THE EMPTY MIRROR
Reviewed by Harvey Karten, Ph.D. Lions Gate Films Director: Barry J. Hershey Writer: R. Buckingham, Barry J. Hershey Cast: Peter Michael Goetz, Joel Grey, Doug McKeon, Norman Rodway, Glenn Shadix, Camilla Soeberg
Did Hitler really believe in the Nazi ideology, or did he simply use his convictions to manipulate the people he governed? You won't find the answer by reading "Mein Kampf," since, after all, the rambling rhetoric of his infamous book is self-serving. According to R. Buckingham and Barry J. Hershey, who have written a difficult new movie "The Empty Mirror," the answer is both: he was a true believer and he cleverly exploited his theories to maintain absolute control over the German people during his reign as chancellor. Buckingham and Hershey could have made a talking-heads documentary, interviewing scores of people in the style of James Moll's Oscar-winning documentary "The Last Days." He opts instead for a dramatic monologue backed up by surreal imagery, actual footage from the film archives of the 1930's and 1940's, stagy dialogue between Hitler and his chief ministers, and fanciful exchanges between Hitler and the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud. While "The Empty Mirror" avoids the off-putting, cerebral, and uncinematic flaws of chronicles like a recent one about Ayn Rand, it settles for off-putting, cerebral and uncinematic conversations, ruminations and speculations assisted by the background drone of film footage, both actual and resourceful.
"The Empty Mirror," which was photographed over a period of just 66 days completely within a claustrophobic set, is the sort of vehicle that should have been produced on the stage, the natural medium for extended soliloquies and prolonged, invented conversations. The screen is the proper mode for action. Using its spacious dimensions for pontifications, however complemented with imagery, gives the viewer the impression of squandered space, as though the music- dramas of Richard Wagner were performed by a single trumpet. Nor is the audience about to be animated by the sort of exchanges launched by advancing warmed-over, fortune-cookie philosophy. This two-hour drama, directed in a heavy-handed manner by Barry J. Hershey, is cumbersome and tedious as you'd expect from a film dominated by interminable talk, however gussied up by the director's flights of fancy.
Unlike wartime leaders such as Churchill and Roosevelt, Hitler never produced a volume of memoirs. His "Mein Kampf," written during the 1920's while he served a brief sentence in prison, lets us in on his view of history and the place he would reserve for himself in its tapestry. But we're left in the dark about how he felt when the smoke cleared and the Russians were advancing on his bunker in 1945. Did he have a conscience at all, the slightest tinge of regret about the untold suffering he caused the world as its greatest mass murderer? For most of its playing time, "The Empty Mirror" takes the view that Hitler regrets only that he got caught. Only in its final segment do we gain a more complex insight into his global perspective.
Director Hershey keeps his subject on a single set, designed to represent an underground bunker--or perhaps the dictator's mind, a dank prison to which he might have been confined pending his trial, or perhaps a hell in which he must spend eternity mulling over his deeds. He is visited by Sigmund Freud (Peter Michael Goetz), his propagandist Josef Goebbels (Joel Grey), his right-hand man Hermann Goering (Glenn Shadix), and his adoring mistress Eva Braun (Camilla Soeberg). These callers provide him with a sounding board for his thoughts which are later dictated to a typist (Doug McKeon). Insisting that people want round numbers for the memoirs they read, he settles on 6 million (rather than 5.7 million) as the number of Jews he had exterminated during the early 1940's. Responding to the probing questions of Freud, he holds that only a poet could touch the edge of his mystery; only a genius like Richard Wagner could do justice to his mission of reviving the mythic greatness of the German Volk. While re-confirming and broadening ideas brooded upon in "Mein Kampf" such as his conviction that modern art is filth that can be traced to a people representing just one percent of the world's population, he describes his means of manipulating the public. "I was born to rule; others love to obey," he states proudly while contending, "Put a man in uniform and he will commit acts he never before imagined." The national socialist spirit will "make high school dropouts feel included by stressing only external differences." Most of all, he attributes his success to combining Jews and Marxists into a single great enemy that the masses could hate.
Hitler babbles on in a stream-of consciousness manner to his visitors--who include samples of the golden-haired youth whose patriotism he captured and channeled for his perverted world view. Hershey keeps the background occupied with newsreel clips and dream-like images which come across largely as busy-work to deflect from the movie's static nature. Norman Rodway, a fine British actor in the title role, resembles Der Fuhrer only superficially with a thick mustache and a shock of hair that reaches down toward his eyebrows. His frequent outbursts, however, appear forced--considering that he speaks either into a camera or to a guest or two. Despite the picture's aim of giving us insights into Hitler's conscience, Mr. Rodway's ruminations merely mine old territory, the background clips serving mostly as superfluous distractions.
Rated R. Running Time: 118 minutes. (C) 1999 Harvey Karten
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