Good Evening, Mr. Wallenberg
by Kjell Grede
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Erland Josephson, K??roly Eperjes, Katharina Thalbach, Mikl??s Sz??kely B., Stellan Skarsg??rdDirector: Kjell Grede
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Subtitled); German (Original Language)
Format: Color, DVD-Video, NTSC, Subtitled
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 115 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2002-11-05
Audience Rating: Unrated
Studio: FIRST RUN FEATURES
Movie Reviews of Good Evening, Mr. Wallenberg
Movie Review: It's only in that moment that I've lived...
Summary: 3 Stars
Kjell Grede's "Good Evening, Mr. Wallenberg" is a noble but ultimately flawed effort. The story focuses on the efforts of Raoul Wallenberg to save Jews in Budapest during WWII's final days. Although he comes from one of Sweden's wealthiest families, there's nothing outstanding about Raoul. He's an ordinary guy with ordinary talents who hasn't done anything remarkable; as the film begins, he's an importer of luxury foods. But on a train trip, he happens to see Jewish corpses being tossed out of a death camp-bound freight car, and a father, who jumped out of the car to be with his dead son, shot and killed. This experience changes Raoul's life. As he tells the skeptical committee considering him for relief work, it's only in that moment that he feels he's ever actually lived.
Grede's film focuses on the very last days of Wallenberg's Hungarian mission: the exhausting scramble to bribe German and Hungarian officials, racing against the clock to try to save the Jewish ghetto, a dramatic standoff with a Hungarian fascist, despair alternating with hope, and finally Wallenberg's mysterious disappearance into the Soviet Union.
The best moments of the film are when Stellan Skarsgard (Wallenberg) and Katharina Thalberg (Marja) are on-screen. Thalberg is especially good as the Jewish woman whose children have been killed and who refuses to wear anything but a man's overcoat because, when the Germans come to kill her, she wants them to see her naked, as a real person rather than a statistic. Skarsgard, whose acting style is low-key anyway, plays Wallenberg with a subdued intensity that seems just right.
But ultimately, neither Skarsgard nor Thalberg can save the film. The writing tends at times to be melodramatic--ruining, for example, the final confrontation between Wallenberg and the Hungarian fascist. There's too little exposure of Wallenberg's interior, so his motives for risking life and limb to save Jews remain a bit cloudy (despite the "It's only in that moment that I've lived" scene).
Still, the film is worth seeing. It highlights the remarkable efforts of Wallenberg, and it underscores the fact--so easy to forget in our rather cynical age--that every life, no matter how "insignificant," is worth superhuman efforts to save.
Summary of Good Evening, Mr. Wallenberg
On Schindler's List there were hundreds of names.On Raoul Wallenberg's there were tens of thousands.
"A film of epic ambitions" (The New York Times), Good Evening, Mr. Wallenberg chronicles the last days of the war in Budapest. It is a moving and sensitive portrait of internationally known hero, Raoul Wallenberg, a small-scale businessman whose life was transformed after he witnessed bodies being thrown from a train on its way to Auschwitz.
International film star Stellan Skarsg?rd (Aberdeen, Dancer in the Dark, Good Will Hunting, Amistad, Breaking the Waves, The Hunt for Red October) "is merely perfect" (New York Post) as Raoul Wallenberg, an attache to the Swedish Embassy who moved to Budapest, Hungary in 1944 to help Jews escape Adolph Eichmann's deadly path. Wallenberg saved over 60,000 people in Budapest's Jewish ghetto by helping them escape Hungary with Swedish papers ("Wallenberg passports"), or getting them placed in protective housing. His greatest challenge came in 1945, when he saved the lives of some 65,000 Jews in the ghetto by forcing the hand of the German general responsible for their fate. On January 17, 1945, Wallenberg was taken to Moscow as a Soviet prisoner. He was never released, and his fate has remained a mystery.
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