The Counterfeiters
Directed by Stefan Ruzowitzky
In German with subtitles

I really wanted to love this film. I wished for nothing more than to agree with almost every critic who has reviewed The Counterfeiters, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences that awarded it the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, the world community at large that considers this a worthwhile addition to the long tradition of films about the Holocaust.

And most of the film is very well done. Salomon Sorowitsch (Karl Markovics) is about as intriguing as a nonverbal Jew wearing a stone-faced grimace and a fedora can be. He is an internationally famed counterfeit artist who is arrested by Nazi authorities in the middle of an attempt to reproduce the American dollar. His skill and reputation buy him special treatment in a section of a concentration camp that’s about as ritzy as they come. Instead of running forced marches in shrunken shoes or digging his own grave, Sorowitsch and his compatriots work in return for nice beds, better food, and other small luxuries. They labor on Operation Bernhard, the name for the Nazi effort to flood other countries’ economies with forged currency. Sorowitsch and the other prisoners realize that their efforts are aiding the ailing Third Reich and juggle their guilt with their desire to survive.

Markovics portrays Sorowitsch and his inner conflict in a performance that is nothing short of superb. It is a delectably understated interpretation of a man in a delicate, unpredictable situation. The actor’s fascinating ability to maintain essentially the same facial expression while communicating a wide spectrum of emotions makes his character all the more interesting.

Sorowitsch’s interaction with Adolf Burger (August Diehl) is compelling as well, but Diehl’s tendency toward melodrama limited the performance. He kind of looks like Cillian Murphy, but minus that wordless subtlety that pervades Murphy’s time on screen.

I suppose subtlety, then, is the name of the game for this film. Markovics’s minimalism is artful, but it makes the sometimes overly complex plot and less skilled performances from the rest of the cast stick out like a sore thumb. It is admittedly difficult to call the film abstruse when it is based on a true story, but I am pretty sure there has to be a simpler way to tell this tale.

It’s not as if I got lost watching the film; it is not particularly difficult to comprehend. It just seems to be bogged down by historical detail while at the same time giving the audience a fantastical, almost unbelievable portrayal of a concentration camp. At times, dramatic considerations are given precedence over concerns of historical accuracy, and at others the audience is given more information (in a lackluster performance) than it could possibly desire. In particular, Sorowitsch’s periodic meetings with Sturbmahnnführer Friedrich Herzog (Devid Striesow), Sorowitsch’s initial arresting officer and mercurial sometime partner in crime, do nothing but advance the plot. Striesow speaks with that declarative, sort of silly tone one might expect from a second rate actor in a cheap spy film. Though the script may be significantly more compelling if one speaks German, lines like “I’m sorry, I need you to crack the dollar,” especially when spoken by a Nazi SS higher-up to a Jew in a concentration camp during the Holocaust, just sound ridiculous.

The cinematography was jerky and bouncy, an addition that did augment the feeling of panic or alarm that pervaded the film. The cinematographer inexplicably chose to include a bunch of these totally unrealistic rapid zoom shots, however. It’s as if we’re in the shoes of a prisoner in a concentration camp… who at times has a Terminator-esque ability to magnify whatever he sees. It could be interpreted as suggestive of a documentary format, but that doesn’t work with the subject matter either.

That said, the film was not particularly bad, per se. Rather, limiting factors that at this point may be inherent in the genre of Holocaust films kept The Counterfeiters from achieving a truly convincing portrayal of the struggles Jews faced during the Third Reich. Markovics is stunning, his fellow actors, less so, and the film as a whole is alright. It seemed unbelievable at times, but this could just be my unconscious erecting a wall of incredulity to combat a truly moving film.

Probably not.

Grade: B-