Good Evening, Mr. Wallenberg
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Erland Josephson, Károly Eperjes, Katharina Thalbach, Miklós Székely B., Stellan SkarsgårdBrand: First RUN Features
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Subtitled); German (Original Language)
Format: Color, DVD, 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: Not an anti-hero, just an average person doing right
Summary: 5 Stars
I feel fortunate to have seen this movie and I wish I had known about it years earlier. I have earlier heard about Raoul Wallenberg as a person who disappeared into the Stalin Soviet political prison system, but I knew little else. It is apparently still a mystery as to why he must have been a threat to Stalin unless Stalin presumed that Wallenberg would have remained in Hungary and agitated against the impending communist state. Regardless, Wallenberg's exploits to ultimately save thousands of Jews from extermination by fanatical Nazi's and Hungarian fascists is a story worth retelling.
What is most poignant about the story is that Wallenberg is presented as a very average person, but a person witnessing atrocities in German held territories. For most of the war, he was like the many thousands who too knew of the genocide and did nothing. But, for his own reasons, he chose to become involved. His role was relatively short (less than a year) and it could have been a complete failure. In fact, he did greatly succeed according to not only this movie, but in many other accounts of his actions. But, his success was less the story than his unselfish efforts. Unlike the majority who remained blissfully ignorant, he had enough self-awareness so as to judge himself unfavorably for life if he did not act. To me that is the real lesson, what did this story tell me about myself and what all of us should do when we see injustice?
It is true that the movie did not focus as much on his many achievements, but the film makers decided to keep the film within two hours and to increase the drama by alluding to the triumphs and viewing him in moments of dire consequences and severe spiritual strain. He witnessed children murdered and we could empathize with his helplessness. The film presents these death scenes matter-of-factly as Wallenberg looks at the survivors who until that moment saw him as a mythical character who could stop all such killings. Wallenberg was often able to escape for his safety, but stayed. Would any of us have done the same? I hope that I would have, but I can never know. I only hope that whatever he finally faced in Soviet prison, he knew an internal peace of having done more than he ever thought possible of himself. Please see this movie and show it to your children to keep these lessons alive.
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 Skarsgård (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.