THE STATEMENT
Reviewed by: Harvey S. Karten Grade: B- Sony Pictures Classics Directed by: Norman Jewison Written by: Ronald Harwood, novel by Brian Moore Cast: Michael Caine, Tilda Swinton, Charlotte Rampling, Alan Bates, Jeremy Northam, Ciaran Hinds, John Neville, Matt Craven, Edward Petherbridge Screened at: Sony, NYC, 11/13/03
When the law conflicts with politics, politics will win out. When justice conflicts with politics, politics will emerge triumphant as well. This bit of Ronald Harwood's dialogue based on a novel by Brian Moore is the theme of "The Statement," a taut tale of the hunt still going on if not as strong as years ago for those Nazis and Nazi sympathizers who committed crimes against humanity during the early 1940's. Director Norman Jewison, known by cineastes for his involvement in rigged melodramas ("In the Heat of the Night") and as well for lightweight observations of human nature ("Moonstruck"), now takes on a project that serves to educate his audience and provide some moral uplift. "The Statement," though absorbing melodrama, is in Costa-Gavras territory, but not the Costa-Gavras of "Z" but rather the seventy-year-old Greek film- maker in decline ("Betrayed," "Mad City"). There is little suspense, since we know how the plot will unfold and conclude though perhaps a more irony conclusion would have made the point that there are Nazi war criminals still at large, albeit aging and now harmless, who have never been caught or even sought. Some countries feel a need for national conciliation or, more sinister, may be housing high officials whose reputations would be in serious jeopardy if the aging criminals were caught and interrogated.
In yet another indictment of the Catholic Church following Peter Mullan's searing exploration of the Church's use of virtual slave labor in "The Magdalene Sisters" and Costa-Gavras's remake of "The Deputy" (which charged Pope Pius XII of failing to do more to save Jews during the Holocaust), Jewison takes on the efforts by some elements of the French Church allied with right-wing fanatics to protect Frenchmen guilty of collaborating with the Nazis. Based on real events and utilizing one Pierre Brossard to serve as a composite for various French traitors, Jewison unfolds his all-too-conventional tale of a man in his seventies or eighties who may not be living in the lap of luxury but is surviving under the protection of a Church monastery and given regular payments by extremist groups of France's far right persuasion.
Michael Caine inhabits the role of Pierre Brossard, who in June 1944 tipped off the French militias working under Nazi law of the presence of seven French Jews who were taken outside and executed on his order. When a determined, half-Jewish woman working in the Palais de Justice in Paris, Judge Annemarie Livi (Tilda Swinton), reopens the case, she hooks up with the equally egotistical Colonel Roux (Jeremy Northam), seeking leads on Brossard's whereabouts an energetic campaign that threatens to expose the forces in the Church and in politics who have protected Brossard from prosecution. Though decades have passed, Roux and Livi are pressed for time. Some men, who may be either Jewish seekers of vengeance or determined to kill Brossard before he can be captured by lawful authorities, are determined to beat the colonel and the judge to the man.
Ms. Swinton portrays her character as a kind of Veronica Guerin, the Irish journalist determined to break through all bureaucracy to bring drug kingpins to justice. Like Guerin, Livi is impulsive. Her insistence that Brossard's picture be published in the newspapers is a self-defeating move. Roux, who accompanies Livi on the investigation, tries without much success to moderate the woman's impetuousness. Michael Caine's portrayal of the opportunistic collaborator is the most complex, one which by implication censures religious fanatics who, in the writer's mind, are simply people driven to extreme religious behavior by feelings of intense guilt. Brossard, now taking medication for a heart condition and hobbling about as though to evoke feelings of sympathy for the audience, comes across as a weak, sniveling coward bent on gaining absolution before he dies though he is quite capable of dispatching some of the men who determined to take him down.
"The Statement," then, is never dull and may serve the interest of the movie-going public eager for insight into the minds of both vicious, wartime criminals and those resolute in capturing them and bringing the pitiful story of their misdeeds to public attention. The film is marred, however, by both its formulaic trajectory and by its use of the English language throughout where French would be the desideratum the latter making possible Jewison's use of major British performers and to convey the story in terms more palatable to a wider audience.
Rated R. 120 minutes.(c) 2003 by Harvey Karten at Harveycritic@cs.com
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