The Second Mrs. Wilson

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Woodrow Wilson, Edith Wilson, President

Woodrow and Edith Wilson

A timely new play at the George Street Playhouse in New Brunswick, NJ, especially for political junkies, is Joe DiPietro’s The Second Mrs. Wilson. You may recall that Woodrow Wilson suffered a debilitating stroke during his second term as President and that, for many months afterward, his second wife, Edith, was in all but title Chief Executive. Detractors called her the nation’s first female president.

This was the time when the treaty ending the appalling First World War was being considered. In Paris, Wilson had helped negotiate the treaty and, back in the States, he campaigned tirelessly for it. He’d been president of Princeton University (and, briefly Governor of New Jersey) before becoming President, so may have had an especially keen appreciation of the nearly 20 million soldier and civilian lives lost, worldwide, many of the soldiers young men who were age peers of those he’d led at the University. In 1919, he received the Nobel Peace Prize, then, on a public speaking tour to promote the treaty, he collapsed.

Edith was his second wife. For nearly 30 years, he’d been happily married to Ellen Axson, but she died early in his first term, a loss that left him devastated. Almost miraculously, it must have seemed, Edith Bolling appeared on the scene and renewed his zest for living.

A two-hour play necessarily collapses and condenses a great many events and emotions, and this play focuses on his love for his new wife and her dedication both to him and his foremost concern: ratification of the Versailles Treaty, which included adoption of the League of Nations. Wilson believed the League was the key to sustained world peace and the avoidance of future conflicts. But with him bedridden, the political forces rose against the League, dramatized in the play through Senator Henry Cabot Lodge. Republican opposition, combined with Wilson’s inability to consider any compromise in the legislative language, ultimately denied him this victory.

No one knows how history would have played out had America joined the League, but certainly the country’s post-war isolationism drastically weakened the organization during the period leading to World War II. Although the play is grounded in events of almost a century ago, we see today the problems of intransigent political opposition, when politicians make decisions not on what is best for the people they represent, their country, or the world, but their own political gain.

The play is brilliantly acted by John Glover (Wilson) and Laila Robins (Edith), whom we have seen and appreciated in numerous previous productions. Michael McGrath as Wilson’s aide Joe Tumulty and Stephen Spinella as his long-time colleague Col. Edward House are particularly poignant, facing their chief’s decline. The second act could be somewhat shorter, though Glover’s portrayal of Wilson’s initial extreme disability and the gradual return of functioning is both masterful and deeply moving.

It’s not possible to discuss this play without reference to recent events at Princeton University , where black students have protested the naming of various university units—including the prestigious Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs—after Princeton’s and the nation’s former president. Wilson supported racial segregation a hundred years ago, when that was Americans’ predominant view. Judging the past by the standards of the present is always problematic, and in this case ignores the tremendous good Wilson—deemed one of the nation’s greatest progressive presidents—contributed to social justice through expanded voter and worker rights and many other measures.

The Second Mrs. Wilson is on stage until November 29.

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%.

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum

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Funny Thing, Two River

David Josefsberg, Michael Urie, Christopher Fitzgerald, & Kevin Isola in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum

Probably most families have movies and plays that are an immediate source of hilarity in the collective memory. My family does, and one of them is this 1962 musical currently re-mounted at Two River Theater in Red Bank, New Jersey, one of the Garden State’s fine regional theaters. With the book by Burt Shevelove and Larry Gelbart (M*A*S*H) and music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, it’s exuberant, ridiculous farce from beginning to end. (The team of Shevelove and Gelbart is responsible for one of our other faves, too, the movie The Wrong Box.)

This was Sondheim’s early days, when his songs were more tuneful, and there are lovely duets (“Lovely”; “The Echo Song”) and showstopping ensemble numbers (“Everybody Ought to Have a Maid”; “Comedy Tonight”). Well, the last-mentioned would be a show-stopper if it weren’t the show-starter, and in the Two River production you know from that first moment, when the eight-member orchestra takes off, that you’re in for an exciting ride!

This production of A Funny Thing, directed by Jessica Stone, uses an all-male cast. She first tried this concept at the Williamstown Theatre Festival in 2010 to great acclaim, and it works well, injecting an extra layer of absurdity. This casting choice is historically accurate, actually, as the original comedies of the Roman playwright Plautus (c. 254-184 BCE)—A Funny Thing is very loosely based on one of them—relied on all-male casts. As in Shakespeare’s day, women weren’t allowed to play on stage. Plautus’s works included a number of stock characters, including the clever slave, the dumb beauty, the lustful old man, the braggart soldier—all of whom appear in A Funny Thing.

Except for the hero of the story—the extremely clever slave Pseudolus—cast members play multiple parts and appear to be having as much fun as the audience. They do a great job, and after such antic and energetic performances, they must need a serious nap or perhaps chiropracty. Christopher Fitzgerald is an irrepressible Pseudolus, Graham Rowat a superior Miles Gloriosus (“I am my ideal”), and I’ve never seen a better Philia than David Turner’s, as a young woman lightly touched with the awareness she’s a dimwit.

If you want some pure fun, don’t miss it! On stage until December 13.

Too far from New Jersey? Netflix (or try your local library) has the movie version, featuring Zero Mostel, Jack Gilford, Phil Silvers, and a very young Michael Crawford (who achieved super-stardom many years later as the lead in Phantom of the Opera), or order it below.

****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.

****Minute Zero

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Africa, Sunset

(photo: Andrew Moore, creative commons license)

By Todd Moss – If you missed Todd Moss’s dramatic 2013 debut with The Golden Hour, catch up with his protagonist Judd Ryker in his second thriller set in an unstable Africa, the recently released Minute Zero for more political chicanery, assassination, theft and corruption at the most brazen level.

Ryker is an academic working in the uneasy surroundings of the U.S. State Department. The careerists don’t trust him, his brief—as head of the department’s new Crisis Reaction Unit—puts him outside the bureaucracy’s normal chain of command, and in many ways he’s in over his head. What landed him there was his theory that in every international crisis there is a short period—the golden hour—in which events can be successfully directed toward a positive conclusion. Once a situation settles, that opportunity is lost.

This novel elaborates that idea, with the proposition that at times of extreme national disruption, there is an even briefer period of breakdown, when outcomes are uncertain and dramatic change is possible. For U.S. diplomats, Ryker counsels, that “zero minute” offers a unique opportunity.

Moss places this thriller in Zimbabwe, under the long-time leadership of fictional President Winston Tinotenda, a man in his 90s (clearly modeled on IRL president Robert Mugabe), aided by his considerably younger national security advisor, General Simba Chimurenga. This pair did not retain power for decades without a hefty dose of corruption, violence, and heavy-handed political tactics. Now the country faces an election pitting Tinotenda against a formidable challenger, a woman lawyer, Gugu Mutonga.

In this situation, U.S. goals are clear and limited, says the State Department’s Africa lead, Bill Rogerson: a safe, peaceful vote and stability into the post-election period, translated as “no bodies in the streets.” Tinotenda’s hold on the office look like a certainty, but Mutonga has strong support among the country’s youth and in its southern region, and Ryker isn’t so sure the president can hold on. Disruption is in the air.

The Secretary of State asks Ryker to fly to Zimbabwe and demonstrate definitively that his crisis reaction analytics can work. But Rogerson considers Ryker a thorn in his side and is anxious to expel him from the body diplomatique. To thwart Ryker’s efforts, Rogerson colludes with the U.S. ambassador to Zimbabwe—a rather dim political appointee counting the minutes until he can take up a new posting in London. Ryker’s wife Jessica is an agronomist working on African water purification projects. She provides helpful counsel to him as he negotiates these treacherous bureaucratic waters. Only over time does the reader begin to suspect Jessica has her own dangerous agenda.

The political and diplomatic chess game Ryker undertakes to protect American interests and the integrity of the vote is just as cutthroat as an assassination and its outcome can be just as fatal (at least to careers).

Moss is uniquely qualified to write his thrillers, having been the deputy assistant secretary of state covering 16 countries in West Africa. Currently, he’s chief operating officer and senior fellow at the Center for Global Development in Washington, D.C. He’s also the author of four nonfiction books on international economic affairs and has taught at Georgetown University and the London School of Economics. Luckily for his readers, in addition to his solid background and experience, he knows how to tell a compelling story!

****Career of Evil

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package, box

(photo: Jonathan, creative commons license)

By Robert Galbraith (J.K. Rowling), narrated by Robert Glenister – Devotees of the heavy metal rock band Blue Öyster Cult will recognize that its allusive and sometimes violent lyrics give this book its title, chapter titles, and break headings. Chapter 1, for example, is “This Ain’t the Summer of Love.” Nor is it.

Former Army Special Investigator Cameron Strike runs a not-exactly-thriving London private detection business, aided by his attractive factotum Robin Ellacott. They have only two cases going when a delivery man shows up with a package addressed to Robin and containing the severed leg of a young girl. Strike can think of three people from his past with the misogynistic leanings, brutality, and sufficient grudge against him to make them suspects in such a crime and desirous to involve him in it. Sending a leg—instead of some other body part—seems a cruel reference to Strike’s own leg, lost in a land mine detonation in Afghanistan and replaced by a prosthesis.

Kinky theories also emerge, and Robin uncovers in their file of “nutter” letters one from a young woman who wanted to cut off her leg. Robin, a psychology major before leaving university, recognizes the syndrome. Her exploration of Internet sites for transabled people and Body Integrity Identity Disorder yields more leads.

Two of Strike’s suspects are people he encountered in the military. The third, Jeff Whittaker, is the much younger second husband of Strike’s mother. Strike is convinced Whittaker orchestrated her death from a heroin overdose, but he was acquitted. Strike and Robin reconstruct the decades-cold trails of their three suspects. They have plenty of time to do so, as publicity about the leg business has discouraged any other would-be clients. They are inevitably brought into conflict with the police, still smarting from previous cases in which Strike out-investigated them.

Meanwhile, Robin proceeds half-heartedly with her wedding plans, perpetually annoyed at fiancé Matthew’s repeated attempts to get her to quit her job and his apparent jealousy of Strike. Even her stalker can detect the chill between them. When Matthew reveals a secret of his own, she calls the wedding off. The book’s early action takes place around the time of the Royal Wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton, and those festivities are a painful counterpoint to the couple’s unhappiness.

Galbraith has constructed a well paced, compelling narrative. She leaves a few clues on the table and could have had the main characters learn more about themselves, but few thrillers do that. It works well as an audiobook, narrated by Robert Glenister, because there is not an overabundance of characters and the pacing keeps the listener well engaged throughout its nearly 18 hours.

A slightly longer version of this review appeared on CrimeFictionLover.com.

I’d “Mutch Rather See Them”

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Civil War, battlefield, cannon

Stones River National Battlefield (photo: wikipedia)

I spent Veterans’ Day yesterday deciphering four letters my great-great uncles wrote in 1863 and 1864 when serving in the U.S. Civil War. Men from my family served on both sides of that war, and the Tennessee ancestors on my grandfather’s side epitomize that truism about the border states, “it was brother against brother.” Those living in Wilson County, east of Nashville, fought for the South, while those who’d moved further west, to Carroll County, were Union men.

The war did not treat kindly the land of Wilson County and the Hurricane Creek area where my family lived. Just ten miles down the road in early 1863 raged the Battle of Stones River (also called the Battle of Murfreesboro). On the Union side, Gen. William Rosecrans led some 43,000 men of the Army of the Cumberland, while Confederate Gen. Braxton Bragg brought 38,000 men from the Army of Tennessee. Although “tactically indecisive,” it was one of the war’s bloodiest battles, with an estimated 23,500 men killed or injured.

More than 80,000 men moving through an agricultural area does not leave much behind for the settlers. As a returning soldier wrote, “When I reached my grandfather’s farm, I saw something of what the home folks were enduring while we were away in the army: barns all gone, fine trees cut down in the front lot, stock all gone, everything in disarray.” Food and currency were scarce, and supplies were gone. “For two years there was no coffee, no sugar, no shoes.” The cotton crop of 1866 was meager, and an epidemic of cholera raged that summer, hitting Wilson County hard, only to be followed by smallpox in the fall. Thus the painted slogan “GTT” began appearing on the doors of people’s abandoned homes and farms—Gone To Texas.

Some family on my grandmother Smith’s side already lived in Texas and their sons were recruited into the Confederate forces. It is their letters I was working on, with the beautifully florid handwriting and many misspellings adding to their charm. These boys—John Ricerd (J.R.), about age 20, and George, 23—were two of eight sons of William and Elizabeth Smith, and they are intimately concerned about the fate of their younger brothers:

  • “Tell W. R. Smith if the war continues till he becomes 18 years old, tell him to go in Texas service, not to comb(come) out here. I hope though he will not have to Join the army.” (from J.R. Smith)
  • “William, you will try to beat me a(t) writing a letter the time, for you are going to School for some time as will be when this letter reaches to hand. You will apply your Self Closely and try to make a Smart man.” (from George Smith)
  • “I reckon I will never see home until this unholy war comes to a close and none but my Heavenly father knows when that will be.” (from George Smith)
  • “I want to here from you and Franklin and all the rest of my little Brothers. But mutch rather see them.” (from J.R. Smith)

You also get a sense of the conditions and concerns that plagued them as they fought in Arkansas and Louisiana in the Trans-Mississippi and Red River campaigns.

  • “I am anxious to here from Brother William. I expec that he has been in the fight. If so I hope that he came threw safe.” (from J.R. Smith)
  • “Father, I have been as wet as I could be for 2 days and a night and travailed (traveled) all one day. You will excuse my bad writing and my Short letter for I have travailed all day and am tired.” (from George Smith)
  • “The reson I don’t get letters regular is we have been running from place to place. The boys is all brokedown and need rest.” (from J.R. Smith)

America has had so many veterans of so many wars, and while the foes and armaments have changed, the human experience remains.

It’s Red Pen Time!

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editing, red pen

(photo: Nic McPhee, creative commons license)

BookBub marketing expert Diana Urban has advice for writers—and that’s pretty much all of us, right?!—about words to excise in our prose. You have probably heard many times about the importance of some of these, but yet, when I read the drafts of new writers, not to mention people who should know better (like me!), they are persistent problems.

  • Avoid passive verbs—the classic example “Mistakes were made” illustrates the problem perfectly. Who made those mistakes? Passive constructions remove the “actor” from the “act.” “The keys were misplaced.” Yes, but who should be looking for them?! With the passive, you never know; responsibility diffuses in a miasma of vagueness.
  • In fact, avoid auxiliary verbs in general. “I was standing at the window, and I was gazing at the sheep” may have been an acceptable dozy writing style 150 years ago, but today’s readers want to get to the point: “I stood at the window and gazed at the sheep, including that black one.” (Hero of the rest of the story, no doubt.)
  • I once had to cut 40,000 words out of a 135,000-word manuscript and found having people simply go to the window and look at the sheep took a lot fewer words than saying they stood up first. Unless a character has problems standing, it isn’t necessary to have them stand, then go. Nor do they need to stand up, as Urban points out, or conversely, sit down. Sit.
  • Similarly, it isn’t usually necessary to say “I started to call the police,” “I began wondering whether . . .” As Nike would say, just do it! “I called the police”; “I wondered whether . . .” Only rarely do you need the pause created by “I started to call the police, but he pulled out a gun and pointed it at me, and I laid the phone gently on the desk.”
  • Intensifiers, like “very,” “really,” (really bad, that), when perhaps your prose would perk up with a jauntier verb. Either something’s bad or it isn’t. How much badder is very bad? Similarly, “totally, completely, absolutely, literally.” Careless writers include phrases like “completely destroyed.” Redundant. Totally.
  • Removing “just” or, in my case, “even” is a bit harder, but they are superfluous most of the time.

Urban’s list continues, including 43 words to jettison. And, she demonstrates a handy way to find these stumblers in your own writing. It’s hard to do, because some of them are so prevalent they slip under the radar. I do searches for them in my prose and find them in embarrassing profusion, so I’ve taught myself to recognize them.

Naturally, what is questionable in the narrative part of your work may be acceptable—and desirable—as part of dialog. People rarely speak as precisely as they write, and a character’s persona may appropriately employ certain verbal tics. What’s important is that the writer recognize them for what they are. Absolutely.

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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