‘The Exception’ is an odd film that mostly works
“The Exception” is an exceedingly odd movie in which one of the romantic leads is a Nazi, the other Jewish and Kaiser Wilhem II is vaguely charming when he’s not being a virulent anti-Semite. So, yeah. Odd. And yet for the most part it works, both as a bizarre romance and a fanciful World War II almost-thriller. This is in large part thanks to the cast, particularly Christopher Plummer as Wilhelm. He’s been exiled to the Netherlands after Germany lost World War I, but Hitler doesn’t dare kill him, worried that the German people still hold him in some symbolic regard.
Thus Capt. Stefan Brandt (Jai Courtney) is reluctantly assigned to lead the group of German soldiers who make up the kaiser’s security detail; in reality, he’s there to spy and see if he says anything subversive about the fuhrer. (Nota-spoiler-alert: He does, though Brandt is more bemused by it than anything else.)
Brandt isn’t the stereotypical movie Nazi. (The exception. Get it?) He’s wounded, for one thing, in body but more so in spirit. He’s haunted by dreams of a slaughter he witnessed in Poland and disillusioned by the direction the Nazis are headed in. There is talk of some bad business with the SS.
But he’s loyal to his country, if nothing else, so he soldiers on, literally, and reports to take command of the kaiser’s detail. Immediately he and the new maid, Mieke de Jong (Lily James), make eye contact, and the next thing you know she shows up in his quarters. He tells her to take off her clothes, and she does. The next time they’re alone together she tells him to do the same, and he does. Thus begins a forbidden affair, made all the more dicey when Mieke tells Brandt that she is Jewish.
The kaiser spends his time with his loyal aide de camp (Ben Daniels), analyzing and criticizing Hitler’s military moves on a map, and feeding ducks. Mieke joins him in the latter activity (and sometimes in the former) to the consternation of his wife (Janet McTeer, also excellent), who busies herself lobbying Hitler for a symbolic return to the throne.
There’s a British spy afoot, and it won’t take too long to figure out who it is. Director David Leveaux, known for his stage work, based the film on Alan Judd’s novel “The Kaiser’s Last Kiss,” and he is less interested in keeping secrets than in