The major turning point in Alone in Berlin involves a man in a wide-brimmed hat and a shifty gaze, slinking through a place he shouldn’t be, in World War II-era Berlin. It’s a government building, and he’s there to deposit a postcard on which he’s written an anti-Hitler message. He is to leave it on a staircase and disappear unnoticed, leaving its fate to chance.
Wartime Berlin, a man, a fedora, a letter, a staircase, terrified glances every which way. It’s appetizing to think of what Brian de Palma would do with this sequence in his prime, slicing and dicing an act of postal dissent into a symphony of suspense, dragging the moment out metacinematically until we almost can’t take it anymore.
But Vincent Perez, the director of the well-intentioned but unambitious Alone in Berlin, is not de Palma. His plodding adaptation of Hans Fallada’s novel of the same name — itself inspired by the real-life case of Otto and Elise Hampel, Nazi resisters whose more than 200 anonymous hand-written postcard polemics caught the attention of the Gestapo — never realizes its potential. Helped little by the distinctionless, Le Carré cutting-room-floor familiarity of Alexandre Desplat’s score, Alone in Berlin is as exciting as a film about mail delivery sounds. It’s a curious footnote extrapolated, with many growing pains, into a feature film.
Yet there’s nobility in the recesses of this lethargic historical drama. It broaches powerful notions of war, propaganda and patriotism, if only fleetingly. In the trenchant, wordless opening sequence, an unidentified soldier — like Donovan’s “Universal Soldier,” he could be fighting for any side — scampers through a verdant forest like frightened quarry, gunfire interrupting an otherwise meditative air. Within seconds, he’s shot dead, and to Perez’s credit, he films it unceremoniously.
We soon learn that the victim is the son of factory worker Otto Quangel (Brendan Gleeson) and his wife Anna (Emma Thompson), whose grief becomes palpable, upending their lives and their political consciousness. Anna no longer feels comfortable recruiting other women to join the Nazi Women’s Club, and Otto likewise decides he must counter the Third Reich propaganda that has enveloped his city with his own agitprop campaign. His method? Randomly disseminated, anonymously penned postcard missives containing statements such as, “fear is the only weapon” and “how many children have to die?” They’re like proto-protest tweets.
Alone in Berlin offers brief glimpses of the nationalistic pull that totalitarian regimes enforce over ordinary people, as well as the way actions cause equal and opposite reactions — in the case, the way in which a family member murdered by the state can turn an apolitical machinist into an underground freedom fighter.
But these are minor, generous takeaways from a misbegotten narrative. Perez’s decision to shoot the film in English may garner more eyeballs, but it results in stilted diction that betrays its poorly translated source material. And the script isn’t the lone synthetic element of Alone in Berlin; the late ’30s settings, even when bombed-out, have a surface-pretty, airbrushed feel.
But nothing feels more artificial than the unconvincing policier that Alone in Berlin becomes when it focuses on Escheric (Daniel Bruhl), the fascist-moustachioed detective hot on Otto’s case. You’d think he and his colleagues were tracking the Zodiac killer: Every time a postcard is turned into the authorities, Escherich places a red flag on a map of its discovery, and the movie contains the expected scenes of frustrated detectives staring pensively at the topography of Berlin, searching for patterns. Never mind that Otto’s valiant attempts to spread messages of peace and resistance through the fruited plain have had no traceable impact; these dogged detectives appear to have nothing better to do than to root out the cancer that produced them.
It’s inopportune that Alone in Berlin opens in South Florida the same day as Pablo Larraín’s own police-chase yarn, Neruda, with its brilliant, ludic metaphysics. Perez’s movie pales in comparison, in part because of the unfortunate ineffectiveness of our heroes’ mission. When a spark never catches fire, it can make for a dull revolution — one that needn’t be televised.
ALONE IN BERLIN. Director: Vincent Perez; Cast: Brendan Gleeson, Emma Thompson, Daniel Bruhl, Mikael Persbrandt, Katharina Schuttler; Distributor: IFC; Opens: Today at Cinema Paradiso in Fort Lauderdale, Cinema Paradiso in Hollywood, and the Cosford Cinema in Coral Gables