Postcards from the edge
Adaptation of a post-war German novel is too clean and reserved.
The year is 1940. Church bells echo in the streets of Berlin. France has fallen to the Nazis, exorcising the demons of Versailles. But as victory confetti floats past his window, Otto Quangel (Brendan Gleeson) looks as if his world has collapsed.
An official telegram lies scrunched on the kitchen table and his wife Anna (Emma Thompson) is sobbing. Their son has been killed in action – shot dead not in a blaze of patriotic glory, but in a nondescript forest somewhere over the Rhine.
In an instant, all the Führer’s grand promises of honour in battle and national pride vanish from their minds.
“Hitler murdered my only son, and he’ll murder your sons too,” reads the postcard Otto writes, the first of more than 200 that he leaves around the city in the vague hope some other “Good Germans” will begin to quietly question the regime.
It’s the only way Otto can give meaning to his child’s death. But any act of resistance is intolerable to the Reich and a police inspector (Daniel Brühl) is soon called in to deal with the dissent.
Alone in Berlin (adapted from Hans Fallada’s 1947 novel Every Man Dies Alone) ought to be tense and dangerous, full of chills and lurking peril. But it is far too clean and reserved to match the gravity of its themes.
Grit and suspense are absent, and the story moves along perfunctorily towards the looming gallows. Gleeson, his face permanently warped into a perturbed sneer, and Thompson, humane and empathetic, make for stolid and reliable heroes, and their German-accented English is certainly more passable than some of the cartoonish Gestapo goons who litter the picture. However, the couple are given no inner life and no visible emotion beyond what their secretive task requires.
On the other hand, Alone in Berlin clearly understands the corrupting influence of absolute power. Brühl’s inspector, having read dozens of Otto’s tiny appeals, comes to doubt the men he has been so eagerly obeying, illustrating Bertolt Brecht’s observation in A German War Primer about the danger to generals of men who think.
And despite its orthodox storytelling and stilted characters, the film admirably portrays the precious and fragile nature of dissent. It may take more courage than many of us can muster, and may prove fatal, but it might just mean that a few lives can be saved. IN CINEMAS NOW