How ya gonna keep 'em/Down on the
shtetl/After they've seen Berlin?" Those may not have the same
ring as the original lyrics are more applicable to Werner
Herzog's latest allegory which he co-wrote with E. Max Frye just
last year. The sixty-year-old German-born maestro now based in
California is best known for challenging, metaphoric works,
films that transcend the period to highlight what Herzog
considers the Big Questions. This time Herzog, best known for
"Aguirre" (about how mankind becomes increasingly wild,
destructive and pathological), but also poignant in his less
known "Land of Silence and Dankness" (about the primitive,
incommunicable nature of people), sticks to what he knows best.
Portraying the dark side of humankind as best exemplified in the
20th Century by Germany's turn from the democratic Weimar
Republic to the increasing irrational and psychotic brand of
politics known as National Socialism, Herzog uses his characters
not only to indicate that politics is little more than
entertainment, with spin doctors telling the masses what they
want to hear, but as fascinating and appealing in their own
right whether demonic or naive.
Using a largely amateur collection
of people particularly the actual World's Strongest Man of 1998
Jouko Ahola in the role of Jewish Samson Zishe Brietbart, Herzog
unfolds a gripping tale of exploitation, cruelty, irrationality
and down-home sentimentality that should be on every serious
film-goer's list of must see's. Predictably enough Tim Roth in
the role of occultist Erik-Jan Hanussen, who owns and runs a
house of magic, showbiz, clairvoyance and hypnotism in
sophisticated Berlin is the most accomplished performer. Here he
outdoes even himself, a tuxedo- clad mystic able not only to
mesmerize his entire audience with his smoke and mirrors but so
charismatic that he can rush into a brawl between Nazi storm
troopers and Jews in his cabaret and end a fracas by simply
pointing to one individual after another and announcing, "Stop
it! Stop it! Stop it!"
Opening in May, 1932 like a story
by Shalom Aleichem crossed with Isaac Bashevis Singer,
"Invincible" takes us first to a dirt-poor shtetl (Jewish
community) in Eastern Poland where Zishe helps his dad in a
blacksmith shop, busy-as-a-bee in an area that rarely sees an
automobile and hasn't a single telephone or running water. When
an agent rolls into town from Berlin to recruit Zishe for a
vaudeville show in Germany's most sophisticated city. Zishe, who
is worshiped by his kid brother Benjamin (Jacob Wein), has to
think for a while but finally pulls away from everything known
to him to fall under the supervision of the theater owner,
Erik-Jan Hanussen (Tim Roth). "Aryanized" by the mesmerist who
slaps a blond wig on his head and renames him Siegfried, Zishe
tries to assimilate into a society in which anti- Semitism is de
rigueur, watching a blatantly anti-Jewish skit open the
performance and hearing the storm troopers in the audience
openly show their antipathy toward Jews. Unable to pretend any
longer, he announces to an incredulous crowd that his name is
Zishe and that he is the Jewish Samson.
Herzog has toned down his movies
of late, chucking the large- scale jungle operatics portrayed in
"Fitzcarraldo," but his signature is obvious to any in a modern
film audience who have seen his previous works. Instead of
opera, he uses music, specifically the Second Movement of the
Beethoven Third Piano Concerto, played near the end by a woman
who serves as Hanussen's abused sex-slave, Marta (Anna Gourari).
Hollywood editors like the great Walter Murch, accustomed to
cutting fourteen times per minute in an action movie, would
probably climb the walls watching Herzog allow the piece of
music to be played for some three minutes without scarcely a
cut, but for an audience attuned to concentrating on every
detail, the music itself is not only wonderful to hear but a
statement that the art and beauty of the early Nineteenth
Century master are about to crumble into a world of increasing
irrationality and anti- intellectualism.
Sure, critics can complain that
Ahola's acting and use of English are wooden, but hey, the guy's
a strong man, not John Gielgud, and does a creditable job as a
foil and ultimately the great challenger of Tim Roth as the
charlatan who tried to fool the Nazis once too often. Based on a
true story, "Invincible" concludes with a final irony as Zishe,
who had survived taunts by Christians in the shtetl and later
the hostility of his boss and the brownshirts, dies in such a
banal way, hoist by his own petard.
