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src="http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?o=1&l=as1&f=ifr&t=reelmoviecriticc&p=8&asins=B00009W0W4&IS2=1&lt1=_blank"><MAP NAME="boxmap-p8"><AREA SHAPE="RECT" COORDS="14, 200, 103, 207" HREF="http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm/privacy-policy.html?o=1" ><AREA COORDS="0,0,10000,10000" HREF="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect-home/reelmoviecriticc" ></MAP><img src="http://rcm-images.amazon.com/images/G/01/rcm/120x240.gif" width="120" height="240" border="0" usemap="#boxmap-p8" alt="Shop at Amazon.com"></iframe>  </B></div> <div> <B><IMG SRC="12e4c7d30.png" border=0 width="199" height="211" ALIGN="BOTTOM" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0"></B></div> <div> <TABLE BORDER="0" CELLPADDING="1" CELLSPACING="1" WIDTH="592" BORDERCOLORLIGHT="#C0C0C0" BORDERCOLORDARK="#808080" FRAME="BOX" RULES="ALL" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0" > <tR> <tD VALIGN=TOP HEIGHT= 20 WIDTH="588"><div> <B>Amen.    </B><FONT SIZE="3" COLOR="#FFCC66" FACE="Wingdings 2" ><B>êêê</B></FONT><B> ½  Stars.  Not Rated.</B></div> </tD> </tR> <tR> <tD VALIGN=TOP HEIGHT= 19 WIDTH="588"><div> Reviewed by Shelley Cameron</div> </tD> </tR> <tR> <tD VALIGN=TOP HEIGHT= 19 WIDTH="588"><IMG BORDER="0" SRC="1x1.gif" HEIGHT="19" ALIGN="bottom" WIDTH="588" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0"></tD> </tR> <tR> <tD VALIGN=TOP HEIGHT= 23 WIDTH="588"><div> Reflections in men's eyes</div> </tD> </tR> </TABLE></div> <bR> <div> <TABLE BORDER="0" CELLPADDING="1" CELLSPACING="1" WIDTH="591" BORDERCOLORLIGHT="#C0C0C0" BORDERCOLORDARK="#808080" FRAME="BOX" RULES="ALL" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0" > <tR> <tD VALIGN=TOP HEIGHT= 19 WIDTH="587"><div> Ulrich Tukur: Kurt Gerstein</div> </tD> </tR> <tR> <tD VALIGN=TOP HEIGHT= 19 WIDTH="587"><div> Mathieu Kassovitz: Riccardo Fontana</div> </tD> </tR> <tR> <tD VALIGN=TOP HEIGHT= 19 WIDTH="587"><div> Ulrich Mühe: The Doctor</div> </tD> </tR> <tR> <tD VALIGN=TOP HEIGHT= 19 WIDTH="587"><IMG BORDER="0" SRC="1x1.gif" HEIGHT="19" ALIGN="bottom" WIDTH="587" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0"></tD> </tR> <tR> <tD VALIGN=TOP HEIGHT= 19 WIDTH="587"><div> Directed by: Constantin Costa-Gavras</div> </tD> </tR> <tR> <tD VALIGN=TOP HEIGHT= 19 ><NOBR><div> France/ Germany/ USA.  In English.  Drama.  130 Minutes.</div> </NOBR></tD> </tR> </TABLE></div> <bR> <div> This provocative and stylized portrayal of Kurt Gerstein, real-life, high ranking Nazi SS insider, details his attempt to expose and thereby to stop the extermination of Jews in the gas chambers in World War II Germany.  Director Costa-Gavras (<I>Z, Music Box, Missing</I>) uses the genre of the political thriller, employed to much acclaim in his most successful films, to dramatize and speculate on the conscience and motives of those who were complicit in the holocaust by their non-participation.  Gerstein's position as a chief craftsman of the genocide lends a complexity and certainly an atypical perspective to a subject covered more extensively in film and literature than any other in the 20<FONT SIZE="1" COLOR="#FFCC66" FACE="Arial" >th</FONT> century.  It is due in no small measure to his eyewitness account that so much is known about actual Nazi operations.  Gerstein's detailed recollection was written in his own hand from his jail cell after he turned himself in to the allied army near the end of the war.</div> <bR> <div> Gerstein was a hygienic expert recruited by the SS to develop a system of delivering disinfectant to destroy lice and other vermin.  In this account, as an up-and-comer in the military, he establishes his expertise as a chemist in a graphic demonstration that turns a foul bucket of sludge into potable drinking water.  Proud of the contribution he is making to the war effort, he is also hearing early rumblings of "unproductive" citizens being eliminated.  </div> <bR> <div> With Gerstein as the counterpoint, the tension builds after the disclosure of the true purpose for his deadly gas and subsequently, his liaison with a young Jesuit priest.  Visual maneuvers including the unsettling manner in which his fellow SS officers peer in unison at Gerstein seems to cast a force like an evil spell to impel compliance with the collective will.  Further, the other two dominant characters, Ricardo, the idealistic priest, and the cynical, self-serving Doctor, serve less as individual beings and more as allegorical figures of naïve good and totally corrupt evil.  The rapidly growing dominance of the Nazi party and the insidious nature of the propaganda machine is illuminated in small moments, as when Gerstein's young daughter brings home math homework consisting of story problems with Nazi solutions at their core.   </div> <div>  </div> <div> Father Ricardo, assistant to the cardinal in Berlin, is deeply disturbed by the accusations made by Gerstein, and even more deeply disturbed that the allegations are dismissed as "sentimental nonsense." His family is intimately connected with the Vatican and his was an idealized upbringing in the inner circle of the Pope, Pius XII.  Ricardo travels to Rome to report what he has learned from Gerstein about the mass murder, and to implore the Pope to publicly denounce the Nazis.  </div> <bR> <div> With a gripping pace, the covert campaign moves back and forth between Germany and the Vatican.  The opulent, lavish, and absurd appointments of the church hierarchy are intercut with trains moving across the landscape.  More and more trains, empty ones with open doors; then the ones with doors closed and locked, returning with their doomed cargo to their deadly destinations.  The trains, and the faces of the Nazi officers as they stare through the peephole to observe the effects of the gas are hideously repulsive as we imagine the people inside.     </div> <bR> <div> The impossible task of marking a man's conscience in clear black and white, right and wrong, is deliberately drawn in this characterization of a powerful man, who continued to produce and perfect the deadly gas even while his confession details a constant effort to sabotage the genocide.  He believed he was in a unique and presumably potent position to witness and thereby hinder the operations.  There is no such ambiguity toward the other powerful men, those men of the church whose very reason for being was purported to be custodians of moral authority, who instead stood idly by, or turned away in self-interested impotency.  Gerstein's and Ricardo's urgency and the fruitlessness of their effort is a morality tale with a lesson about how evil succeeds and goes unpunished when good people do nothing.  The notion that Germany was full of Christians, many of them Catholics, who conceivably and believably could have stood against and stopped Hitler is not news but the clear focus on it here may be seen as a cautionary tale for a difficult political climate, like the present.  It simultaneously is fine, riveting filmmaking.    </div> <bR> <div> Costa-Gavras thought briefly of casting better known actors for the principals but quickly decided it was essential to cast German actors in the roles of the SS officers.  Ulrich Tukur moves through the film with a stunned, horrified expression that effectively conveys the relentless anguish of Gerstein.  Mathieu Kassovitz (<I>Hate, Amilie</I>) as Ricardo is able to walk the fine line between devotion to his religion and acceptance of his own conscience.  Ulrich Mühe is chilling as the nameless doctor who blows with the winds of expediency to shelter himself from the consequences of his own evil. </div> <bR> <div> <TABLE BORDER="0" CELLPADDING="1" CELLSPACING="1" WIDTH="592" BORDERCOLORLIGHT="#C0C0C0" BORDERCOLORDARK="#808080" FRAME="BOX" RULES="ALL" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0" > <tR> <tD VALIGN=TOP HEIGHT= 20 WIDTH="588"><div> Shelley Cameron <FONT SIZE="3" COLOR="#FFCC66" FACE="Symbol" >Ó</FONT> 2003</div> </tD> </tR> <tR> <tD VALIGN=TOP HEIGHT= 19 WIDTH="588"><div> <A HREF="mailto:info@reelmoviecritic.com" TARGET="_top" TITLE="mailto:info@reelmoviecritic.com"><U><U>Shelley@reelmoviecritic.com</U></U></A></div> </tD> </tR> </TABLE></div> <bR> <bR> <bR> <bR> <bR> </td> </tr></table></body>