Category Archives: Drama

The Piano Lesson

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piano

(photo: Ovi Gherman, creative commons license)

August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson is on stage at Princeton’s McCarter Theatre through February 7, one of his ten plays—The Century Cycle—set in Pittsburgh’s predominantly African American Hill District in different decades of the 20th century. The Piano Lesson and another play in the cycle, Fences, which McCarter produced two years ago, won the Pulitzer Prize.

The Piano Lesson takes place in 1936, in the midst of The Great Migration of southern blacks to northern industrial cities—Pittsburgh, Detroit, Cleveland, Chicago. One of its themes is the difference in perspective of visitors and newcomers from the rural south compared to their family members already established in the urban north.

The story centers on members of the Charles family and (with a captivating stage set showing both the urban neighborhood and the intimacy of the Charles’s home): Doaker, a cook on the railroad, his widowed niece Berniece, and her 11-year-old daughter. Their well-ordered routines are disrupted by the arrival from Sunflower County, Mississippi, of Berniece’s brother, Boy Willie, and his friend Lymon, who’ve driven north with a ramshackle truck full of watermelons to sell.

Boy Willie has been offered the chance to purchase the farmland of a white man (Sutter) who died under mysterious circumstances. He’s saved up some money for the purchase, the sale of the watermelons will help, and to seal the deal he needs the proceeds from selling the family piano. Berniece refuses to sell it. Carved on the piano is the story of their family going back to slavery days. So beyond the rural/urban, south/north divide, there is the tug-of-war between honoring the past versus enabling the future.

Further disrupting the family is the claim by each of the northern household that they’ve seen the ghost of the dead white man, and their willingness or unwillingness to believe that Boy Willie killed him. Playgoers can develop various theories as to the reality and significance of this particular ghost, but it’s clear that the characters are haunted by many ghosts, including those represented in the piano’s carvings, and, more immediately, Berniece and her uncle Wining Boy’s dead spouses.

The excellent cast—Stephen Tyrone Williams as Boy Willie (with an unbelievably long Act II monolog that possibly should be trimmed); Miriam A. Hyman as Berniece; John Earl Jelks as Doaker; and Cleavant Derricks as Doaker’s slick brother Wining Boy—is directed by Jade King Carroll. David Pegram was a perfect Lyman, a half-step behind and eager to become citified. There is much good humor in the characters’ interactions of the kind only close kin can indulge in.

The presence of a composer, sound designer, and music director in the crew credits suggests how significant music is in Wilson’s conception of the family and their story. The beautifully staged men’s work song about the Parchman Prison Farm is long, but not long enough!

The program for the play includes a helpful family tree of the Charles family, who can trace their lineage (thanks to the piano) back to Doaker’s and Wining Boy’s great-grandparents. This is an unusually full picture of family during slavery days, as demonstrated in Henry Louis Gates’s fascinating Finding Our Roots PBS television program. Reflecting on ancestors in slavery is powerful, as Regina Mason’s discovery of a great-grandfather who was a former slave, attests. These modern-day quests, three or four generations after the action of Wilson’s play, illuminate how some members of many families, like Boy Willie, wanted to put all that history behind them and how others, like Berniece, believed in keeping it close. In her case, the lessons of the piano were worth more than money.

Weekend Movie Pick: The Danish Girl

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Alicia Vikander, Eddie Redmayne, Danish Girl

Alicia Vikander & Eddie Redmayne in The Danish Girl

You (like me) may have admired Eddie Redmayne in the TV version of Tess of the D’Urbervilles (2008), in My Week with Marilyn (2011), as Marius in Les Miserables 2012), and as Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything (Academy Award, 2014). You still may be surprised at how moving his delicate performance is in The Danish Girl (trailer).

I knew vaguely what this movie was about—very “loosely based” on the lives of mid-1920s Danish painters Einar and Gerda Wegener.

Despite their happy and loving marriage, Einar comes to realize he is a woman in a man’s body. “Lili,” as his alter ego is named, is at first a diversion for the pair, then a painful inevitability, and Einar becomes one of the first people to undergo sex-reassignment surgery. Both of them suffer because of Lili’s condition and the strains it places on their love, yet they desperately try to make some kind of relationship work. Yet it’s dangerous to be a pioneer.

While Redmayne is superb, he’s matched in nuanced expressiveness by Swedish actor Alicia Vikander as Gerda. The delicious Matthias Schoenaerts plays Einar’s childhood friend, Hans, with whom a frantic Gerda reconnects while the couple is in Paris. Ben Whishaw also appears, determined to court the shy Lili, or is it Einar he recognizes and pursues?

Not much was known about transgender identities in 1925, and the medical practitioners with whom the couple shares its secret propose predictably draconian measures. But the real drama is watching Redmayne transform himself into a female being. Says Nathan Heller’s Vogue article, “He is no longer recognizable as a 33-year-old man; suddenly, the flash strikes his face and the transformation is complete.”

The film, directed by Tom Hooper with a script by English playwright Lucinda Coxon, is based on the 2000 David Ebershoff novel. Due to Coxon’s diligent research, the movie actually contains numerous factual details not in the book. Tim Gray’s interview with Coxon for Variety reveals that the film is actually closer to what really happened than either the novel or Lili Elbe’s pastiche of a “memoir,” which was, Coxon told Gray, “a work of many hands.”

Rotten Tomatoes critics rating: 71%; audiences 75%.

Weekend Movie Fare: Carol

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Cate Blanchett, Rooney Mara, Carol

Rooney Mara & Cate Blanchett

Hailed as a top Oscar contender this year in numerous categories—best director, film, actress, and cinematography—Carol (trailer) is the story of a wealthy but unhappily married woman (played by Cate Blanchett) who embarks on a relationship with a shopgirl (Rooney Mara) she meets by chance. Unquestionably, it’s a period piece (nice Packards!), written by author Patricia Highsmith, herself a lesbian, who wrote high-class mysteries like The Talented Mr. Ripley, and it would have had considerably more shock value—and prompted more audience reflection—in its 1952 novel version, The Price of Salt.

In a story set in that era and with the social class differences involved, there are lots of ways for this relationship to go wrong. Worse, with a husband willing to play his ace—custody of his and Carol’s four-year-old daughter Rindy—the stakes are high. Yet, I didn’t find this movie either engaging or revelatory. Of course Blanchett is terrific, as always, though even she may underplay the role of Carol through most of the film. Mara, as the initially childlike Therese Belivet, is so indeterminate that it’s hard to root for her happiness (what would that require, exactly?) and even harder to see what the glamorous, sophisticated Carol sees in her. Perhaps director Todd Haynes and screenwriter Phyllis Nagy hoped that, by making Mara more or less a cipher, viewers would be free to pin their own romantic hopes and dreams on her.

In the New York Times, critic A.O.Scott calls Carol “a study in human magnetism, in the physics and optics of eros . . . (giving) emotional and philosophical weight to what might be a perfectly banal question: What do these women see each in each other.” That was my question, all right. Therese says she is almost will-less, that the complications in her life arise because all she ever does is say “yes,” and the film takes on the challenge of imbuing her most important affirmation with real meaning. In a season where we’ve seen so many excellent high-drama films, this one, to me, did less than I would have liked it to. I’d give it a B-.

Rotten Tomatoes critics rating: 94%; audiences: 79%.

****The Man in the Wooden Hat

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tulips

(photo: Denise Krebs, creative commons license)

By Jane Gardam — Getting to know intimately one half of a married couple can ill prepare you for meeting the other half, who may fail to live up to their superior advance billing, or, as likely, be so surprisingly normal—even pleasant—that you mistrust your own memory of past marital revelations. Award-winning British writer Jane Gardam’s books Old Filth (from the husband’s point of view) and The Man in the Wooden Hat (the wife’s) apply these different lenses to the same 50-year marriage.

I’ve read only this one, published in 2009, but went back to reviews of Old Filth (2006) and found that many of the animating events in the couple’s life are described in both novels. While the bones of the relationship remain the same, “Little here is as it seemed in ‘Old Filth,’ and both books are the richer for it,” said Louisa Thomas in her New York Times review.

The sobriquet Old Filth—created by and applied to talented barrister Edward Feathers, later Sir Edward—is an acronym for “Failed In London, Try HongKong.” Try there, he does, and succeeds. Also in Hong Kong, his future wife Elisabeth Macintosh debates whether to marry him, decides to, and carries through at rather a slap-dash pace in ancient borrowed finery. Eddie’s preoccupation is that Betty should never leave him, and she promises she won’t. This is a promise Betty learns will be enforced by Edward’s best friend, the card-playing Chinese dwarf Albert Ross (“Albatross”): “If you leave him, I will break you,” Ross threatens, and she is sure he means it.

The wedding ceremony follows by a few hours a one-night affair, in which Betty is deflowered by Eddie’s nemesis, rival barrister Terry Veneering, a secret to which The Albatross, unfortunately, is privy. Trust Charles Dickens to recognize an allusive name when he hears one; like the nouveau riche social climbers in Our Mutual Friend, this Veneering has a charming surface. His attraction for Betty lasts for decades, and he weaves in and out of the story of the couple’s marriage.

While a story of interpersonal relationships, the book takes place after World War II, and is necessarily revelatory about broad social upheavals in Britain. Class and privilege are never the same after the unraveling of Empire, the economic upheavals of the decade before the war, and the war itself. The world into which the three protagonists were born simply disappeared beneath their feet and dissolved out of their arms.

Gardam’s novel follows the couple from youth to old age, with Betty’s death planting tulips in their rural garden. Mostly, though, it focuses on their early relationship, including the tragedy of a miscarriage that leaves Betty unable to have her heart’s desire, children. The closest relationship she maintains with a young person is with Veneering’s precocious son, Harry, whom she meets when he is nine years old and “crunching a lobster” under the table at a banquet. She has numerous lively and colorful friends in Hong Kong and later in London, whose appearance in the narrative is always welcome.

As for the everyday relationship between the spouses, the reader is shown the benefits of accommodation rather than the head-to-head battles that often characterize “relationship books.”

Well plotted and carefully written, full of good humor and getting on with it. A third book in the Old Filth trilogy, Last Friends, was published in 2013. It’s a view of the Feathers’s marriage from Veneering’s point of view. Now that should be interesting!

Charles III

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Charles III

Tim Pigott-Smith in Charles III

The prize-winning play King Charles III, billed as a “future history play” and now on Broadway at the Music Box theatre, is a compelling theatrical conjecture. It anticipates the time when Queen Elizabeth is gone and her oldest son, Charles, is in position finally to become king. Charles, alas, has always been a person from whom little has been expected (some would say this is one reason QEII has hung on so long), a view which he himself has contributed to. His perceived rejection of Diana—“the world’s princess”—in favor of the unloved Camilla Parker-Bowles added fire to his critics, who had previously mustered little more than a yawn.

In the play, the Liberal Prime Minister assumes Charles will play the role of thoughtful rubber-stamp that his mother did, so well portrayed in The Audience (Helen Mirren as Queen) on Broadway earlier this year. Not so. In their very first meeting, Charles objects to a Liberal bill to restrict freedom of the press. As in a high-stakes chess game, parliamentary move and monarchal countermove ensue. In the fragile edifice of his family, the issue of controls on the frenzied media are of more than academic interest. The plot keeps turning and turning, and I won’t say more about it, except that I found it riveting.

Let’s talk about style. The simple set is intended to remind the audience of the Old Globe, showing shows five sides of an elegant brick structure. A frieze running around the entirety, about ten feet above the stage, comprises semi-abstract faces lit in various ways to denote “the people”—crowds, demonstrators, in other words, those most likely to be affected by the affairs of state on which Charles aspires to be a benevolent, active force.

The echoes of Shakespeare are more than visual. We have the machinations of Lady Macbeth, the indecisiveness of Richard II, the desperation of Lear. Written in blank verse, playwright Mike Bartlett’s language is often given an Elizabethan cadence, “Husband,” Kate calls to William, and nearly every scene ends in a rhyming couplet. This is artificial, but doesn’t seem artifice. Rather it reflects the tragedy, if tragedy is defined in the dramatic sense, as a fall from a great height, playing out before us. We are seeing critical precedents discussed and the weight of 1600 years of history. Such events are worthy of Shakespearean language in the country’s leaders, and not the territory of “Oh, whatever” or a graceless “WTF?”

The cast, which comes from London’s prestigious Almeida Theatre, is excellent. By training and experience, it manages this demanding language well. Tim Pigott-Smith is a heart-breaking Charles (The Telegraph of London calls it “the performance of his career”), and Margot Leicester is perfect as Camilla. I also especially liked pencil-thin Lydia Wilson as Kate and Richard Goulding as “the ginger idiot,” Harry. Adam James and Anthony Calf were fine as the Liberal and Conservative leaders, respectively. The program notes that many of the actors had vocal training, and that stands them in good stead in various scenes, in which solemn chanting (this is not a musical!) establishes a moody atmosphere, which is not to say there are no laughs elsewhere.

Bartlett also wrote the theatrical version of Chariots of Fire (seen in London in 2012 and greatly admired), among many others, and won a Best New Play award for Charles III. It’s nice to see something on Broadway that grapples with thought-worthy issues, including questions for which Americans are merely interested observers, like the future of the monarchy.

As in London, the production is directed by Rupert Goold, the award-winning Artistic Director of Almeida Theatre. I wondered what the U.K. critics thought of it, and found they quite approved. For example, critic Michael Billington in The Guardian said, “It gains traction as it goes along and by the end has acquired a borrowed grandeur through its Shakespearean form and a tragic dimension through the performance of Tim Pigott-Smith.” Agree. Whole-heartedly.

Spotlight

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Spotlight, Boston Globe

Rachel McAdams, Mark Ruffalo, & Brian D’Arcy James in Spotlight

Shades of Woodward and Bernstein, the based-on-a-true story Spotlight (trailer) follows the actions of an investigative journalism team way out on a limb in Catholic Boston. They’re not just in pursuit of the story of clergy child sex abuse, their mission is also to expose the shameful cover-up of abusive priests, and the institutional shortcomings that allowed them to carry on. Unlike today’s social media blowhards (and political candidates), they can’t just make accusations; they need actual proof.

A nice coincidence is the support the reporters receive from another Ben Bradlee—this one Ben Bradlee, Jr., played by John Slattery, who never has a good hair day. Like his father in the Watergate era, he lets the reporters run, even though he’s initially skeptical they’ll come up with anything.

Crusading journalists are a social corrective we have largely lost in the era of declining newsroom budgets and staffs and the competition for sound bites and snarky bits. The reporters in this film reporters fill the job description, pushed by a fierce desire to expose the truth. Sometimes, of course, that leads to more truth than they might desire—closer to home truths of different kinds. They’re after the kind of story that wins Pulitzers (and did), but more important to the journalists, they know it’s an important story for the affected families and a sobering story about how evil can hide in plain sight.

The principals include the Boston Globe’s new editor, Marty Baron (Liev Schreiber) and his investigative “Spotlight” team, led by Robby Robinson (Michael Keaton of the pursed lips), with reporters Michael Rezendes (Mark Ruffalo, who sticks his head out like a turtle, so eager is he to grab onto the story), Sacha Pfeiffer (Rachael McAdams), and Matt Carroll (Brian D’Arcy James). The actors do a fine job, as do Stanley Tucci and Billy Crudup in smaller roles.

As written by Tom McCarthy and Josh Singer and directed by McCarthy, the film is a “magnificent nerdy process movie—a tour de force of filing cabinet cinema,” says Justin Chang in Variety. Yet it is never uninteresting. Even better, it is never sanctimonious.

The film’s tension comes from fear that the Church will find out what the Globe is up to and exert its considerable influence to put a stop to it or—and almost worse from the reporters’ point of view—the Boston Herald will scoop them. If they can delay publication until they have proof top Church leaders knew about the abuse, it would be impossible for them to persist in the “few bad apples” claim.

In sum, “A taut story, well-told,” says Jim Lane in the Sacramento News & Review.

Rotten Tomatoes critics rating: 98%; audiences 96%.

Suffragette

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Suffragette, Carey MulliganCinema’s efforts to dramatize major social upheavals are always somewhat problematic, either focusing too wide, so that the viewer doesn’t adequately relate to individual participants’ challenges, or too narrowly, pulling their struggle out of the necessary context. Despite the predictability of some elements in its story, Suffragette (trailer), achieves a pretty good balance between background and foreground. The movie was directed by Sarah Gavron, with a screenplay by Abi Morgan.

By 1912, many decades of asking politely for the vote and expanded rights has achieved nothing for British women. Finally, their leader Emmeline Pankhurst declares, “deeds not words,” ushering in a new era of militancy, including bombs in post boxes. In part this new tactic is necessary because government and media collude to keep the suffragette’s demands quiet. No one knows the extent of the movement or public sympathy for it, and government wants to keep it that way. We see male officials fretting about the situation, but the film mostly shows “ordinary women” whose lives have become unbearably suffocating. Some of them are torn by the choices they have to make, while others have moved beyond doubt and are determined to grab the government’s attention, no matter the consequences.

The movie is fortunate in the actors selected for these foreground roles. Carey Mulligan is, as ever, perfect as Maud Watts, a young mother who’s worked in a Dickensian laundry since childhood and becomes involved with the movement by chance; Anne-Marie Duff is a true believer who has to reconsider; Helena Bonham Carter and Natalie Press have left doubt in the dust. (Bonham Carter is the great-granddaughter of H.H. Asquith, Prime Minister of Britain during the height of the suffragette movement, which he opposed.)

The government brings in a Special Branch investigator, played by Brendan Gleeson, to track the women’s movements, and he zeroes in on Watts, thinking she may crack. Meryl Streep makes a cameo appearance as Pankhurst, and of course it would have been great to see more of her, but that would have drawn light away from the everyday women who ultimately had to say to themselves, enough.

British women received partial suffrage in 1918 and full suffrage a decade later. “While nobody—least of all Maud—supposes that the vote will solve everything, it will at least be a start,” said A.O. Smith in the New York Times. As a scroll at the end of the movie attests, worldwide acceptance of women’s suffrage is still incomplete and, for many, the start hasn’t yet started.

Rotten Tomatoes critics rating: 72%; audiences 74%.

It would be difficult not to compare this movie with Sophie Scholl – The Final Days, which I reviewed yesterday. Both are about young women standing up for their beliefs at the risk of their lives. Sophie Scholl was the more moving, both because she was a real-life person and because her beliefs were so well articulated in the face of the inevitable penalty. In Suffragette, the possibility, if not the certainty, of death was present and discussed. It is the more cinematic experience, with the lovely recreation of 1910 London, the grim laundry, and more women’s stories, which increase its universality. More than a hundred years later women around the world can identify with at least aspects of the economic, occupational, legal, sexual, and other inequalities these women collectively suffered.

Sophie Scholl – The Final Days

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Sophie Scholl, Nazis

Julia Jentsch as Sophie Scholl

Netflix finally sent a movie whose queue we’d been in for years (they must have only a single copy), and wouldn’t you know, it arrived the same week we saw another based-on-a-true-story German-subtitled movie about World War II, Labyrinth of Lies. But you don’t have to wait so long, the entire 2005 Scholl movie is available on YouTube, or you can watch this snippet (trailer).

Sophie Scholl, age 21, her older brother Hans, and several of their friends were students in Munich during the war and participated in a non-violent resistance organization called The White Rose. It was 1943. Stalingrad had just been lost, the Eastern Front was a disaster, and most German military leaders saw inevitable looming defeat. It was in that atmosphere that Sophie and her brother are arrested for distributing anti-war flyers at the university, and the movie focuses on her interrogation by the Gestapo. It doesn’t involve the thuggish violence one might expect; rather, it’s a duel of wits between Sophie and her interrogator, Robert Mohr, as she refuses to name accomplices.

Raised a Lutheran, Sophie’s religious beliefs were the basis for her opposition to the Nazi regime. In addition, her boyfriend Fritz Hartnagel who served on the Eastern Front had written to her about the mass murders of Soviet soldiers and Jews that he had seen. Her final words illustrate the strength of her convictions: “How can we expect righteousness to prevail when there is hardly anyone willing to give himself up individually to a righteous cause? Such a fine, sunny day, and I have to go, but what does my death matter, if through us, thousands of people are awakened and stirred to action?”

Although the law and the punishment are clear, what is also clear is that Mohr (played by Gerald Held) comes to respect Sophie’s courage, as played so movingly by Julia Jentsch. You might be tempted to think that when the defendants appear in the People’s Court for their show trial, the court’s President is played too broadly, like a hysterical fanatic. Watch the “extras” that accompany the film—and you’ll see some footage made at the trial. The actor playing the judge got it exactly right. As Roger Ebert said in his review: “Those who know their actions are wrong are often the loudest to defend them, especially when they fear a higher moral judgment may come down on them.” The extras include a lengthy interview with Sophie and Hans’s younger sister, Elisabeth, as well. Today, in Munich and elsewhere, there are numerous memorials to Sophie and Hans and The White Rose.

This award-winning film, directed by Marc Rothemund, was an Academy Award nominee for Best Foreign Language Film in 2005.

Rotten Tomatoes critics rating: 87%, audiences: 88%.

****Everything I Never Told You

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Alone, teenager

(photo: Pierre Guinoiseau, creative commons license)

By Celeste Ng – In a perceptive Glimmer Train essay, summarized here, Celeste Ng talked about “comfortable ambiguity,” and how in her debut novel, she tried to give readers space to enter the world of the story and enough clues to come to their own conclusions about the fates of the characters. Since so many of her early readers had strong—and differing—opinions about what those fates were, her efforts were clearly successful.

The story centers around a family living in a small town outside Cleveland in the 1970s: honey-blonde Marilyn, the mother, estranged from her own mother, her would-be career, and the future she thought she would have; James, her Chinese husband in an era and a place where being Asian made him—at least in his mind—the perpetual outsider; and their three black-haired children, the only Asian-Americans in their school. Hannah, the acutely observant youngest, Nathan, the oldest, on his way to Harvard, and in the middle, Lydia—serious, responsible Lydia—her parents’ favorite. Their hopes are pinned on her.

New York Times reviewer Alexander Chee calls the story “a deep, heartfelt portrait of a family struggling with its place in history, and a young woman hoping to be the fulfillment of that struggle.” What went wrong? And something did go drastically wrong, as we learn in the book’s first irrevocable sentences: “Lydia is dead. But they don’t know this yet.”

The narrative moves from present to past in exploring these five lives and the different social forces and character traits that propelled them to where they are, one dead. Something they all have in common is secrets. Before Lydia is a year old, Marilyn notices her uncanny ability to keep secrets. In the aftermath of the disappearance, a desperate Marilyn pulls down from the bookcase the dozen diaries she’s given her to see what clues they may hide. She jams the flimsy locks open. Every page is blank.

As the story’s point of view shifts among family members, and each tries to piece together what happened to Lydia and why, the secrets, the alienation, and the deceptions in their own lives emerge. Even so, little is shared among them. Each must come to an understanding of Lydia’s tragedy in a unique, highly personal, and for some, devastating way. For the reader, the great pleasure of this novel is its uncluttered style. It easily draws you into deeper and deeper waters until you realize the surface is far above you.

Everything I Never Told You was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and named a “best book of the year” by many reviewers.

Labyrinth of Lies

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Alexander Fehling, Labyrinth of LiesGermany’s submission (trailer) for Best Foreign Language Film at the upcoming Academy Awards puts viewers in a world of anti-Semitism, fear, denial, indifference and callous pragmatism. The movie, screened with subtitles, breathes life into the familiar storyline of a justice-seeking crusader. This one is not entirely alone, but the pervasive forces he’s battling are propagated not just by those in power but by the common folk as well.

Set in Frankfurt in 1958, the movie fictionalizes the effort to conduct the first German prosecutions of former Nazi officials. Many believed the Nuremberg trials conducted by the Allied forces had resolved that matter (or should have). At the same time, it was common knowledge that war criminals were everywhere, carrying on normal lives with impunity. Only after these ground-breaking trials did Germans finally confronted their wartime culpability.

Bringing ex-Nazis to justice required heroic effort. Making that journey in the film is young prosecutor Johann Radmann, played by Alexander Fehling in a widely praised performance. (Radmann is a composite of several real-life prosecutors.) He’s a junior one, handling traffic violations, but he’s ambitious. The screenplay deftly reveals this by showing him articulating the case for sentencing a murderer to the maximum penalty of life imprisonment, then we see he’s standing alone in front of a bathroom mirror.

Into this unfulfilled life comes a revelation from a journalist, Thomas Gnielka (André Szymanski). He tells prosecutors a member of the Waffen S.S. stationed at the Auschwitz concentration camp now works as a school teacher, in violation of federal law. Radmann wants the case, but he’s opposed by his boss and colleagues. He’s supported, however, then led by a shrewd, experienced Attorney General, Fritz Bauer, the real-life hero of the story, who has long harbored the ambition of bringing top ex-Nazis to justice. Played by the late Gert Voss, he exudes quiet power.

Labyrinth of Lies

Becht and Fehling in Labyrinth of Lies

Radmann is far less aggressive in his personal life than his professional one, but a convincing romantic involvement with a dressmaker, Marlene Wondrak (Friederike Becht), raises the stakes for him.

We feel the horrors of the camp through the emotions of survivors, primarily artist Simon Kirsch (Johannes Krisch), a friend of Gnielka, who lost his twin daughters to the horrific experiments of Dr. Josef Mengele. But the focus stays on the complicity of those who continue to ignore, deny, or cover up Nazi crimes. It’s not difficult to understand the disconnect between Radmann and the people trying to thwart him. He was too young to appreciate how so many of his countrymen came to be Nazis. If he can’t come to terms with his new knowledge, however, it will destroy him.

Some critics, such as The Boston Globe’s Peter Keough, have found the movie “formulaic and uninspired,” but most have a more positive view, such as that of Kate Taylor in The Globe and Mail of Toronto. She called it “a strong account of a lesser-known episode of post-Holocaust history raised above its obvious cinematic formula by Fehling’s anchoring performance and the film’s wise approach to the survivors’ horrific testimony.”

Rotten Tomatoes ratings are 78% from critics and 83% from viewers.

Guest review by fellow writing group member David Ludlum, a fan of tales of intrigue.

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