Apt Pupil (1998) 1/2 * A movie review by Serdar Yegulalp Copyright 1998 by Serdar Yegulalp
This film enraged me in ways that I find difficult to put into language. I was at first compelled to consign it to the "no stars" category, which I reserve for films that are morally repugnant, but I held back -- if only because I wasn't too sure if the filmmakers were aware of how badly they'd botched their own story. Let me explain.
APT PUPIL has been adapted from a Stephen King short story about a high school kid who discovers that the old man living down the street is Kurt Dussander, a former Nazi commandant. He blackmails the old man into spilling more and more of the beans about his life as a Nazi, and then, as we might imagine, there is a transference of personality and intent.
The story seemed less exploitive on paper, I guess. On film, it's appalling, because it shows us things that in a more intelligent movie, we would have felt repulsed by -- but in this movie, they're being used for shock value, to lead us along and enlist our attention when it's already being kept.
Technically, the movie's credentials are solid: it was directed by Bryan Singer, whose THE USUAL SUSPECTS was fascinating if a little too much like the ultimate cinematic shaggy-dog story. The acting is also solid: Ian McKellan, who was magnificent in RICHARD III, is fine as Dussander, given the limits of the script. Brad Renfro plays the boy, and does a decent job. His character is not stupid, but morally bankrupt, and the movie tries to get its mileage out of the idea that his moral vacuum may somehow be worse than Dussander's.
But isn't this a futile effort? I kept asking myself. The only reason one would try to gauge which of the two is worse -- Dussander or the Renfro character -- is so that one could mete out punishments, and the movie indulges in precisely the kind of ham-handed eye-for-and-eye revenge moralization that bad Hollywood movies of this stripe wallow around in. There is a particularly odious attempt to provide "balance" at the end of the movie, when a concentration camp survivor is trotted out and made to recite John Donne, as if on cue.
The film is littered with noxious episodes which are allegedly supposed to portray both character's disintegrations, but which don't add up to much more than ugly attempts to shock the audience -- probably because they're dealt with in such an exploitive fashion. For example: Dussander, in one of his less tractable moments, tries to stick a neighbor's cat in the oven and gas it to death. The film's shifty editing allows us to draw our own conclusions about whether or not the cat survived. In other words, the movie wants to have its cake (cheap shock of cat being gassed in oven) and eat it too (larger "statement" about Dussander's evil). The film even sinks to the level of shamelessly milking the old He Isn't Really Dead ploy, which does not belong anywhere near a movie of its alleged caliber.
I think I understand now why I hated this film. I resented the movie because it tries to use the subject of the Holocaust -- as well as many other kinds of horrors -- to spice up a basically mundane story. It gets to the point where we are being asked to listen to details that add nothing to the actual drama, but are simply there as a kind of emotionally pornographic embroidery.
Take, for instance, one scene where Dussander describes in loathsome and graphic detail the process of gassing Jews. The scene is squirm-inducing for all the reasons I described above, but then it takes on another level of audience betrayal. Dussander is made to say that the gas came from nozzles in the ceiling -- in other words, from the infamous dummy showerheads that have been the subject of many a documentary of the gas chambers. This is not even factually correct: the showerheads were cosmetic and not attached to anything. The actual gas (which came in the form of Zyklon B, a gravel-like substance that released cyanide gas when exposed to air) was either thrown in through doggable ports in the ceiling or introduced through wire mesh devices.
I don't mean to digress forever on this point, but it is a strong component of what I objected to about this movie. The whole issue of the Holocaust and its impact on people is not being explored per se, but is simply being exploited as an attention-getting factor -- and what's worse, the filmmakers and screenwriters didn't bother to do basic research beyond recycling whatever obvious cliches of the Holocaust were floating around in their head. That's offensive.
I am now mentally comparing APT PUPIL mentally to another movie that I saw a while ago -- BETRAYED, which was written by Joe Eszterhas and starred Tom Berenger as a good ol' boy-cum-Klansman. That film contained a scene which brought the whole movie screeching to a halt -- a sequence where Berenger and some of his Klan buddies kidnap a black man and use him in a live manhunt. If the filmmakers felt that to include such a scene in that movie was "required" to establish how vile the Klansman were, then they are mistaken. BETRAYED was written on the level of a two-dimensional Hollywood entertainment AT BEST. Putting a repulsive scene like that in it does not "ennoble" the film, because the film has not earned the right to exploit that imagery by dint of any understanding of those issues.
And now, at last, I think about a movie like the heart-stopping documentary SHOAH, which contains an almost uncountable number of real details about the Holocaust, or even HOTEL TERMINUS, which examined the Klaus Barbie affair -- both of which have infinitely more to say about the nature of evil than the rancidly exploitive APT PUPIL.
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