Thug Lives

That is this careful film’s strength, and also its weakness. Based on fresh material from recovered interrogation and trial records, Sophie Scholl is painstakingly faithful to the facts of the case, charting this devout young Protestant’s passage from protestations of innocence to her proud assumption of responsibility under assault from an interrogator increasingly freaked out by her steady dignity. The movie isn’t dry — Jentsch is utterly harrowing as Sophie, barely out of girlhood and struggling to maintain her composure and her sense of self under unspeakable pressure. But the script is so intellectualized that I couldn’t help feeling I was witnessing not two complex people locked in struggle, but the opposed souls (and classes) of Germany: Sophie, emblem of the cultured, tolerant and enlightened humanism of the middle classes duking it out with Mohr, resentful member of a disenfranchised proletariat from whose ranks sprang Hitler’s most loyal quislings. We learn that ultimately Sophie is sustained by her liberal upbringing and her Protestant faith, but while the filmmakers are at pains to avoid portraying her as an ascetic Christian martyr — we see her listening to jazz with a girlfriend and leaning into the weak sunlight filtering through the bars of her prison cell — there is little sense of what sets this seemingly ordinary girl apart and gives her her steely resolve.

This is a critical question, for if many films about the Third Reich (among them the potent 2002 documentary Blind Spot: Hitler’s Secretary) ask which among us would have held up under pressure to collaborate, few have asked what kind of person would resist to the death. The truly amazing revelation in Sophie Scholl is that her interrogator, himself the father of a soldier fighting on the Eastern front, gave her an eleventh-hour out, a way to save herself, though at the expense of her rigorous moral code. For myself, I’d have liked to know more about what forces deep within this courageous young woman made her say no.

Tsotsi Photo by Blid Alsbirk and Miramax Films

Sophie Scholl Photo by Zeitgeist Films

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More About

• Gavin Hood
• Sophie Scholl
• Athol Fugard
• Marc Rothemund
• World War II

TSOTSI | Written and directed by GAVIN HOOD | Based on the novel by ATHOL FUGARD | Produced by PETER FUDAKOWSKI | Released by Miramax Films | At Pacific ArcLight and Landmark NuWilshire

SOPHIE SCHOLL: THE FINAL DAYS | Directed by MARC ROTHEMUND | Written by FRED BREINERSDORFER | Produced by CHRISTOPH MUELLER, SVEN BURGEMEISTER, BREINERSDORFER and ROTHEMUND | Released by Zeitgeist Films | At selected theaters