Turned Away by Men of God

Amen, the new film by Costa-Gavras, has caused a mild uproar in France and Italy for fusing the swastika and the crucifix in its advertisement posters (in the only poster I saw, the crucifix half had been discretely snipped off). Based on The Deputy, a play by Rolf Hochhuth, it recounts the story of Kurt Gerstein (Ulrich Tukur), an SS officer who developed the lethal Zyklon B gas, which was used by the Nazis to exterminate Jews in the concentration camps. A devout Protestant and reluctant supporter of Hitler, Gerstein assumes the gas pellets would sterilize water for German troops on the Eastern front; when he learns of Zyklon B's true purpose, in the film's most effective and disturbing scene, he resolves to blow the whistle on the Nazis and bring the genocide to a halt.

If only it were that easy. In a desperate effort to buy time, he declares whole shipments of Zyklon B unusable and resorts to other stalling tactics, much to the chagrin of his efficiency-obsessed superiors. Under risk of execution for treason, he implores a Swedish diplomat, his pastor, and finally the Catholic Church to protest the mass killings of Jews and bring them to the world's attention. His efforts are in vain until a young Jesuit priest, Riccardo Fontana (a composite or fictional character played by Mathieu Kassovitz) is moved by his testimony to alert the Vatican. If the Pope, Pius XII (Marcel Iures), speaks out against the atrocities, perhaps they will stop.

And here is the central controversy behind Amen: the Pope is unwilling to say a word, and in Costa-Gavras's judgment, this is tantamount to complicity. The Vatican's silence during the Holocaust is a conspicuous and well-documented fact; numerous defenses and rationalizations have been offered and are repeated again in this film. Pius sought to forestall an invasion of the Vatican by placating the Germans. He feared the Bolsheviks more than the Nazis and secretly hoped that Hitler would defeat Stalin. He worried that speaking out would exacerbate the situation (how could it get any worse?). And so on. Costa-Gavras does not dismiss any of these arguments as false; he says that, assuming they're true, the Pope is still culpable for his cowardice.

The Greek-born Costa-Gavras has a reputation for making provocative--even inflammatory--political films. Given the general savagery of his indictments, his mildness in this film is somewhat remarkable. I suppose it's a sign of restraint, but Costa-Gavras never follows through on his implicit charges of papal cooperation with the Nazis. The Pope is depicted as, at worst, an over-cautious and reticent pragmatist, never a villain or an anti-Semite (the case, sadly, could be made for both). Costa-Gavras reserves his ire for a small cadre of repellent, hissing cardinals (led by Michel Duchaussoy) who ignore, dismiss, and abuse Fontana for his idealism. Even when Roman Jews--and Jewish converts to Christianity--are packed onto freight trains and sent to the camps, the cardinals are unwilling to do anything except negotiate in private.

Costa-Gavras is quite even-handed in his criticisms. An early sequence shows nuns aiding in the murder of "socially unproductive" (that is, retarded) Germans, but this is not quite the single-minded polemic one might expect, given the controversy. Also in for a ribbing are American diplomats, who scoff at Fontana's pleas to bomb the freight lines shuttling Jews to their deaths. The director's point is more general and expansive than any anti-Catholic diatribe: he argues that all states and peoples are capable of ignoring evil when their interests are at stake.

Being more interested in hagiography than devastating exposé, Costa-Gavras devotes much of his time to the saintliness of Gerstein and Fontana, two people so fundamentally good I found them hard to believe in this hard-bitten moral universe. Kassovitz is not a nuanced performer; his incessant piety seems more the product of youthful self-righteousness than a genuine moral imperative. Tukur does far better: his eyes and chin nearly tremble under the strain of witnessing--and participating in--these horrors. Ulrich Mühe is also quite good as a sinister, Josef Mengele-type figure known only as The Doctor, who is ushered to safety in post-war Argentina by the Vatican itself. Gerstein and Fontana don't fare so well; this being a martyrs' tale, you expect it to end badly.

The bureaucratic banality that infuses this picture does, in fact, strengthen its depiction--or lack thereof--of the Nazi atrocities. Aside from the shooting of two anonymous prisoners, we never see the Jews being annihilated, and I think this was an intelligent decision on the director's part; some things exceed the limits of representation. Instead, Costa-Gavras inserts constant, unsettling indexes of off-screen horrors: full freight trains barreling endlessly toward the camps, and empty ones leaving them; the thump of falling dead bodies against the door of a gas chamber; crematorium chimneys belching black, heavy smoke. In one scene, The Doctor absent-mindedly doodles some human figures into a gas chamber schematic. The endless office discussions, petty small-talk, and dull efficiency plans are an eerily understated correlative to what we don't see.

In the end, however, there is little that strikes the mind. Costa-Gavras has fashioned a movie that is proficient and has at least a modicum of political responsibility, but what's most remarkable about his Holocaust film is that it's so thoroughly unremarkable. This movie would be instantly crushed under the heel of Roman Polanski's important and much more accomplished film, The Pianist, which manages to reconcile the demands of historical truth with cinematic art. As it stands, Amen is barely deserving of notice, and certainly not worth the outrage it has caused.