Alone in Berlin * (2016, Emma Thompson, Brendan Gleeson, Daniel Brühl) – Movie Review

Three very good actors – Emma Thompson, Brendan Gleeson, Daniel Brühl – are stranded through miscasting and poor writing in co-writer/ director Vincent Perez’s earnest and well-meaning World War Two wartime drama Alone in Berlin.

It is based on the 1947 novel by German writer Hans Fallada, a bestseller when first translated into English in 2009. That in turn is based on a little-known true story about a real-life German couple and their brave resistance to the Nazis.

Thompson and Gleeson play a 1940 Berlin working class middle-aged married couple called Otto and Anna Quangel who hear their only son is killed in battle. Otto decides to resist the Nazi regime in his own way by leaving postcards here there and everywhere, attacking Hitler. Anna puts up some resistance of her own to Otto, realising the danger, but falls into the scheme full steam.

Soon dogged German policeman Escherich (Brühl) is on the case and the evil Gestapo is hunting the threat to their regime too. This gives Mikael Persbrandt an eagerly grabbed chance to overact as SS Officer Prall.

It is such a good, honest, interesting story that you really want to like the film – and then feel really bad that you don’t. Every note it sounds is just off key.

[Spoiler alert] The story ends just like you imagine it is going to from the very beginning. That ending makes for depressing viewing. Telling a little known story, the film celebrates bravery in the face of appalling adversity, but it doesn’t celebrate it well enough. There’s just no surge of victory in defeat at the climax. It is just horrible what happens.

The normally excellent to brilliant Thompson and Gleeson are particularly disappointing, with their fake ‘German’ accents and hollow, unpersuasive performances. We can blame the screenplay and direction for a lot of this. The dialogue is difficult to perform convincingly and, with jarring words and phrases, feels like a bad, or at best uneasy translation into American from either German or French.

Brühl seems slack casting, just a typecast stock German actor struggling with a role he played so much better in The Zookeeper’s Wife (2107). Escherich comes over as a cross between Sherlock Holmes and Inspector Javert in Les Miserables. The role comes over as a total cliché that good actor Brühl can’t turn into a convincingly real character.

The production is lavish and impressive, and the film often looks eye-catching, but Perez’s direction is only moderate, never truly involving or inspiring. Yet it remains a fascinating story, and an essential companion to The Zookeeper’s Wife.

© Derek Winnert 2017  Movie Review 

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