Should We Listen to Stuart Klawans' Call for a Moratorium on Holocaust Movies?

Is it weird that the only true Holocaust movie this year that’s also pretty good, The Counterfeiters (based on the life of a Jewish forger who was far from a saint), came out of Austria, which also produced Blind Spot: Hitler’s Secretary, a documentary interview with Hitler’s private secretary, which is far superior to the similarly themed German film Downfall, and a searing challenge to us all to ask, as Zwick tried to in Defiance, what we would have done under the circumstances. The soul of Germany under Nazism is always worth examining, but not much good will come from Good, which takes on the potentially interesting question of passive collusion with Nazism but is so incompetently mounted by Brazilian director Vicente Amorim (it takes a clumsy directorial hand to make Viggo Mortensen come on like Sesame Street’s Mr. Noodle), as to be utterly incoherent. At the end, the stunned professor totters around a remarkably cleaned-up concentration camp, seeing the light at last. I mean, who knew?

Given the record, Klawans may be right to call a halt on Holocaust movies. We may not, indeed, may never be ready to understand the worst genocide in human history so far. The last word may come from the end of The Reader, whose narrator comes begging for absolution for the former camp guard he had loved, from a Jewish survivor (Lena Olin) who was her victim. “Nothing came out of the camps,” she tells him. “Nothing!”

Above:Yiddishe Superhero: Daniel Craig in Defiance Below: The stunned professor: Viggo Mortensen in Good

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More About

• Adolf Hitler
• Edward Zwick
• Bryan Singer
• Stuart Klawans
• Todd Solondz

DEFIANCE | Directed by ED ZWICK | Written by CLAYTON FROHMAN and ZWICK | Produced by ZWICK and PIETER JAN BRUGGE | Released by Paramount Vantage | Grove

GOOD | Directed by VICENTE AMORIM | Written by JOHN WRATHALL, based on the play by C.P. TAYLOR | Produced by MIRIAM SEGAL | Released by THINKFilm | Opens December 31 at Laemmle’s Music Hall

VALKYRIE | Directed by BRYAN SINGER | Written by CHRISTOPHER McQUARRIE and NATHAN ALEXANDER | Produced by SINGER, McQUARRIE and GILBERT ADLER | Released by United Artists | Citywide