Movie Review: The Captain

The Captain *** ½ / *****

Directed by: Robert Schwentke.

Written by: Robert Schwentke.

Starring: Max Hubacher (Willi Herold), Milan Peschel (Freytag), Frederick Lau (Kipinski), Bernd Hölscher (Schütte), Waldemar Kobus (Hansen), Alexander Fehling (Junker), Samuel Finzi (Roger), Wolfram Koch (Schneider). 

 

It can be interesting to watch a director return to their home country after a time in Hollywood. Robert Schwentke directed several films in America – The Time Traveler’s Wife, Flightplan, Red, R.I. P.D, and two of the Divergent sequels (Insurgent and Allegiant) and never really made the case for why he was a filmmaker you needed to pay any special attention to. All of those films (of the ones I’ve seen) are mediocre studio time wasters that you would likely forget soon after watching them with a real sense of the filmmaker who made it. With The Captain, he returns to his native Germany for the first time in more than a decade – and whatever else you can say about The Captain, you could not call it forgettable.

 

The film is set in the last few weeks of WWII, and centers of Willi Herold (Max Hubacher), a Private in the German army who deserts his unit. As he’s walking across Germany, he comes across an abandoned military car – and inside is the luggage of German Captain. He puts on the uniform – presumably more for warmth than anything else – but is quickly mistaken for the Captain himself. Instead of correcting the mistake, he runs with it. He becomes worse than those he was running away from – overseeing massacres of German prisoners – being held for the same crime he committed (desertion) on a mass scale – and pushing everyone around to do worse and worse things.

 

In a way, the film tells a story not unlike The Milligram experiment or the Stanfield Prison Experiment (the latter of which has kind of debunked, but whatever). How far can you push people when you have a little authority. How will you respond when you are given a little bit of authority? Is everyone just waiting to be given permission to become horrible, violent people?

 

The film is shot in stark black and white – which is the appropriate choice for this material – and the look of the film is the best thing about it. The second best thing is the performance by Hubacher as Herold – who goes from a scared kid, to someone playacting as a Captain, to somehow who truly becomes the evil he was just playing at before, and he has to do all that without really communicating it to anyone, since no one knows his secret.

 

If there is a problem with the movie, it’s that it does grow repetitive over its nearly two hour runtime. Herold does the same thing again and again, and sees what the reaction is, and it’s the same. Things keep getting worse, and he keeps on pushing to see how long he keeps getting away this for. He doesn’t seem to have any long term plans – and when he’s caught, he doesn’t really try to deny anything. What plays out over the end credits brings Herold and his crew into modern day Germany – and it’s both fascinating to watch, and also somewhat confusing. We don’t hear anything but the music being played, and whatever point Schwentke is making here is confused at best. And yet, for all the issues with The Captain – (I didn’t even really mention the smug cynicism of the whole thing) it’s not a film that will easily leave your mind, and it’s not something we’ve really seen much of out of Germany in terms of dealing with its past – and how easily so many people did the horrible things that they did, and how easy it could be for it happen again – anywhere.