Fatuous Fascism

Benigni is not Jewish, but his father served gruesome time in a Nazi labor camp, and Life Is Beautiful is at least paved with the good intentions of a tribute to a generation that made huge and often unacknowledged sacrifices for their children. Would that I could say the same for Apt Pupil, a singularly heartless piece of ill will that serves up a garden-variety horror movie under the guise of penetrating the soul of National Socialism.

Based on a novella by Stephen King, hardly the man to crack a problem that continues to defeat far more burnished minds than his, the movie is directed by Bryan Singer with the same frigid competence he brought to The Usual Suspects, of which the best that can be said is that it was a clever puzzle. Apt Pupil stars Brad Renfro as Todd Bowden, a sullen American schoolboy obsessed with the Holocaust, who, in the first of a slew of wildly contrived plot twists, spots elderly Nazi war criminal Kurt Dussander (Ian McKellen, mercifully restrained from Teutonic hamming) on a local bus and threatens the old man into regaling him with the full details of how he gassed the Jews. Pretty soon an elaborate power game of mutual extortion gets under way as the two bond in evildoing, and Dussander, whose psychological complexities include a fondness for The Jeffersons, proves himself a cooler head than his clueless apprentice. There's some clumsy symbolic posturing with showers and Gestapo uniforms, and some awful screenwriting by Brandon Boyce ("Oh my boy, don't you see we are fucking each other?"). And if that doesn't persuade you that absolute power corrupts absolutely, Singer works in a spot of homosexual blackmail with poor David Schwimmer, looking very Groucho in a boot-black mustache, as Todd's school counselor. For good metaphorical measure, the old geezer tries to stuff a visiting cat into his gas oven.

Such overkill is far from the most egregious of the movie's sins. By casually leveling the moral field between a sadistic apparatchik of the machinery of genocide and a screwed-up boy who gets off on gory stories, Apt Pupil implies that the potential for fascism lurks everywhere. Had he lived to see it, Irving Howe would have blown a gasket.