WWII drama lacks emotional pay-off Alone in Berlin (M)
103 mins Alone in Berlin is based on a true story of courage and loyalty in the most dangerous of circumstances, and with two of today’s finest actors at the helm, it has the potential to be a powerful, and alarmingly relevant, movie for our time.
It’s nicely photographed and painstaking in its period design. But somehow, despite this rigour, the film sits more as a glimpse of an interesting historical moment than a gutwrenching tragedy.
The tale at its heart is certainly engaging. Brendan Gleeson (In Bruges, Calvary) headlines as Berliner Otto Quangel (Otto Hampel in real life), the working class foreman of a company that makes wooden coffins. There is an unspoken irony in this since the film begins quietly with Otto’s wife Anna (Emma Thompson) opening the letter no parent in wartime ever wants to receive. Newly devastated by the death of their only son, Otto’s silent grief leads him to begin writing postcards which denounce Hitler and his Nazi regime in the hope of raising, if not quite an armed Resistance, at least an awareness among their fellow Germans that the Fu¨ hrer and his cronies are an evil to be reckoned with.
Otto and Anna start risking their lives, and their place in a fractured community, by surreptitiously leaving the postcards in public for unsuspecting citizens to read. When the Gestapo is alerted to this anonymous subversion, Daniel Bru¨ hl’s police Inspector is tasked with catching the ‘‘criminal’’.
Gleeson and Thompson are undeniably fine actors, and their portrayal of the Quangels is quietly tormented, if not particularly nuanced. However, there is something inescapably ‘Allo ‘Allo! about Englishspeaking actors using German accents, and despite Thompson’s make-upfree, permanently drawn visage, her performance often seems to drift into caricature, robbing us of the emotional pay-off anticipated in what could have been rendered a devastating story.
Director Vincent Perez has had a long career as an actor, which may speak to his being more of an actor’s director than an auteur. Everything about the film is just fine – the pacing, the revelations, the acting. The notion of being criminalised for speaking out against your government is one all too resonant in many countries around the world, and even a thinly veiled threat in the new America.
But ultimately Alone in Berlin ticks its boxes in pencil rather than pen, and while it’s a tale worthy of telling, sadly it won’t leave a lasting impression. Sarah Watt