A made-for-cable film adapted from Robert Harris's novel, this tale of government conspiracy begins with a compelling premise: What if Germany had won the war in Europe and, furthermore, had successfully suppressed evidence of the Holocaust for nearly thirty years?
It is 1964, three decades after the German army turned back the D-Day invasion at Normandy, and the superpower now known as Germania is on the brink of an historic moment: detente between Germania and the United States, to be symbolized by a meeting of US President Joseph Kennedy Sr. and the
seventy-five-year-old Fuhrer, Adolf Hitler. Just days before the summit, a Germanian police officer, Major March (Rutger Hauer), is called to investigate a series of murders, possibly linked; at the same time, American journalist Charlie Maguire (Miranda Richardson) is called away from her press
junket by a former German military official hoping to defect to the US. Together, March and Maguire unfold Germania's horrible secret: the systematic slaughter of nearly six million Jews during WWII. With only hours remaining before the US-Germania summit, they race against the Gestapo to get
evidence of the Holocaust to the US ambassador.
Capably-directed and well-acted, FATHERLAND would make a superb suspense thriller if not for one rather glaring fact: the audience already knows the solution to the puzzle (the Holocaust), even if March and Maguire do not. If written better, the story could lend itself easily to Hitchcock's
classic "bomb under the chair" scenario, with the detectives inching closer and closer to the answer, assembling the pieces one by one until the last one slips satisfyingly into place. However, the detectives in FATHERLAND approach the mystery in such an elliptical fashion there seems to be no
chance of them even stumbling upon the answer, let alone working it out themselves--in other words, the bomb in this scenario is under a chair in another room of a completely different house. In the end, the evidence for the Holocaust is dropped abruptly in their laps by a single informant, making
the protagonists look like rather poor detectives indeed. Most likely, the luxury of well-paced revelation (which may have also answered such begged questions as "How did Joseph Kennedy become president?") was lost in the novel-to-screenplay translation. (Violence, nudity, adult situations.) leave a comment
