Black Book
Paul Verhoeven has has two quite separate careers as a director. In the
1970s and early 80s, he made some generally excellent films in Dutch:
- (7.88) - Soldaat van
Oranje (1977)
- (7.42) - Voorbij,
voorbij (1979) (TV)
- (7.28) - Vierde man, De
(1983)
- (7.09) - Turks fruit
(1973)
- (6.68) - Keetje Tippel
(1975)
- (6.59) - Spetters
(1980)
- (5.75) - Wat zien ik
(1971)
Many of those films touched on resonant themes and/or provided typically
European transgressive content but, unlike many European directors,
Verhoeven did not eschew comprehensible narratives, and he always stayed
mindful that film is an entertainment medium first and foremost. His ability
to make high quality films with commercial potential made him attractive to
Hollywood, where he worked for about a decade and created some entertaining
studio pictures.
- (7.40) - RoboCop
(1987)
- (7.30) - Total Recall
(1990)
- (6.80) - Starship
Troopers (1997)
- (6.80) - Basic Instinct
(1992)
- (5.30) - Hollow Man
(2000)
- (3.80) - Showgirls
(1995)
With the possible exception of Hollow Man, each of those films is fun to
watch. Even the much-denigrated Showgirls has some great entertainment
value, sometimes in terms of unintended guffaws, but also in terms of what
Verhoeven was trying to deliver. The film looks good. The nudity is
gorgeous. The sleaze is sleazy, as it well should be. As for the top four on
that list, I could pop any of them into my DVD player right now, and within
ten minutes you would not be able to pull me away. Verhoeven is a good
entertainer who tries to scope out what a film needs in order to work, then
tries his best to deliver that.
In recent years he has felt that Hollywood has no more to offer him
except large budgets, so he has migrated back to the Netherlands to go back
to making the films he wants to make, perhaps in Dutch, and to take a larger
role in choosing the projects and writing the scripts with his former
collaborator Gerard Soeteman. Not surprisingly, the first major effort was
themed similarly to his best film, Soldier of Orange. Both Black Book and
Soldier of Orange are films about the Dutch resistance in WW2. Both films
combine sex and small personal stories inside the greater theme of defeating
the Nazis. In many ways Black Book is the more complicated of the two films,
because it doesn't draw a solid line between Germans and Dutch, with evil
ending one one side of the line.
Black Book is filled with duplicity. There are Nazis who double-cross
other Nazis for wealth and power. There are Dutch resistance fighters who
double-cross their colleagues for the same sorts of reasons. There is a Nazi
who seems like a genuinely decent human being. There are Dutchmen who seem
like total asses. All of this provides complex characterization and a rich
environment for intrigue, but it also creates a tremendously intricate web
of plots and counter-plots which I didn't always follow. Imagine that the
Dutch always know what the Germans are planning because they have planted a
microphone in the German HQ, but then imagine that the Germans know the mike
is there and act disingenuously in front of it. The imagine that the traitor
who told the Germans about the mike knows that they know, and knows they are
providing disinformation, but uses that knowledge for his own personal
post-war fortune, owing allegiance to neither side. Finally, imagine that
you don't really know all of those things until they are revealed in the
story, and even then you're not sure which Germans and which Dutchmen are
co-operating until the last veil is removed. Even after watching the film a
second time I was still unclear on some of the details.
All of those machinations provide a steady nail-biting level of suspense
and mystery, and even some music and romance, but Verhoeven does not shy
away from the real tragedies of the war. He just works all of that into the
story. During the war there are rich Dutch Jews slaughtered for their
wealth, mowed down by a combination of Dutch traitors and rogue Nazis. After
the war there are collaborators bathed in shit by their own countrymen, and
feckless Allied administrators who make poor decisions. Along the way there
are sympathetic characters mowed down by machine gun bullets and tortured by
the SS, as well as people killed by bombs dropped in error, and numerous
other tragedies of war.
You should not expect this film to be part of a smooth continuum with
Verhoeven's early Dutch films. It is very much a slick Hollywood-style film,
except for the nudity level. The budget was $22 million, but it looks
bigger. And it's not a heavy-handed or preachy film. In terms of combining
romance and entertainment with tragedy and stirring themes, Black Book might
be fairly called the Dutch Casablanca. And considering how much I love
Casablanca, I do not make that comparison lightly. Of course, the tragedy of
war is portrayed more graphically and in more accurate detail in 2006, given
the new levels of film technology and the public's current level of
tolerance for extreme sex and violence, so this film is more realistic, less
romantic than Casablanca, but given the differences in time and place, the
comparison is not unwarranted. Good characters, good story, important ideas.
I should not leave you with the impression that this film is flawless.
Perhaps it should have been, with a little more effort, but Verhoeven and
his co-author got some period details wrong. In terms of anachronisms, there
are modern-style toilet paper dispensers, electric trains, bikes with rubber
tires, and sheep in the fields, all details which don't correspond to the
reality of the Netherlands in the winter of 1944 and spring of 1945. But in
the context of what the film does accomplish, those are small matters.
Not everyone admired the film. The New York Post wrote, "On the one hand,
Black Book has the artiness of subtitles, the dramatic weight of history,
and the desperate heroics of Jews hiding from Nazis. On the other hand, it
has Paul Verhoeven." The New Yorker wrote: "This is trash pretending to
serve the cause of history: a Dirty Dozen knockoff with one eye on
Schindler’s List."
Fair enough. Accurate statements.
Except that's what I liked about the film!
The film fails neither to honor history's heroes nor mourn its
incalculable losses, but it remembers to tell a story in an entertaining,
engaging way. Personally, I do not see that as a negative. There are
intrigues and romances and good yarns which can lighten even the darkest of
times, and we need not always dwell entirely on the darkness. (Not does
Schindler's List do so.) Even if you do see the "Dirty Dozen meets
Schindler's List" aspect in a negative light, you should find your distaste
largely offset by the very strong female lead (one of the greatest roles
ever written for a woman), and the film's stubborn unwillingness to fall
into the "black vs. white" view of history.
If this film were in English I would certainly grade it a B and recommend
it to everyone. Given that it is in Dutch and German (except for a few lines
in English and Hebrew), I have to concede that some people just hate
subtitles and would not see it under any circumstances, and that others
would be offended by the sex and nudity or the unlikely combination of
holocaust and entertainment.
Call it a very high C+, but a film that I watched enrapt for its two and
a half hour running time.
