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Amen.

2002, Movie, R, 130 mins

Amen.: Review

AMEN.
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About as subtle as a hammer blow to the skull and marred by a heedless mixture of fact and fiction, Costa-Gavras's latest exercise in historical awareness-raising nevertheless dramatizes an important real-life story, revolving around the efforts of one conscience-stricken SS officer to alert the rest of the world to the horrors of the Holocaust. SS lieutenant Kurt Gerstein (Ulrich Tukur) is a well-regarded chemist, who's serving his country by developing ways of purifying the German army's water supply while overseeing the fumigation of camp barracks using a form of prussic acid known as Zyklon B. Sent to a concentration camp in Poland to supervise an suspiciously large shipment of the highly combustible poison, he witnesses an appalling sight: the gassing of hundreds of Jewish prisoners. Deeply shaken, Gerstein risks serious SS reprisals by telling first a secretary to the Swedish Ambassador, then various leaders of the Protestant and Catholic churches. None seems particularly willing to speak out, but Gerstein's story pricks the conscience of Father Riccardo Fontana (Mathieu Kassovitz), a young Italian priest with close family ties to Pope Pius XII (Marcel Iures). As Gerstein travels east to the camps — where, as head of the Hygiene Institute, the SS expects him to further apply his Zyklon B expertise to streamlining the extermination of "vermin of all kinds" — Father Riccardo heads south to the Vatican in a vain attempt to convince the Holy Father to publicly expose the genocide and denounce Hitler's Holocaust. As one of the few SS officers who ultimately refused to surrender his conscience in the face of mass murder, Gerstein is perhaps the only bona fide hero who ever wore Himmler's death's head on his cap. But his unusual heroism is trumped here by the overtly symbolic martyrdom of Father Riccardo, an entirely fictional character Costa-Gavras plucks wholesale from Rolf Hochhuth's controversial 1963 play The Deputy. Costa-Gavras uses Father Riccardo to draw the circle of passive complicity tighter around Pius XII, whose failure to speak out against Nazi genocide has been roundly condemned, but whose consequent guilt is still hotly debated. Righteously angered, Costa-Gavras also implicates the Roosevelt administration and the rest of the Allied countries who were more concerned with winning the war than saving Jewish lives. They all knew, the film contends, accusing them of the only thing worse than ignorance: indifference. leave a comment --Ken Fox
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