Any presidency that kicks off with a chamber quartet featuring a diverse collection of some of the finest and most inspiring classical musicians working today is off to a good start, as far as I am concerned (even if it's music by John Wiliams and even if it wasn't exactly 100% live). While two of the musicians are household names, the two others are less known outside informed musical circles. Hopefully, that will change after such massive media exposure. As a tribute to both of them, here are a few youtube videos.
The first features Metropolitan Opera Orchestra principal clarinet, and Chicago native, Anthony McGill exquisitely accompanying Susan Graham in Parto, parto from Mozart's Clemenza di Tito:
Here is Gabriela Montero, joined by Martha Argerich in Lutosławski's Paganini Variations:
And one more, Gabriela Montero doing what she does best: improvising on the spot. This one from the Philharmonie Köln:
Thursday, January 22, 2009
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
Dudamel Returns
A little behind on my blogging, I know...
Last week saw the highly anticipated return of Gustavo Dudamel to the CSO podium. Dudamel brought with him what looked on paper like a very conventional program: Barber Adagio for Strings, Mozart Piano Concerto No.21 (with Stephen Hough), and Brahms Symphony No.2. But with Dudamel at the helm, it became an evening of exploration.
Easily my favorite was, perhaps surprisingly, the Barber. By far. I am the last person to defend the sanctity of authorial intention, if such a thing could even be objectively ascertained. But there comes a point when a work of art becomes so over-instrumentalized for completely unrelated purposes that it is difficult to find performers unencumbered by clichéed preconceptions. Barber's Adagio for Strings is one such piece, which all too often turns into a caricature of sappiness. That's when you need a Dudamel to make you re-hear it as if from a blank slate. Gone was the hyper-sentimentalism, the flabby heart-on-your-sleeve string sound. Dudamel knew how to make time stand still without milking the slow tempo. In contrast to how the piece is often performed, one would be inclined to label the following characteristics of Dudamel's performance "unusual": He started with a very lean, transparent sound, that very gradually, but therefore all the more inexorably, built toward that incredible climax. But Dudamel did it in such a way that left you thinking: "this is the way it should be performed - we've been doing it wrong the whole time." By de-sentimentalizing the Barber, it became all the more moving, if in many other ways than the conventional one. For an orchestra that gets more compliments for its brass than it can handle, programming works like the Barber is a great reminder to the world of just how outstanding this string section can be. Dudamel's clarity of purpose was rewarded with superb ensemble playing and terrific calibration of dynamics that allowed Dudamel to create one of those rare occasions when nobody coughs in a slow piece and everybody even stays silent for a minute after the music stops. Truly memorable.
I need to make a little aside here. I think too many reviewers still treat Dudamel as too much of a Wunderkind, as if he were an eight-year old piano prodigy miraculously playing Beethoven. Too often overlooked is the fact that, despite his youthful age (just shy of 28), he has nearly a decade and a half of solid conducting experience - something that many conductors a decade his senior would envy having. And most of that experience was with a youth orchestra. One might look down upon that, but that would be lethally wrong. A youth orchestra needs more guidance than a professional one, and yelling will get you nowhere. It is a much better environment for learning the craft than jumping in with the pros. And by now Dudamel has conducted almost all of the great orchestras of the world as well. In four months he will add the Concertgebouw to the list. As Daniel Barenboim says in this 60 Minutes video: "He knows what he's doing. He knows what he wants and he knows how to get it. What more can you say?" The guy is a pro and he's been at it for much longer than his babyface suggests. It is time to take the kid gloves off, both in terms of criticizing what there is to criticize, but also in terms of giving credit where credit is due and appreciating that this is a serious, thoughtful interpreter who goes into rehearsals with a concept in his mind, whose performances aren't the random result of youthful exuberance.
Good. With that out of the way, let's turn to the Mozart. Stephen Hough brought his limpid tone and spontaneous style to the famous 21st concerto. I thought Hough and Dudamel were a very good match in the second and third movements, which sparkled and flowed nicely, benefiting equally from Hough's transparent tone and Dudamel's rhythmic articulation. The first movement, by contrast, didn't really come together for me. Too rhapsodic were Hough's solos to really connect with the rest of the musical action to make a coherent whole.
The Brahms that made up the second half of the program was very enjoyable, indeed. I am always somewhat irked by interpreters who put all of Brahms's output into that same "autumnal" category and perform it accordingly with a pensive, brooding, even resigned air, doomed to perpetual melancholy, as if this weren't the same composer who gave us numerous Hungarian Dances, Waltzes, the two orchestral Serenades or the raucous, tongue-in-cheek Academic Festival Overture. It is then immensely refreshing to have a conductor blow away these preconceptions, get rid of some of the fat in the sound and focus on that other Brahms. While the gems in Dudamel's Brahms 2 were the third and the fourth movement, in the entire work Dudamel's clear articulation of rhythms brought out many of the metric ambiguities and counterpoints that are too often overlooked by others. Some reviewers criticized Dudamel's tempo in the finale as too fast. I didn't think so. In comparison with the current and historic interpretive spectrum it was on the quick side, certainly, but not excessively so. Indeed, I found Dudamel's approach to the finale far more persuasive than most. This is Brahms at his most Mozartian. The finale of the Second with its soft introduction of a fast theme and its exuberant tutti forte repeat hearkens back to similar dramatic techniques in Mozart's symphonies, e.g. in the finales of the Linzer and the Haffner. When I hear Brahms 2, I want to hear that musical lineage, and Dudamel's brisk approach made that possible.
Yet, I wasn't completely convinced by the Brahms as a whole, and there are two reasons for that. As I have been hearing more and more of Dudamel - live, on broadcasts and on recordings - I've been starting to notice a slightly bothersome tendency to drown out the woodwinds. Dudamel gets a nice full, dark sound out of the orchestras he conducts, but often the strings are just a tad too thick and the winds a bit buried. So, while Dudamel's emphasis on clear rhythmic articulation brought out many often inaudible details in Brahms's score, there were still a few others that nonetheless fell by the wayside. While this is to an extent a question of taste and emphasis - you might just like your Brahms more lush and don't find the absence of certain woodwind lines bothersome when the rhythms are so nicely accented - getting this sound and still articulating all the other voices should not necessarily be mutually exclusive. Secondly, for all the jollity of parts of Second, there are still many moments of darkness. Some, e.g. in the first movement, Dudamel brought our quite well. But the second movement did not quite move. The harmonic ambiguities were just a bit too understated to create those unsettling moments of suspension that keep this movement going.
Otherwise, in all respects a very fine performance. It is evident that Dudamel is at once a very efficient rehearser; setting the parameters in rehearsal that allow him then to let things flow in concert, push a little here, hold back a little there. All three works on the program lived from a subtle flexibility of tempo and phrasing that even the CSO exhibits all too rarely.
Last week saw the highly anticipated return of Gustavo Dudamel to the CSO podium. Dudamel brought with him what looked on paper like a very conventional program: Barber Adagio for Strings, Mozart Piano Concerto No.21 (with Stephen Hough), and Brahms Symphony No.2. But with Dudamel at the helm, it became an evening of exploration.
Easily my favorite was, perhaps surprisingly, the Barber. By far. I am the last person to defend the sanctity of authorial intention, if such a thing could even be objectively ascertained. But there comes a point when a work of art becomes so over-instrumentalized for completely unrelated purposes that it is difficult to find performers unencumbered by clichéed preconceptions. Barber's Adagio for Strings is one such piece, which all too often turns into a caricature of sappiness. That's when you need a Dudamel to make you re-hear it as if from a blank slate. Gone was the hyper-sentimentalism, the flabby heart-on-your-sleeve string sound. Dudamel knew how to make time stand still without milking the slow tempo. In contrast to how the piece is often performed, one would be inclined to label the following characteristics of Dudamel's performance "unusual": He started with a very lean, transparent sound, that very gradually, but therefore all the more inexorably, built toward that incredible climax. But Dudamel did it in such a way that left you thinking: "this is the way it should be performed - we've been doing it wrong the whole time." By de-sentimentalizing the Barber, it became all the more moving, if in many other ways than the conventional one. For an orchestra that gets more compliments for its brass than it can handle, programming works like the Barber is a great reminder to the world of just how outstanding this string section can be. Dudamel's clarity of purpose was rewarded with superb ensemble playing and terrific calibration of dynamics that allowed Dudamel to create one of those rare occasions when nobody coughs in a slow piece and everybody even stays silent for a minute after the music stops. Truly memorable.
I need to make a little aside here. I think too many reviewers still treat Dudamel as too much of a Wunderkind, as if he were an eight-year old piano prodigy miraculously playing Beethoven. Too often overlooked is the fact that, despite his youthful age (just shy of 28), he has nearly a decade and a half of solid conducting experience - something that many conductors a decade his senior would envy having. And most of that experience was with a youth orchestra. One might look down upon that, but that would be lethally wrong. A youth orchestra needs more guidance than a professional one, and yelling will get you nowhere. It is a much better environment for learning the craft than jumping in with the pros. And by now Dudamel has conducted almost all of the great orchestras of the world as well. In four months he will add the Concertgebouw to the list. As Daniel Barenboim says in this 60 Minutes video: "He knows what he's doing. He knows what he wants and he knows how to get it. What more can you say?" The guy is a pro and he's been at it for much longer than his babyface suggests. It is time to take the kid gloves off, both in terms of criticizing what there is to criticize, but also in terms of giving credit where credit is due and appreciating that this is a serious, thoughtful interpreter who goes into rehearsals with a concept in his mind, whose performances aren't the random result of youthful exuberance.
Good. With that out of the way, let's turn to the Mozart. Stephen Hough brought his limpid tone and spontaneous style to the famous 21st concerto. I thought Hough and Dudamel were a very good match in the second and third movements, which sparkled and flowed nicely, benefiting equally from Hough's transparent tone and Dudamel's rhythmic articulation. The first movement, by contrast, didn't really come together for me. Too rhapsodic were Hough's solos to really connect with the rest of the musical action to make a coherent whole.
The Brahms that made up the second half of the program was very enjoyable, indeed. I am always somewhat irked by interpreters who put all of Brahms's output into that same "autumnal" category and perform it accordingly with a pensive, brooding, even resigned air, doomed to perpetual melancholy, as if this weren't the same composer who gave us numerous Hungarian Dances, Waltzes, the two orchestral Serenades or the raucous, tongue-in-cheek Academic Festival Overture. It is then immensely refreshing to have a conductor blow away these preconceptions, get rid of some of the fat in the sound and focus on that other Brahms. While the gems in Dudamel's Brahms 2 were the third and the fourth movement, in the entire work Dudamel's clear articulation of rhythms brought out many of the metric ambiguities and counterpoints that are too often overlooked by others. Some reviewers criticized Dudamel's tempo in the finale as too fast. I didn't think so. In comparison with the current and historic interpretive spectrum it was on the quick side, certainly, but not excessively so. Indeed, I found Dudamel's approach to the finale far more persuasive than most. This is Brahms at his most Mozartian. The finale of the Second with its soft introduction of a fast theme and its exuberant tutti forte repeat hearkens back to similar dramatic techniques in Mozart's symphonies, e.g. in the finales of the Linzer and the Haffner. When I hear Brahms 2, I want to hear that musical lineage, and Dudamel's brisk approach made that possible.
Yet, I wasn't completely convinced by the Brahms as a whole, and there are two reasons for that. As I have been hearing more and more of Dudamel - live, on broadcasts and on recordings - I've been starting to notice a slightly bothersome tendency to drown out the woodwinds. Dudamel gets a nice full, dark sound out of the orchestras he conducts, but often the strings are just a tad too thick and the winds a bit buried. So, while Dudamel's emphasis on clear rhythmic articulation brought out many often inaudible details in Brahms's score, there were still a few others that nonetheless fell by the wayside. While this is to an extent a question of taste and emphasis - you might just like your Brahms more lush and don't find the absence of certain woodwind lines bothersome when the rhythms are so nicely accented - getting this sound and still articulating all the other voices should not necessarily be mutually exclusive. Secondly, for all the jollity of parts of Second, there are still many moments of darkness. Some, e.g. in the first movement, Dudamel brought our quite well. But the second movement did not quite move. The harmonic ambiguities were just a bit too understated to create those unsettling moments of suspension that keep this movement going.
Otherwise, in all respects a very fine performance. It is evident that Dudamel is at once a very efficient rehearser; setting the parameters in rehearsal that allow him then to let things flow in concert, push a little here, hold back a little there. All three works on the program lived from a subtle flexibility of tempo and phrasing that even the CSO exhibits all too rarely.
Friday, January 02, 2009
Double Movie Review: Nazis Everywhere
Valkyrie's Facile Heroics
This movie season has brought a sudden bonanza of films dealing in one way or another with Nazi Germany. Some of these threaten to finally relegate this difficult period to a mere pastiche backdrop for feel-good movies with morally uncomplicated stories of heroism. Bryan Singer's Valkyrie is perhaps the most egregious of the recent batch. In trying to create a vehicle to rescue Tom Cruise's ailing acting career, Singer and screenwriters Christopher McQuarrie and Nathan Alexander reduce a complicated real-life character and a plethora of historical contingencies down to a one-dimensional battle between good and evil, packaged in a work of formulaic grandiose cinematography and predictably cheap dramatic effects. The movie reconstructs in painstaking detail the preparations for the failed July 20, 1944 assassination attempt against Hitler by members of the German military resistance under the leadership of Colonel Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, played by Tom Cruise. And that is all it does. It is a pure action-suspense flick that follows its central hero as he tries to kill the most evil villain of human history without ever pausing to probe the souls of its central characters.
The movie does in fact start with Stauffenberg - with an utterly unnecessary voiceover by Cruise speaking completely unconvincing German - writing in his diary about his disillusionment with the Nazi military leadership, both on account of its military incompetence and the appalling atrocities against the Jews and the populations of Nazi-occupied countries. But we never get to see the critical character development that turned Stauffenberg into a resistance fighter. From the moment the movie opens, we are faced with a Stauffenberg full of inexorably righteous anti-Hitlerite conviction and played with such robotic swagger and cockiness by Cruise that a similarly smug real-life Stauffenberg should have set off many alarms before ever getting anywhere as close to killing Hitler as in fact he did. Cruise doesn't do doubt, insecurity or second thoughts. It's always full steam ahead, damn the torpedoes.
And that is sad, for that is where the story would have been. The real-life Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg was a far more complicated figure. Like many members of the old German nobility who became career military officers, he joined the military in 1926 straight out of high-school despite medical weakness. Early on, he and his brothers came under the intellectual influence of the nationalist mysticist philosophies of the neo-romantic poet Stefan George and his circle of acolytes, and Stauffenberg remained to his death a believer in George's idea of a "sacred Germany" (referenced in his last words at his execution). This, in part, motivated his belief in the greater cause of trying to save Germany, although initially rejecting an earlier offer to join the resistance. Despite never becoming a member of the NSDAP, Stauffenberg opposed Hindenburg and supported Hitler in the crucial 1932 presidential elections and was involved in providing military training to members of the SA, which was instrumental in undermining the legal order of Weimar
Germany and enabling Hitler's rise. In 1939, he wrote to his wife of from occupied Poland about the "incredible rabble here, many Jews and mixed blood ... people who only feel well under the lash. The thousands of prisoners will be helpful to our agriculture." As late as December 1941, Stauffenberg still supported a unified central military command in the person of the Führer. In 1942, he was instrumental in the establishment of guidelines for recruiting a "volunteer" army of pro-German deserters from among Turkmen and Caucasian members of the Red Army on the Eastern Front.
If the human moral disaster of the Third Reich lies in the fact that ordinary people turned at the very least into enablers of the greatest crimes against humanity, if not becoming the butchers themselves; then the story of attempted redemption behind Valkyrie would have been in the ability of a deeply complicit member of the Nazi killing machinery to recognize its inhumanity for what it is and risking life and limb to stop it. But, because the film never lets us meet young Stauffenberg, the Nazi believer, we never get to partake in his personal catharsis. It is obvious to us who grew up after the war that the Nazi regime was evil. But if we do not learn how the obvious could be difficult to acknowledge for a population brainwashed under Gleichschaltung then we are failing to understand precisely what it is that makes totalitarianism so lethally effective and dangerous.
While Stauffenberg had joined the military resistance before Stalingrad - earlier than the movie suggests - his actions were too little, too late. Because Valkyrie never shows the character complexities of the real-life Stauffenberg, the audience is duped into thinking that, had the coup been successful, peace would have sprung up in Europe and democracy would have been restored. But - without disputing the noble motivations and courage of Stauffenberg - nothing could be further from the truth. While the Valkyrie conspirators agreed about removing Hitler and ending the war and the persecution of the Jews, there was no agreement among them whatsoever as to what the post-Hitler German state was supposed to look like. The conservative bourgeois and nobility elements of the resistance, Stauffenberg included, specifically opposed a return to parliamentary democracy. Yet, by ignoring these details and encouraging the audience to play "what if" games with the historical contingencies surrounding the July 20 conspiracy, Valkyrie dangerously oversimplifies history into a black-and-white pastiche of heroes and villains.
Misreading The Reader
In context with Valkyrie, we can be glad that there are still movies being made like Stephen Daldry's intelligent and sensitive The Reader. This movie, adapted for the screen from Bernhard Schlink's novel Der Vorleser by David Hare, tells the story of Michael Berg, played in his older form by Ralph Fiennes and in his teenage and student morph by the immensely talented and convincing David Kross. The film begins with the adult Michael, a lawyer, reflecting on his first love. When he is fifteen in 1950s reconstruction West Germany, Michael falls ill on his way home to school and throws up in the entry of a random building on his way home. A woman residing in that building cleans him up rather brusquely, as well as the mess he made, and helps him home. After his convalescence, Michael's mother suggests he visit the anonymous woman to give her flowers as a thank you. A strange erotic relationship quickly develops between Michael and the woman, Hanna Schmitz, a 36-year old tram conductor, played in a lifetime performance by Kate Winslet. They develop a routine for their daily trysts, where Michael reads aloud for Hanna from the books he has been reading for school before they make passionate love. Still very naive and with an unformed personality, Michael's puppy dog love for Hanna turns into a fixation that sometimes allows Hanna to be emotionally abusive. One day she disappears without a trace.
Years later, we meet Michael again at Heidelberg law school in the 1960s. He has enrolled in a cutting edge seminar on Nazi war crimes. The professor, played with marvellously credible dishevelment by Bruno Ganz, takes the class on a trip to attend a trial of a group of women SS guards accused of having let three hundred Jewish women burn to death in a locked church during an air raid. Michael is mortified as he finds out that one of the defendants is none other than his Hanna. From that moment Hanna and the trial dominate his life. In the course of the proceedings, Michael comes to realize that Hanna is illiterate. This piece of information would refute a key element of the crime that her co-defendants are trying to blame on Hanna in order to get more lenient sentences themselves. Yet she is too proud to admit her illiteracy on her own. Caught in an emotional whirlwind of feelings of guilt, responsibility, hurt, shame, love, hate, and contempt, Michael considers intervening in the trial and consults his professor for advice. In the end he decides against informing the judge of her illiteracy and Hanna is sentenced to life in prison.
We reconnect with Michael again some ten years later. He is in the process of getting a divorce from his wife with whom he has a young daughter. While sifting through his possessions in the course of the separation, Michael comes across the books he had read aloud to Hanna. Spontaneously, he decides to record major works of literature for Hanna on cassette tape and sends her a package to the prison. This goes on for over a decade, as Michael starts getting letters in return from Hanna, who has taught herself to read and write by comparing the audio tapes to the corresponding books she borrowed from the prison library. In the late 1980's Hanna is about to be released on account of her good conduct. Due to a lack of living relatives and a total absence of any contact with anyone other than Michael, the head of the prison contacts Michael about her impending release and to ask his help in assisting Hanna's reintegration into society. The two estranged lovers meet briefly and discuss her release. But when he comes to pick her up a week later, Hanna has already committed suicide.
One of Schlink's great skills as an author is his ability to succinctly transport the reader to a different era by setting the scene in a few short sentences that immediately bring to mind the sounds, look and smell of a time gone by. Stephen Daldry's movie comes close to the same level of virtuosity in depicting different decades of postwar Germany. Many Hollywood blockbusters (Valkyrie included) tend to overdo the period pageantry; they lay on too thick and incorporate too many present-day fashions, expressions and mannerisms that make their time travels not very believable to anyone with the slightest cultural familiarity with the subject. The Reader, by contrast, does an absolutely outstanding job capturing the essence of each period in which the movie is set, and without trying to make history more photogenic than it really was. Having lived in Germany through the last three decades depicted in The Reader, I was stunned by the attention to detail. Not one item was out of place.
But sadly, Stephen Daldry doesn't quite succeed in conveying the historic context where it matters most. Der Vorleser is most of all an Oedipal tragedy, and for the understanding of that tragedy, an understanding of the special social, political, and generational conflicts of 1960s Germany is essential. The 60's student movement in Germany was not merely a political uprising against the Vietnam War and against a stifling bourgeois cultural and social order. It was also an Oedipal attempt at character assassination of an entire generation of parents who had participated in, acquiesced to, or had otherwise been complicit in the rise of Nazism and the Holocaust. It was certainly a necessary, productive and partially cathartic rebellion for the young postwar nation, as 1960s Germany was still full of old Nazis in positions of power, especially in academia and the justice system.
In the book, Schlink's protagonist finds himself unmoored, adrift in the conflicting currents of that time. It is Hanna's trial that sets things into perspective. Even though his own father lost his position as a university lecturer in the Third Reich because he had the temerity to teach Spinoza and subsequently labored as an editor in a publishing house for geography books, Michael initially shares the emotionally gratifying, facile moral outrage of his fellow students in the Nazi war crimes seminar. When he discovers that he lost his virginity to an SS guard, his cockiness dies instantly. Michael finds out that he, a member of the 60's student generation, has effectively committed incest with a member of the Tätergeneration, the generation of those involved in the Nazi crimes. In the guise of a personal coming-of-age drama Schlink provides a metaphor for the inextricable link between Germany's postwar rise and its inextinguishable wartime heritage. By making Michael the sole bearer of a crucial piece of information that could not only help Hanna avoid an excessively harsh sentence, but could also help the court refocus its attention on the culpability of the other co-defendants who are all too eager to escape scrutiny by pouncing on a convenient scapegoat, Michael becomes morally tainted. His recognition of Hanna's illiteracy puts him in a similar moral position as the general German population during the Third Reich. He becomes one who knows what is going on but doesn't step in. As a result, the other co-defendants get off with relatively lenient sentences.
The film, by contrast, neither provides the historic nor the family background, and never shows the smug and arrogant jerk into which Michael develops at the beginning of law school and whom the trial cuts down to size. Instead, Daldry gives us two scenes that are not in the book and which don't help to clarify the plot. First we get a nihilistic rant by a fellow student that neither elucidates Michael's internal conflicts, nor captures the political streams within the student body of the time. Then, Daldry transposes the crucial talk between Michael and his father about whether or not to reveal Hanna's secret to the court, to a talk with his seminar professor instead. This does not make sense. Unlike his father, the professor has an academic interest in the outcome of the trial and could never be a neutral advisor the way his father could. Finally, instead of making the adult Michael a legal scholar as in the book, Daldry makes him a defense attorney. This does not capture the disillusionment Hanna's trial produces in Michael. In the book, Michael is so disturbed by the farcical miscarriage of justice in Hanna's trial that he finds himself unable to commit to any aspect of the legal profession - one of the key reasons leading to his eventual divorce.
All that being said, on its own terms, this is still a brilliant movie. One other point does deserve praise. In a movie full of flashbacks, Daldry resists the temptation to visually depict the crimes committed by Hanna and her fellow SS guards. Instead of painting the events of the death march in cinematographic detail that leaves nothing to our imagination, the absence of visuals more effectively highlights the conflicting testimonies and the resulting difficulty of judging correctly. In any case, Hanna's reactions to the events in court are far more important to the story and Winslet delivers a virtuoso performance in depicting them.
Despite the self-evident qualities of the acting, the storytelling, and the care with which the subject is handled in The Reader, this movie garnered some bizarrely idiotic knee-jerk reviews from some corners. Manohla Dargis in the New York Times gets herself exercised over "another movie about the Holocaust that embalms its horrors with artfully spilled tears and asks us to pity a death-camp guard." Charlie Finch on artnet goes completely overboard with the accusation that "What is especially repellent about The Reader is the use of Kate Winslet's nubile body to create sympathy for a repellent character, whose triumph over illiteracy somehow mitigates unspeakable crimes that are never actually depicted on screen." Both of them utterly misread The Reader. With the same facile self-righteousness with which Cruise plays a resistance fighter, these two critics assail this film for showing the human side of a Holocaust perpetrator. In the process of reveling in their indignation, they completely fail to see the movie (Finch goes so blind he even confuses a tram for a bus).
Aristotle in his Poetics wrote that the essence of tragedy lies in the combination of pity and fear that the audience feels for the tragic character. The fact that they can identify with the human sides of the protagonist allows them to see into the depths of their own souls and thus attain the catharsis that tragedy is meant to achieve. In other words, if the tragic character lacks a human side, there is no tragedy. If the Holocaust had been committed by orcs from Mordor, it would have had no moral significance as an event. Inherently evil monsters are no different than natural disasters; their acts might be deeply upsetting, but they teach no lesson about the inherent human potential for profound depravity. We deeply misunderstand the Holocaust if we ignore the fact that it was committed by perfectly normal human beings who breathed air, went to the bathroom and loved and cried just like the rest of us. Without this recognition, the words "Never Again!" carry absolutely no moral meaning whatsoever. We can no more stop monsters from being monsters than we can stop earthquakes. We can, however, make humans reflect on their own humanity, the good and the bad of it, and thereby help avoid relapses into inhumanity.
The singular achievement of The Reader then is that it shows a complicated character who, out of a combination of pride and vanity, entangles herself in a web of lies that first makes her one of Hitler's handmaidens and later allows her accomplices to get away with murder. Yes, we should pity Hanna. But that pity should go hand in hand with the fear of seeing our own character flaws in her; seeing how our own pride can corner us into places where we must choose between becoming criminals or destroying the carefully constructed facade that we have built around our fragile egos.
This movie season has brought a sudden bonanza of films dealing in one way or another with Nazi Germany. Some of these threaten to finally relegate this difficult period to a mere pastiche backdrop for feel-good movies with morally uncomplicated stories of heroism. Bryan Singer's Valkyrie is perhaps the most egregious of the recent batch. In trying to create a vehicle to rescue Tom Cruise's ailing acting career, Singer and screenwriters Christopher McQuarrie and Nathan Alexander reduce a complicated real-life character and a plethora of historical contingencies down to a one-dimensional battle between good and evil, packaged in a work of formulaic grandiose cinematography and predictably cheap dramatic effects. The movie reconstructs in painstaking detail the preparations for the failed July 20, 1944 assassination attempt against Hitler by members of the German military resistance under the leadership of Colonel Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, played by Tom Cruise. And that is all it does. It is a pure action-suspense flick that follows its central hero as he tries to kill the most evil villain of human history without ever pausing to probe the souls of its central characters.
The movie does in fact start with Stauffenberg - with an utterly unnecessary voiceover by Cruise speaking completely unconvincing German - writing in his diary about his disillusionment with the Nazi military leadership, both on account of its military incompetence and the appalling atrocities against the Jews and the populations of Nazi-occupied countries. But we never get to see the critical character development that turned Stauffenberg into a resistance fighter. From the moment the movie opens, we are faced with a Stauffenberg full of inexorably righteous anti-Hitlerite conviction and played with such robotic swagger and cockiness by Cruise that a similarly smug real-life Stauffenberg should have set off many alarms before ever getting anywhere as close to killing Hitler as in fact he did. Cruise doesn't do doubt, insecurity or second thoughts. It's always full steam ahead, damn the torpedoes. And that is sad, for that is where the story would have been. The real-life Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg was a far more complicated figure. Like many members of the old German nobility who became career military officers, he joined the military in 1926 straight out of high-school despite medical weakness. Early on, he and his brothers came under the intellectual influence of the nationalist mysticist philosophies of the neo-romantic poet Stefan George and his circle of acolytes, and Stauffenberg remained to his death a believer in George's idea of a "sacred Germany" (referenced in his last words at his execution). This, in part, motivated his belief in the greater cause of trying to save Germany, although initially rejecting an earlier offer to join the resistance. Despite never becoming a member of the NSDAP, Stauffenberg opposed Hindenburg and supported Hitler in the crucial 1932 presidential elections and was involved in providing military training to members of the SA, which was instrumental in undermining the legal order of Weimar
Germany and enabling Hitler's rise. In 1939, he wrote to his wife of from occupied Poland about the "incredible rabble here, many Jews and mixed blood ... people who only feel well under the lash. The thousands of prisoners will be helpful to our agriculture." As late as December 1941, Stauffenberg still supported a unified central military command in the person of the Führer. In 1942, he was instrumental in the establishment of guidelines for recruiting a "volunteer" army of pro-German deserters from among Turkmen and Caucasian members of the Red Army on the Eastern Front.
If the human moral disaster of the Third Reich lies in the fact that ordinary people turned at the very least into enablers of the greatest crimes against humanity, if not becoming the butchers themselves; then the story of attempted redemption behind Valkyrie would have been in the ability of a deeply complicit member of the Nazi killing machinery to recognize its inhumanity for what it is and risking life and limb to stop it. But, because the film never lets us meet young Stauffenberg, the Nazi believer, we never get to partake in his personal catharsis. It is obvious to us who grew up after the war that the Nazi regime was evil. But if we do not learn how the obvious could be difficult to acknowledge for a population brainwashed under Gleichschaltung then we are failing to understand precisely what it is that makes totalitarianism so lethally effective and dangerous. While Stauffenberg had joined the military resistance before Stalingrad - earlier than the movie suggests - his actions were too little, too late. Because Valkyrie never shows the character complexities of the real-life Stauffenberg, the audience is duped into thinking that, had the coup been successful, peace would have sprung up in Europe and democracy would have been restored. But - without disputing the noble motivations and courage of Stauffenberg - nothing could be further from the truth. While the Valkyrie conspirators agreed about removing Hitler and ending the war and the persecution of the Jews, there was no agreement among them whatsoever as to what the post-Hitler German state was supposed to look like. The conservative bourgeois and nobility elements of the resistance, Stauffenberg included, specifically opposed a return to parliamentary democracy. Yet, by ignoring these details and encouraging the audience to play "what if" games with the historical contingencies surrounding the July 20 conspiracy, Valkyrie dangerously oversimplifies history into a black-and-white pastiche of heroes and villains.
Misreading The Reader
In context with Valkyrie, we can be glad that there are still movies being made like Stephen Daldry's intelligent and sensitive The Reader. This movie, adapted for the screen from Bernhard Schlink's novel Der Vorleser by David Hare, tells the story of Michael Berg, played in his older form by Ralph Fiennes and in his teenage and student morph by the immensely talented and convincing David Kross. The film begins with the adult Michael, a lawyer, reflecting on his first love. When he is fifteen in 1950s reconstruction West Germany, Michael falls ill on his way home to school and throws up in the entry of a random building on his way home. A woman residing in that building cleans him up rather brusquely, as well as the mess he made, and helps him home. After his convalescence, Michael's mother suggests he visit the anonymous woman to give her flowers as a thank you. A strange erotic relationship quickly develops between Michael and the woman, Hanna Schmitz, a 36-year old tram conductor, played in a lifetime performance by Kate Winslet. They develop a routine for their daily trysts, where Michael reads aloud for Hanna from the books he has been reading for school before they make passionate love. Still very naive and with an unformed personality, Michael's puppy dog love for Hanna turns into a fixation that sometimes allows Hanna to be emotionally abusive. One day she disappears without a trace. Years later, we meet Michael again at Heidelberg law school in the 1960s. He has enrolled in a cutting edge seminar on Nazi war crimes. The professor, played with marvellously credible dishevelment by Bruno Ganz, takes the class on a trip to attend a trial of a group of women SS guards accused of having let three hundred Jewish women burn to death in a locked church during an air raid. Michael is mortified as he finds out that one of the defendants is none other than his Hanna. From that moment Hanna and the trial dominate his life. In the course of the proceedings, Michael comes to realize that Hanna is illiterate. This piece of information would refute a key element of the crime that her co-defendants are trying to blame on Hanna in order to get more lenient sentences themselves. Yet she is too proud to admit her illiteracy on her own. Caught in an emotional whirlwind of feelings of guilt, responsibility, hurt, shame, love, hate, and contempt, Michael considers intervening in the trial and consults his professor for advice. In the end he decides against informing the judge of her illiteracy and Hanna is sentenced to life in prison.
We reconnect with Michael again some ten years later. He is in the process of getting a divorce from his wife with whom he has a young daughter. While sifting through his possessions in the course of the separation, Michael comes across the books he had read aloud to Hanna. Spontaneously, he decides to record major works of literature for Hanna on cassette tape and sends her a package to the prison. This goes on for over a decade, as Michael starts getting letters in return from Hanna, who has taught herself to read and write by comparing the audio tapes to the corresponding books she borrowed from the prison library. In the late 1980's Hanna is about to be released on account of her good conduct. Due to a lack of living relatives and a total absence of any contact with anyone other than Michael, the head of the prison contacts Michael about her impending release and to ask his help in assisting Hanna's reintegration into society. The two estranged lovers meet briefly and discuss her release. But when he comes to pick her up a week later, Hanna has already committed suicide.
One of Schlink's great skills as an author is his ability to succinctly transport the reader to a different era by setting the scene in a few short sentences that immediately bring to mind the sounds, look and smell of a time gone by. Stephen Daldry's movie comes close to the same level of virtuosity in depicting different decades of postwar Germany. Many Hollywood blockbusters (Valkyrie included) tend to overdo the period pageantry; they lay on too thick and incorporate too many present-day fashions, expressions and mannerisms that make their time travels not very believable to anyone with the slightest cultural familiarity with the subject. The Reader, by contrast, does an absolutely outstanding job capturing the essence of each period in which the movie is set, and without trying to make history more photogenic than it really was. Having lived in Germany through the last three decades depicted in The Reader, I was stunned by the attention to detail. Not one item was out of place. But sadly, Stephen Daldry doesn't quite succeed in conveying the historic context where it matters most. Der Vorleser is most of all an Oedipal tragedy, and for the understanding of that tragedy, an understanding of the special social, political, and generational conflicts of 1960s Germany is essential. The 60's student movement in Germany was not merely a political uprising against the Vietnam War and against a stifling bourgeois cultural and social order. It was also an Oedipal attempt at character assassination of an entire generation of parents who had participated in, acquiesced to, or had otherwise been complicit in the rise of Nazism and the Holocaust. It was certainly a necessary, productive and partially cathartic rebellion for the young postwar nation, as 1960s Germany was still full of old Nazis in positions of power, especially in academia and the justice system.
In the book, Schlink's protagonist finds himself unmoored, adrift in the conflicting currents of that time. It is Hanna's trial that sets things into perspective. Even though his own father lost his position as a university lecturer in the Third Reich because he had the temerity to teach Spinoza and subsequently labored as an editor in a publishing house for geography books, Michael initially shares the emotionally gratifying, facile moral outrage of his fellow students in the Nazi war crimes seminar. When he discovers that he lost his virginity to an SS guard, his cockiness dies instantly. Michael finds out that he, a member of the 60's student generation, has effectively committed incest with a member of the Tätergeneration, the generation of those involved in the Nazi crimes. In the guise of a personal coming-of-age drama Schlink provides a metaphor for the inextricable link between Germany's postwar rise and its inextinguishable wartime heritage. By making Michael the sole bearer of a crucial piece of information that could not only help Hanna avoid an excessively harsh sentence, but could also help the court refocus its attention on the culpability of the other co-defendants who are all too eager to escape scrutiny by pouncing on a convenient scapegoat, Michael becomes morally tainted. His recognition of Hanna's illiteracy puts him in a similar moral position as the general German population during the Third Reich. He becomes one who knows what is going on but doesn't step in. As a result, the other co-defendants get off with relatively lenient sentences.
The film, by contrast, neither provides the historic nor the family background, and never shows the smug and arrogant jerk into which Michael develops at the beginning of law school and whom the trial cuts down to size. Instead, Daldry gives us two scenes that are not in the book and which don't help to clarify the plot. First we get a nihilistic rant by a fellow student that neither elucidates Michael's internal conflicts, nor captures the political streams within the student body of the time. Then, Daldry transposes the crucial talk between Michael and his father about whether or not to reveal Hanna's secret to the court, to a talk with his seminar professor instead. This does not make sense. Unlike his father, the professor has an academic interest in the outcome of the trial and could never be a neutral advisor the way his father could. Finally, instead of making the adult Michael a legal scholar as in the book, Daldry makes him a defense attorney. This does not capture the disillusionment Hanna's trial produces in Michael. In the book, Michael is so disturbed by the farcical miscarriage of justice in Hanna's trial that he finds himself unable to commit to any aspect of the legal profession - one of the key reasons leading to his eventual divorce.
All that being said, on its own terms, this is still a brilliant movie. One other point does deserve praise. In a movie full of flashbacks, Daldry resists the temptation to visually depict the crimes committed by Hanna and her fellow SS guards. Instead of painting the events of the death march in cinematographic detail that leaves nothing to our imagination, the absence of visuals more effectively highlights the conflicting testimonies and the resulting difficulty of judging correctly. In any case, Hanna's reactions to the events in court are far more important to the story and Winslet delivers a virtuoso performance in depicting them.
Despite the self-evident qualities of the acting, the storytelling, and the care with which the subject is handled in The Reader, this movie garnered some bizarrely idiotic knee-jerk reviews from some corners. Manohla Dargis in the New York Times gets herself exercised over "another movie about the Holocaust that embalms its horrors with artfully spilled tears and asks us to pity a death-camp guard." Charlie Finch on artnet goes completely overboard with the accusation that "What is especially repellent about The Reader is the use of Kate Winslet's nubile body to create sympathy for a repellent character, whose triumph over illiteracy somehow mitigates unspeakable crimes that are never actually depicted on screen." Both of them utterly misread The Reader. With the same facile self-righteousness with which Cruise plays a resistance fighter, these two critics assail this film for showing the human side of a Holocaust perpetrator. In the process of reveling in their indignation, they completely fail to see the movie (Finch goes so blind he even confuses a tram for a bus).
Aristotle in his Poetics wrote that the essence of tragedy lies in the combination of pity and fear that the audience feels for the tragic character. The fact that they can identify with the human sides of the protagonist allows them to see into the depths of their own souls and thus attain the catharsis that tragedy is meant to achieve. In other words, if the tragic character lacks a human side, there is no tragedy. If the Holocaust had been committed by orcs from Mordor, it would have had no moral significance as an event. Inherently evil monsters are no different than natural disasters; their acts might be deeply upsetting, but they teach no lesson about the inherent human potential for profound depravity. We deeply misunderstand the Holocaust if we ignore the fact that it was committed by perfectly normal human beings who breathed air, went to the bathroom and loved and cried just like the rest of us. Without this recognition, the words "Never Again!" carry absolutely no moral meaning whatsoever. We can no more stop monsters from being monsters than we can stop earthquakes. We can, however, make humans reflect on their own humanity, the good and the bad of it, and thereby help avoid relapses into inhumanity.
The singular achievement of The Reader then is that it shows a complicated character who, out of a combination of pride and vanity, entangles herself in a web of lies that first makes her one of Hitler's handmaidens and later allows her accomplices to get away with murder. Yes, we should pity Hanna. But that pity should go hand in hand with the fear of seeing our own character flaws in her; seeing how our own pride can corner us into places where we must choose between becoming criminals or destroying the carefully constructed facade that we have built around our fragile egos.
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