The question that screenwriter Ronald Harwood and director Istvan Szabo raise in the frustratingly underdeveloped “Taking Sides” is straightforward: By remaining in Germany during the Third Reich and pursuing his career, was conductor Wilhelm Furtwangler of the Berlin Philharmonic automatically guilty of sanctioning Nazi crimes?
This poser reveals how films touching on the Holocaust have changed in the last 15 years. For decades following the war, you could be assured that any Nazi turning up in a movie would be brutal, crude and murderous.
There were no shades of gray with these smiling villains. You feared them, hated them and relished their inevitable and violent deaths at the hands of the hero.
I can’t put my finger on exactly when the kinder, gentler movie-Nazi first appeared — though I’m sure there are plenty of graduate theses that do — but “Music Box” (1989) stands out.
In that film, an innocuous Hungarian immigrant, now a grandfather in Chicago, is arrested and tried for war crimes. There must be a mistake, the audience figures, since we can’t reconcile this harmless coot with that evil. And if in fact he did do horrible things, what purpose is served by tossing him in a cell for the last years of his life?
While the Holocaust originally was cited by filmmakers to shock and provoke, it gradually evolved into a catalyst for existential debate. “Schindler’s List,” which was as concerned with a single German’s moral quandary as with the suffering of thousands of Jews, did both. This was only possible once we were sufficiently removed in time from the actual events. And, for that matter, after the task of bringing the facts of the Holocaust to the public had been accomplished.
Although there are always new generations to educate, contemporary artists and historians typically invoke the horrors of the past to challenge and inspire us to halt today’s tragedies.
Which brings us to Harwood’s “Taking Sides,” a film that began life on the London stage in 1995 before jumping the pond to Broadway the following year. After seeing a French production of the play, Roman Polanski contacted the playwright, sent him Wladyslaw Szpilman’s memoir and “The Pianist” began its trek to the screen.
“Taking Sides” — both onstage and onscreen — is structured primarily as a 1945 interrogation of the cultured German Furtwangler by a boorish American officer prior to the conductor’s appearance before the De-Nazification Commission. The film, which premiered locally last October in the Mill Valley Film Festival, is now at Bay Area theaters.
Maj. Steve Arnold (Harvey Keitel) is not a man who embraces ambiguity. Because Furtwangler stayed in Germany, lived high on the hog, had numerous affairs, received honors from Goering and Goebbels and led the Berlin Philharmonic in a birthday performance for Hitler, Arnold views him as a despicable collaborator.
In his defense, the broken yet dignified Furtwangler (Stellan Skarsgard, in a shattering performance) declares he was never a member of the Nazi Party. He even wrote an open letter to the newspapers in 1934 denouncing what the Nazis were doing to music by eliminating Jewish artists from German cultural life.
That infamous concert occurred the night before Hitler’s birthday, he explains. And Furtwangler kept his baton in his right hand to avoid giving the fuhrer the Nazi salute.
He even helped Jews by providing money or means of escape. This only gives the single-minded Arnold more ammunition. If Furtwangler had no idea what the Nazis were really up to, why did the Jews need saving?
Furtwangler proclaims that he served music, not Hitler, and saw art as separate from politics. (Filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, who died last month at 101, made a similar though less convincing argument.)
The film “Taking Sides” is opened up just slightly from the play, with Harwood and Szabo (“Sunshine”) providing Arnold with two assistants who lost family to the Nazis. David Wills, a German Jew whose parents sent him to the United States as a boy in the ’30s while they stayed behind, has returned in a U.S. uniform. And the father of stenographer Emmi Straube was executed for his role in one of the failed plots to kill Hitler.
Their unmistakable compassion for Furtwangler and respect for his artistic contribution underscores Arnold’s ignorance of the Old World.
The major’s simplistic but well-meaning attitude inevitably has a different connotation given the recent American incursions into Afghanistan and Iraq.
The upshot is that “Taking Sides” plays less like a Holocaust allegory than as a square-off between European sophistication and American globalism. Unfortunately, it’s a one-note debate. Arnold makes the same argument repeatedly, and his attitude never evolves. The same goes for Furtwangler, although Skarsgard’s performance elicits waves of sympathy for the artist.
Since the primary characters don’t experience much of a shift, neither do we. The most satisfying part of “Taking Sides,” therefore, will likely be your discussion after the lights come up.
“Taking Sides” is playing at Embarcadero Center Cinemas in San Francisco and Landmark
Act 1 and 2 in Berkeley.