Rating: 3 stars out of 5
The average layperson has probably never heard of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a pastor and theologian who was murdered by the Nazis during the waning days of World War Two. But the man had an incalculable effect on the warp and weft of twentieth century Christianity. A tireless writer and pulpit firebrand, Bonhoeffer was one of the founding members of the Confessing Church, a movement that opposed the Third Reich’s attempts to centralize German Christianity into the pro-Nazi German Evangelical Church. Many of their members, Bonhoeffer included, were arrested and executed in concentration camps for speaking out against Hitler. But even in the face of Nazi militarism, Bonhoeffer was a devout pacifist, insisting in his writings that evil could only be conquered by Christian love. Not that you’d know that from the poster of Todd Komarnicki’s new biopic Bonhoeffer: Pastor. Spy. Assassin. which features the titular pastor carrying a handgun. This handgun was one of many controversies arising from the movie, even leading to one of Bonhoeffer's descendants denouncing the ad in a major German newspaper as a gross distortion of history. But Bonhoeffer does a lot of distorting, much of it ultimately benign, and putting a pistol in Bonhoeffer’s hand would be one of the least significant changes Komarnicki and his associates made to impress the importance of the great man’s life on its audience.
Many of the film’s most unapologetic inventions revolve around Bonhoeffer’s time studying abroad at Union Theological Seminary in the United States in the 1930s. Though generally bored with the state of American academia—at one point he boasts he could teach the very classes he attends better than his teachers—Bonhoeffer nonetheless had a powerful spiritual awakening in the States thanks to his exposure to the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem where he taught Sunday School. Perhaps worried that Bonhoeffer’s transformation at the hands of the African-American church would be underappreciated or—even worse—disbelieved by audiences, Komarnicki adds a preposterous scene where Bonhoeffer crashes a Harlem nightclub and wows a black audience with an impromptu jazz rendition of a German piano ballad. Another benign sequence sees one of Bonhoeffer’s black friends introducing him to the realities of American racism during a trip to Washington D.C. where they’re assaulted by a racist white hotel owner. I use that word “benign” again deliberately because, despite their fancifulness, these sequences speak to a genuine renewal of religious feeling in Bonhoeffer that would ultimately lead him to reject the soulless and empty religiosity of German Christianity in favor of a more radical lived experience of God.
Less benign are the changes the film makes to Bonhoeffer’s life during the Third Reich in the 1940s where he served as a secret resistance agent while working for the Abwehr, Germany’s military intelligence office. While the film more or less accurately depicts his work delivering messages to sympathetic contacts in England and helping Jewish prisoners escape into Switzerland, the film implies Bonhoeffer had a major role in the 20 July plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler. Bonhoeffer’s apparent part in the plot was a major selling point for the film whose marketing hammers home the idea that he rejected his pacifist beliefs for the sake of the greater good. But in actuality Bonhoeffer does no actual assassinating—in fact the most he’s involved with the plot is a scene where he’s depicted as merely being in the same room with other resistance fighters who actually plan and eventually execute the attempt. But this was enough, the film insists, for his eventual execution at hands of the Nazis. Perhaps, but this doesn’t change the film’s strange underselling of his involvement. Indeed, with the exception of one prisoner exchange sequence the film almost entirely overlooks Bonhoeffer’s double agent work within the Abwehr.
If I go on about the film’s changes to Bonhoeffer’s life, it’s because the film itself provides little else to comment on. It’s competently filmed and respectably acted, though the less said of the abrupt cameos by Winston Churchill and one of the least convincing Hitler impersonators I’ve seen, the better. It is, by most standards, an perfectly average historical biopic. Why, then, did it make me cry three different times? Perhaps because for all its distortions of history it competently tells the story of an extraordinary man without downplaying the centrality of his faith. The film goes into greater theological detail about Bonhoeffer’s beliefs than I expected. Consider one scene where Bonhoeffer delivers a sermon in Berlin’s national cathedral before an audience of Nazis—he centers the sermon on Jesus’ dismissal of hypocritical Pharisees and teachers of the law in Matthew 23, reminding listeners that nobody hated “religion” more than Jesus of Nazareth.
Or consider a most likely invented scene near the end where Bonhoeffer celebrates the Lord’s Supper with his fellow concentration camp prisoners and a sympathetic Nazi guard. The film treats the act of Communion with due reverence and import instead of as a passing religious observance. Perhaps I’m merely jaded from years of superficial depictions of Christianity that such religious sincerity caught me off guard. And that is the operative word to describe Bonhoeffer—sincere. It sincerely believes in Bonhoeffer’s life and faith as extraordinary. It sincerely sees in his resistance to fascism a model applicable even today for resisting institutionalized evil. It sincerely believes that in merely telling the story of this man an audience might be encouraged to speak out against tyranny in the midst of rising antisemitic violence and political divisiveness. And maybe, just maybe, they’re right.
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