuracy anyway.)
Rutger Hauer, who specializes of late in over-the-top performances, is remarkably subtle this time as Major Xavier March. March is one of the few good Nazis, an officer whose bulky uniform seems to hang on him heavily and awkwardly now. The Major is a veteran detective member of the SS, who has grown tired of the Nazis. When his son gives the Nazi youth pledge to Hitler at mealtime, March suggests they say grace instead like they used to.
His son, Dili, is a well scrubbed and naive member of the Hitler youth movement. Rory Jennings plays Dili as an automaton who shows little emotion at times when any human being would have had to be significantly affected.
The simple murder gets more complicated when General Globus (John Shrapnel), the head of the Gestapo, is found to have been at the scene. Soon a cover-up is afoot, and March is taken off the case.
Miranda Richarson plays an American journalist named Charlie Maguire, who was originally born in Germany but who left as a little girl. She is passed the mysterious and incriminating photos by a stranger, along with a cryptic note to see someone to find out more about the picture's background.
In delicious bit of casting against type, Jean Marsh shows up briefly as a creepy old German actress who blames her lack of success in America on those Jews who run the studios.
The book spent more time on the detective work whereas the movie devotes too much time to establishing Hauer's "good" Nazi credentials. And while the book kept the reader on the edge of the chair, the movie's laconic pacing and unhurried staging robs the story of its threatening immediacy. The movie makes everything too predictable, but the book had the gift of making the obvious surprising.
A gripping and lucid book is thus transformed into a confusing and slow movie that is populated with a remarkably tame group of Nazis with little visible anger. Even the Gestapo, with the exception of their sinister hats, don't seem to be a particularly bad lot. New York City cops are usually portrayed as more vicious by the movies. Still, the fascinating underlying plot and Hauer's moving performance ultimately save the picture, but just barely.
FATHERLAND runs 1:48. It is rated PG-13 for brief nudity, some violence and a few pictures of concentration camp victims. The film would be fine for kids age 12 and up.
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