Word: halder
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When we meet John Halder (Viggo Mortensen) he is chaotically cooking a meal with the assistance of his scampering children. Meantime his wife is banging out classical music on the piano - as she does for hours every day - while his incontinent and half-mad mother insistently cries out for help from an upstairs bedroom. Halder, who is a novelist and literature professor, is obviously in need of a little discipline in his life and, since this is Germany in the 1930s, there's plenty of that available...
Once upon a time Halder wrote a novel that made a rather romantic case for euthanasia (a beautiful woman is assisted toward death by her devoted lover). The book has been discovered by the Nazis, who, of course, believed in killing not just Jews but also the insane, the mentally deficient and the hopelessly crippled. Hitler himself has read and approved Halder's work, the writer is told. Could he perhaps write a little essay summarizing his views - nothing hysterical, something of literary quality, for distribution by the state...
...from his distracted wife and then into a new, happy marriage. The downside, at first almost imperceptible to him, is the growing persecution of the Jews, personified by his best friend, Maurice (Jason Isaacs), a psychiatrist, who waits too long to attempt his escape from Germany and discovers that Halder, for all his connections, is at best a half-hearted collaborator in his failed, attempt to flee. By the time Kristallnacht comes around, Halder is awash with regrets for his betrayal of his best instincts, but there is no longer anything he can do about that. When...
...respectfully received in the 1980s, it also feels like old news. We know that in bad times human beings have a propensity to behave like - well, human beings. That is to say, only a heroic and visionary minority has the gumption to resist evil. Most of us, like Halder, just go along with whatever system is in place. Indeed, the compromises he is obliged to make are generally speaking so minor that he scarcely notices them until it is too late, and their cumulative effect finally becomes inescapable. It is interesting to see Mortensen, normally an expertly rambunctious actor, hiding...
...evildoers in the Third Reich couldn't all have been hissing, predatory, nutsy Nazis; they needed the complicity, passive or active, of the "good Germans." That notion spurred Taylor's excellent 1981 play, with Alan Howard as Halder, a liberal professor who is made complicit in the atrocities of the regime through promotions, seduction and his own laissez-faire cowardice. Casting a flinty hero type like Mortensen in the role of a moral weakling seems inspired, but the movie isn't. Its attention to period detail and emotional nuance is lax, plodding, lacking either the grinding power of inevitability...