The German film Sophie Scholl: The Final Days arrives with a pedigree.
Playing in German with English subtitles, it was nominated for the best foreign language film Oscar, losing to the searing South African ghetto drama Tsotsi. Its radiant star, Julia Jentsch, won the best actress prize in the European Film Awards for her title role performance.
And Marc Rothemund’s tragedy has its roots in a haunting true story. Sophie Scholl was an idealistic German student who joined an underground anti-Nazi protest group called the White Rose in 1943. As a non-Jewish group, their concerns were wide-ranging but they did include the persecution against the Jews in their protests.
Scholl is a near-legend in her home country because she had the morality and the courage to stand up to Nazi repression while Hitler’s brutes were still in power and before it was clear that Germany would lose World War II. Her fate — and it is indicated in a simple and shocking fashion in the film — turned her into a martyr. In today’s Germany, she is remembered with her name on 190 schools.
The film, written by Rothemund’s creative partner Fred Breinersdorfer, keeps the true-life roots nourished by relying heavily on the harrowing transcripts of the Scholl interrogation, which was conducted by a senior Gestapo agent named Robert Mohr (played with skill and restraint by Alexander Held, from the Hitler film Downfall).
Those transcripts were kept secret by East German bureaucrats until they surfaced in 1990. Now they are put to good use, in an authoritive fashion, and give The Final Days its gravitas, its weight of history.
Unfortunately, the film is also burdened with that truth, which is reinforced by the methodical way that Rothemund stages the events leading up to Scholl’s tragic fate.
It is difficult — despite great empathy for Scholl and the other members of White Rose, including her own brother (played effectively by Fabian Hinrichs) — to become emotionally involved. This is an intellectual exercise.
A powerful, valid and worthy exercise, to be sure. But not emotional, and emotions are the fuel of cinema. I don’t mean it should be played for cheap sentiment, certainly not with the gritty innocence Jentsch brings to the role of Sophie, nor with the weary self-realization Held uses to make the Gestapo agent so human, so believable.
But something was missed in the translation of this story from reality to cinema. That means Sophie Scholl: The Final Days is a good but not great film.
BOTTOM LINE: Not exactly an upbeat film — the title tells you that it cannot end happily — but Marc Rothemund’s drama is a worthy film that illuminates a tragic chapter in Nazi history: A student-led protest in 1943.
(This film is rated PG)
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