Weekly meditations from your humble messenger
Making
Money for the Third Reich
(The Counterfeiters, 4/21/08)
By Nicholas Nicastro
It
is May, 1945. A dark, thin, vaguely thuggish little man shows up at
Monte Carlo with a suitcase full of cash. After checking into the best
hotel, he gets a bath, a shave, and a manicure—all apparently overdue.
Hitting the high-stakes poker tables, he makes a killing. This attracts
the attention of one of those observant young ladies who happen to frequent
the casinos, making the acquaintance of high rollers. Later, in bed,
she turns over—and sees the numbers tattooed on his arm. "You
weren't in the camps, were you?" she asks. The man is silent.
From this promising beginning, Stefan
Ruzowitsky's The Counterfeiters tells the true story of Salomon
Sorowitsch—career criminal, Holocaust survivor, and acknowledged
King of Counterfeiters. Arrested at just the wrong time, and condemned
to a slow death in a slave labor camp, Sorowitsch (Karl Markovics) finds
redemption in an outlandish Nazi scheme: to use captive Jewish experts
(legitimate and otherwise) to set up a high-tech counterfeiting operation.
The idea is to wage economic war
on the Allies by flooding the financial markets with bogus British pounds
and US dollars. In exchange for this feat, the Germans are happy to
provide their stooges with feather beds, real food, and a ping-pong
table. For Sorowitsch, "Operation Bernhard" is a ticket to
survival. For others forced to cooperate, it is perhaps their only opportunity
to mount meaningful resistance to Hitler.
With those kinds of moral stakes—holocaust
resistors vs. Nazis—its hard to adopt anything but a reverential
tone. Indeed, Ruzowitsky's film, which won Austria the Best Foreign
Language Oscar last year, feels like the European answer to Schindler's
List—a saga of a talented crook who finds his conscience awakened
by the bigger crime unfolding around him. As far as that goes, it's
hard not to appreciate The Counterfeiters. But it's hard to get
excited about it either.
Ruzowitsky's boldest choice lies
in the casting of his lead. Instead of presenting some square-jawed
idealization of the legendary forger (the likeable hood/Clive Owen option)
the film gives us Markovics—a dark, impenetrable, bent-nose type
who seems more suited to background or character parts. Though until
now known primarily for TV roles, Markovics holds this film together
with what seems like the effortless ease of a seasoned star.
How a jail-bird adapts to a death-camp
is a less explored corner of an overworked genre. ("The guards
have to respect you without losing face," Sorowitsch declares,
"just like in any other jail.") Most of the other players
around Markovics, including August Diehl as an idealistic printer who
tries to sabotage the project, do creditable jobs. After so many similarly
earnest Holocaust dramas, though, such characters seem a little stale.
Likewise applies to the standard-issue sadistic guard (Martin Brambach),
and the SS commandant with delusions of grandeur (Devid Striesow).
After proceeding in largely unsentimental
fashion for ninety-eight percent of its length, The Counterfeiters
falls apart in the last five minutes. I won't spoil it, but suffice
it to say that the guilt-ridden Sorowitsch decides to play fast and
loose with his counterfeit nestegg. That a fictional character so careful,
and full of such pride in his craft, would do such a thing is preposterous.
And yes, the objection goes double
if the real Sorowitsch did the same thing.
©2008 Nicholas Nicastro
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