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“The Captain,” Robert Schwentke’s harrowing World War II psychodrama, isn’t what you would call enjoyable, exactly. More accurately, it compels our attention with a remorseless, gripping single-mindedness, presenting Naziism as a communicable disease that smothers conscience, paralyzes resistance and extinguishes all shreds of humanity.
Based on the astonishing true story of Pvt. Willi Herold (Max Hubacher), a teenage deserter from the German army whose sadism would eventually earn him the nickname of the Executioner of Emsland, the movie picks up two weeks before the end of the war. Germany is in chaos and the petrified Herold, fleeing military police, finds a Nazi captain’s uniform and can’t believe his luck when it fits. Thus disguised, he soon organizes a car, weapons and a ragtag band of brothers whose unquestioning acceptance of his command emboldens him. High on the terrifying charisma of his clothing, he invents a secret mission from the Führer and embarks on a brutal odyssey of torture and slaughter.
Shooting in Poland and Germany in knife-edged black and white, the cinematographer, Florian Ballhaus, adds uncomfortable visual heat to Herold’s ice-cold cruelties. Through camera angles and lighting, in God’s-eye views and in carefully staged close encounters, his images pinpoint the tension between real and fake authority and the ways we determine which is which. And while there’s a grotesque comedy to Herold’s gang of dupes and opportunists as it trundles from one atrocity to another, the script’s emphasis on the transactional nature of power is too chilling to encourage chuckles. We can almost see characters figure out which side their Schwarzbrot is buttered on.
In the publicity notes, Mr. Schwentke says he’s not interested in the architects of National Socialism, so much as the “back row” people who maintained its cover. And as we watch Herold gain confidence in his deception, sliding from fearful fugitive to pitiless con man, we see how the allure of a uniform might sicken its wearer as well as subjugate its followers. His swift embrace of depravity — and the self-interested silence of those who see through his ruse — gives “The Captain” a distressing inevitability that can make the viewer feel helpless, as if the seductiveness of fascism were stronger than its terrors.
The real Herold fought in Italy as a paratrooper and, at one point, had an estimated 80 soldiers under his fake command. Movie Herold, sadly, remains an enigma, as his director seems more keen to place human nature, in a general sense, under scrutiny — to sniff out the reasons so many were willing to hitch their wagons to an emperor who really had no clothes at all.
The Captain
Not rated. In German, with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 58 minutes.
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