“Amen” at Oak Street

by David Anderson

The difficult question of the Vatican’s apparent indifference to the Holocaust, and what actions might have possibly avoided the Nazi genocide, is the weighty subject that courses through Costa-Gavras’ film “Amen.”

Although we seem to be awash, at present, in films about the Holocaust, the series of scandals that have rocked the Catholic Church to its foundations have received greater attention recently in a number of films with distinctly anti-clerical themes. Most notable among these, Peter Mullan’s “The Magdalene Sisters,” Marco Bellocchio’s “My Mother’s Smile,” and (most controversial of all) Carlos Carrera’s “The Crime of Father Amaro,” all remain uncomfortable reminders of some of the church’s more troublesome mysteries.

Yet any narrative with the purpose of raising questions about the church’s 60-year silence concerning its all-but-acknowledged complicity in the Reich’s extermination of Jews deserves our attention. The extended evolution that marks “Amen” as the distilled effort of many creative talents places it far beyond the banality of daily headlines.

Using the German writer Rolf Hochhuth’s 1963 play “The Deputy” as a foundation, Costa-Gavras and screenwriter Jean-Claude Grumberg have fleshed out scene after scene with layers of vivid color. Faithful to Hochhuth’s original settings and leaving vital characters intact, the filmmakers have tightened the six-hour drama into a gripping thriller with a premise that remains a searing indictment of the complicity of the papacy of Pope Pius XII with the crimes of the Third Reich.

In choosing a European cast, including French actor and filmmaker Mathieu Kassovitz (“Amelie”), for a film scripted in English, the director has insured his film’s appeal to a wide audience. In a career shaped largely by the sort of didactic moral dilemmas that occupy “Amen”, Costa-Gavras maintains a familiar pattern.
Having secured his reputation early with the 1969 release of “Z,” a dramatization of the events surrounding a military coup that seized power in his native Greece, both “The Confession” (1970) and “State and Seige” (1973) served as further indictments of political regimes both right-wing and leftist. His “Missing,” the 1982 political intrigue about an American family’s attempt to find a son among the thousands of Chilean “disappeared” during the Pinochet regime, earned Costa-Gavras an Oscar for his only film made in Hollywood.

Chosen to open last summer’s Human Rights Watch Film Festival, “Amen” has earned both praise and vilification for an overtly political message. The story of the crisis of faith that joins its two central characters, one an S.S. officer, and the other a Jesuit priest with strong connections to the Vatican’s inner circle, is as intricate as it is deeply troubling.

Based in part on an actual S.S. officer, Kurt Gerstein (Ulrich Tukur) is a chemist drafted by the Nazis in 1943 to assist with disinfection and water purification for German units serving on the Eastern front; despite his patriotism, he is also a man of deep Christian faith. While in Poland, Gerstein learns the awful truth about mass exterminations in the Treblinka death camp.

Horrified by what he has seen, he eventually seeks out the Papal Nuncio in Berlin. Repulsed by the Pope’s representative, Gerstein is nonetheless aided by the Nuncio’s private Secretary, Father Riccardo Fontana (Kassovitz). Fontana pledges to reveal all he has learned to the Holy Father, and thereby halt the exterminations. The Jesuit then begins a vital journey between Rome and Berlin.

Because “Amen” is a film that reduces the detail of its characters to embodiments of good and evil, the moral absolution sought by both Gerstein and Fontana must necessarily be balanced by at least one character, referred to in the film only as “the Doctor”( Ulrich Muhe), a Nazi medical officer who serves dramatically as a moral counterweight and cynical foil to their pious protestations.

“Our church came forward even for the lunatics,” he sarcastically tells Gerstein on a visit to Auschwitz. “Nobody (not even the church communities) came forward for the Jews.”

Strengthened by Kassovitz and company, the screen presence and performances in the film ultimately save “Amen” from the preachiness it sometimes threatens to break into with each dramatic shift. Because Costa-Gavras grapples here with the same subject that runs through the main body of his work—namely, the moral blindness that has dominated human history—we haven’t the strength to argue nor the assuredness to ignore him.

“Amen” starts Friday at the Oak Street Cinema. 612-331-3134.