Amen
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Movie Reviews of Amen
Movie Review: A movie to be seen
Summary: 5 Stars
Thank you very much for sending me the movie "Amen", everything was ok and the movie is really well done! Something that everyone should see!Movie Review: An important story
Summary: 4 Stars
This interesting film tells the story of Kurt Gerstein, a real-life SS officer who risked everything to try to get the Vatican to alert the world to the Shoah and to do something, anything, to stop it. He was a chemist and sanitation engineer who originally was responsible for creating gas to fumigate barracks, blankets, and clothes being used by the Wehrmacht. Before long he was pressed into service sanitising the drinking water for the soldiers serving in the East, and working for the Institute of Hygiene. While working on a way to combat typhus in the East, he discovers just what his gas is being used for. Thoroughly shaken and horrified after personally witnessing people being murdered in a gas chamber, he turns all of his moral energy towards trying to get through to the Vatican, since he knows what a powerful leader the Pope is, even though he himself is a Protestant. The euthanasia of the mentally disabled (his own niece among them) was stopped when Church leaders protested against it, and Gerstein believes, very optimistically, that the murders of European Jewry too will be halted once such a major leader of the Christian world speaks out against it. At his first attempted meeting with Vatican officials, he meets Ricardo Fontana (a composite of several real-life priests), a young Jesuit priest whose family has powerful connections to the Vatican. Both men spend the rest of the war trying to use their positions of power and prestige to stop the genocide, even as everyone around them maintains an unbelievable silence. It's an important story and powerful message about the dangers of complacency and the power of a few individuals to make a difference.
There are the usual suspects who have accused this film of being anti-Catholic, but it's not meant to be a political film. This is about historical events, and the stunning silence so many Christian leaders maintained in the face of mounting evidence of atrocities, refusing to use their power to speak out and do something the way they had in the past. And while Italy itself (home to Europe's oldest Jewish community) "only" lost about 19% of its prewar Jewish population, and many Italian Jews were hidden with the help of Church officials, the victims the film largely deals with come from Eastern Europe, people who were being deported and murdered long before that fate began to be dealt to Italian Jewry in September 1943. Real history might unsettle us when it doesn't always depict things such as religious institutions in a positive light, but that doesn't make it propaganda or a lie.
While part of the film's effectiveness comes from the fact that it never really shows any of the atrocities that Gerstein and Ricardo are protesting against, that also is a bit of a downside. While less is more, that "less" doesn't have to be just vaguely hinted at or only show in a few very brief scenes. A lot of the film depicts politicking, and thus it can be hard at times to really feel emotionally drawn into the story when it's almost all dialogue. At times it seems more like a tv movie than a feature-length film. However, since it was based on a play (Rolf Hochhuth's 'Der Stellvertreter,' 'The Representative'), the staginess of a lot of it seems more understandable. I do wish though that there had been some more emotional depth brought to these characters, and that there had been more of a chronology. Apart from a few things, such as the mention of the defeat at Stalingrad and the winter landscape, there isn't much clear sense of what year it is or how much time passed since the last scene. And since this is based on a play about historical events, it seemed to lack more of a distinct narrative arc, with a set beginning, middle, and end, and as a result the end did seem a bit anticlimactic to me. In spite of those issues, though, I did still quite enjoy it.
Extras include trailers, a "making-of" documentary, comparison of a scene from the film with a scene from the play, bios and filmographies of the director and two protagonists, information on the real Kurt Gerstein, and an interview with director Costa-Gavras.
Movie Review: Holocaust Best
Summary: 4 Stars
Costa-Gavras (Constantinos Gavras) is a Greek director with a distinguished career, working in France and the United States. His brilliant late masterpiece -- Amen. (2003) -- may well be the most intelligent and affecting Holocaust film ever made.
His father fought in the EAM Greek Resistance to the Nazi occupation. He was imprisoned after World War II and the Greek civil war as a "suspected communist." That meant that Costa-Gavras was not allowed to attend university in Greece or to emigrate to the United States. After high school he went to France, where he began legal studies in 1951, and switched to film in 1956.
Costa-Gavras won a US Academy Award in 1969 for Z, a political thriller starring Yves Montand, set before the "colonels' coup" and the Greek military dictatorship of 1967-74. He won another Oscar for Best Screenplay Adaptation for State of Siege (1973), again with Montand set in Uruguay during the Tupamaro period. His film Missing (1982) with Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek was widely acclaimed. He served as president of the Cinémathèque Française from 1982 to 1987, and again from 2007 to the present.
Amen. is based in part on the 1963 play, The Deputy, a Christian Tragedy, by Rolf Hochhuth. Avoiding the conventional great washes of emotionally overwrought moralizing, Costa-Gavras attains Amen. with patient historical dry-point. He focuses on two improbably idealistic young men: Gerstein (Ulrich Yukur), is a Waffen SS chemist specializing in prussic acid as a water-purifier. A deeply religious Protestant, Gerstein imagines that he has escaped what he knows as Nazi horror through a humane application of his expertise. And Fontana (Mattheu Kassovitz) is a minor Italian aristocrat, a cousin of Pope Pius XII, and a devout Jesuit priest. Fontana seeks to serve the Church, humanity, and his own faith as a low-level Vatican diplomat in Nazi Germany.
Costa-Gravas draw us into this dramatic moral history from 1942 until the end of the war with gently painstaking detail. Gerstein is confronted the Nazis perversion of his water-purifying chemistry into Zyclon-B, the gas they used in the extermination camps. "Don't worry," his SS superior reassures him, "all the camps are quite close to your normal inspection routes." Gerstein undertakes to document the Nazi genocide. Yet, even with Fontana's diplomatic help, he can't find any more significant channel for his data than a Swedish embassy secretary. Gerstein reasons, "You can't issue millions of passports."
Fontana is blocked at every step in his campaign to bring the Church into active opposition. Even as Roman Jews are arrested outside the Vatican windows, he sees no hope of Papal action. He pins a Nazi yellow star on his cassock. "That's sacrilege!" a cardinal, once his spiritual mentor, shouts. Fontana joins the Jewish deportees. Gerstein tries to save him, even forging Himmler's signature on a pass. But nothing ever works. The historical person Gerstein is based up ended up in a French prison as a war criminal, dead within 20 days of his arrest.
Amen., I believe, is a uniquely compelling small modern classic. Costa-Gravas has substituted moral character drama for the topical political themes his more familiar thrillers. At 70 when he made Amen., his mood and method are brilliantly penetrating. More than any holocaust drama I've ever seen, he renders the human meaning of this history.
Movie Review: A Powerful Lesson we May Still Need To Master
Summary: 4 Stars
As far as films dealing with the Holocaust are concerned, I do not believe that AMEN is in the same category as LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL or SCHINDLER'S LIST. I say this not so much because of the film's quality, but due to the fact it is really a morality tale about what happens when people who are basically good fail to see obvious evil, do little to nothing about it, and in the end may even be aiding the evil that so opposes good. The Holocaust is merely the backdrop, and the failure of organized religion to oppose the evil of Holocaust is history's best example to demonstrate what happens when people do not oppose evil.At the beginning of the film, people of the Christian faith seem to be doing the right thing. People with mental and physical disabilities are being sent to the death camps, and churches, particularly the Roman Catholic Church boldly speak against the atrocity. Yet when the same thing happens to the Jews, the vigilant churches remain indifferent at best, and in more cases than not, silent. The more the churches realize the atrocities, the more deafening the silence becomes.
Amen breaks new ground as far as the discussion is concerned. Much has been made about the silence of the Vatican in general, and more specifically Pope Pius XII's failure to speak. The film could have used the easy answer, namely fear that the Vatican would be destroyed, and would therefore destroy the Church as well. While this is mentioned in the film, it really does not seem to be the major reason for the silence. The choice for the Church was either to side with the Allies, which included Russia, a Communist nation. The Communists were viewed as more evil since Communists opposed religion. The Axis powers were just as evil as Stalin, but at least they allowed the practice of the faith as long as the Church was not critical of the Nazi Regime. This seems to be the more accurate reason for the silence.
Many people who will see this film will see the Catholic Church in a less than positive light. I'm not certain this is accurate. The character of Fr. Riccardo Fontana is one of the two heroes of the film; he is Catholic, and actually stands for what is best in the Church. Keep in mind, the greatest Christians, Catholic and non-Catholic, are more often than not the heroes who stand alone, and the heroism of one who stands alone is probably a more powerful example of faith than any religious officials. We see in the character of Fontana one who makes a morally good choice and acts on it as opposed to the hierarchy, who made a bad moral choice of choosing what they believed was the lesser of two evils. Fontana is actually a Christ figure and his actions teach us how we should be acting. Also, people viewing the film should keep in mind that while the Catholic Church is the Church that is viewed as wrong, none off the other Christian denominations did all that much to stand up to the evil either. If Dante is correct about the hottest spot in hell being reserved for those who remain neutral, and silence is considered neutrality, many are in deep trouble.
Movie Review: Amen - More bad news for the Pope
Summary: 4 Stars
I wasn't expecting much when I picked up a fictional movie about the Catholic pope's response to the Holocaust during WW2. This looked like a typical cord puller showing the zombies in the camp, moms walking with children to their death, evil crazy Nazis, yada, yada, yada.
Luckily, the director Costa-Gravis has experience with movies with political themes and undertones, Z being his most famous. Here the scenes of atrocities are indirect rather than direct. You seen trains, lots of trains, going full and returning empty. You see smokestacks burning and the emotional reactions when the real truth is known. This was done with a nice touch rather than a heavy hand.
The movie is based on a real SS mole who vainly tries to get the word out. He is in charge of army disinfection, and finds out the hard way what the poisons are really being used for. He ends up being both sympathetic (perhaps too much, considering his position) and tragic. You follow him throughout and after the war. To the bitter end.
Throughout the movie, I just sat in amazement to the lame excuses used again and again by the pope and other countries in response to the holocaust. Even when the Nazis start taking jews in the view of the vatican what does his eminence do? Take a guess. There was a lunch scene with vatican cardinals and ambassadors where all of the standard responses to do nothing are raised. They just didn't get it.
From an interview with Gavras the inevitable question of "Did they Know?" arose. "Everybody knew", he responded. And this is the rub. We are not talking about Germans here. We are talking about the people who knew from the allied side of the war. Americans, British, French. Hell, even the pope knew and they all had a reason not to respond.
Their only saving grace is that "maybe" they didn't understand the scope of the genocide. They had enough people telling them the truth, but once again, they just didn't get it. One scene that emphasizes this position is where the US ambassador is told that 10,000 jews are being killed daily. He replies, "You'll have a better chance of being believed if you say hundreds, instead.
The Catholic church made a pact with the devil called Hitler. In the beginning, they had their reasons for this pact, but when faced with the truth, they ran the other way. One priest in the movie asks "Do we want to save the Vatican or Christianity." The pope chose poorly.