Good Evening, Mr. Wallenberg

The real Wallenberg's intervention, as an amateur diplomat in Budapest, probably spared as many as 30,000 lives. But when the advancing Red Army entered Budapest in early 1945, suspicious Soviets took Wallenberg (a member of a prominent banking family, and hence "a big capitalist") back to Moscow as a prisoner. Protests from Western leaders were muted by Cold-War politics, and Wallenberg disappeared. Wallenberg's story had already been dramatized in the 1985 TV movie LOST HERO, and the man himself elevated to secular sainthood when the 1990 Swedish film GOD AFTON, HERR WALLENBERG offered a dour, revisionist portrait of the fabled "righteous gentile."

The film begins with Wallenberg (Stellan Skarsgard), young, mild-mannered importer/exporter of foodstuffs, looking out of his comfortable train compartment to witness German troops shooting down a Jew who tried to escape Hitler's cattle cars. Subsequently Wallenberg presents himself to the skeptical World Jewish Council as a volunteer for a special diplomatic posting to Hungary, one of the few Axis-occupied countries whose Jewish community had not yet been exterminated. In a calculated, myth-busting scene, the future hero flatly tells the Council that he is an atheist, a failure in business, and an all-around insignificant human being. His value, he says, lies in an obsession to rescue every Jew he can.

The rest of the story takes place in besieged Budapest--photographed in somber blues and stony grays like a vast cellblock--covering Wallenberg's last few days in the city as head of the Swedish Legation. Though the Nazis are nearing full retreat, the area is infested with the Arrow Cross, vicious Hungarian fascists. In the midst of the madness, Wallenberg races throughout the city, rechecking his safe houses, handing out bogus passports and protective documents to any Jews lacking them, and threatening, cajoling and bribing stormtroopers to let their prisoners survive for one more week, one more day, one more hour as Allied divisions draw closer. Concurrently Wallenberg attempts to confront Adolf Eichmann (Laszlo Soos), the dreaded architect of the Final Solution, who is making one last sweep through the territory. The Swedish humanitarian hopes to dissuade the Nazi fanatic from giving a pullout order to bomb Budapest's packed Jewish ghetto to rubble.

Writer/director Kjell Grede pushes the narrative forward at a grueling pace, reflecting the nonstop labors and daily horrors of Wallenberg's world. The film drives home with pitiless force that noble acts such as his were stark exceptions in a landscape of evil, and on the screen Wallenberg gets handed as many defeats as victories. Especially wrenching is the plight of a houseful of Jews corralled by a martinet Arrow Cross officer and herded into a lorry that's not going anywhere because of a gasoline shortage. While trying to save the thousands in the ghetto, Wallenberg returns regularly to the stalled truck to argue for the detainees' release; with each visit, he finds more shot at the whims of the volatile captors. Finally they're just another pile of corpses.

By confining the action to the space of a few days, GOD AFTON, HERR WALLENBERG reshuffles historical facts. In actuality Wallenberg met Eichmann a number of times, and never in such dramatic circumstances as the film's climax: Eichmann is looting Budapest of its art treasures, and Wallenberg dogs his heels as the Nazi chief tours a human art gallery, a row of wealthy Jews holding up their finest paintings at eye-level, to exchange for their lives. Fiction or not, the sequence epitomizes the malignancy of the dying Third Reich. Such moments make this a film worthy of mention in the same company as SCHINDLER'S LIST.

But does the drama serve Wallenberg equally well? Skarsgard portrays the relentless saviour with tight-lipped, brooding angst. Though permitted to display a sense of humor, even a platonic love interest (a Jewish woman traumatized by the slaughter of her family), he remains unchanged from the gloomy individual at the beginning who declared himself a mediocrity. The Raoul Wallenberg Association, a Stockholm-based group, were displeased by GOD AFTON, HERR WALLENBERG and its inference that Wallenberg's worth lay only in his deeds and somehow eluded the man himself. When the Nazi Holocaust ends, so does his usefulness, and the silent Communists who drive him away at the close are mere curtain-pullers on the stage of history. During its short US tour, GOD AFTON, HERR WALLENBERG was billed as "a passion taken from reality," sentiments reflecting both the filmmaker's fudging of the facts and the film's presentation of a martyred messiah as non-believer and avowed nobody. It's an unconventional approach, but this film's melancholy Swede matches neither the documented heroism of the real Wallenberg, nor the moral complexities of Spielberg's Oskar Schindler. (Violence, adult situations, nudity, profanity.) leave a comment