Sunday Flicks Part II: Not So Vast, But Very Very Right Wing Conspiracy

The other movie I saw was Conspiracy, a 2001 HBO docudrama on the Wannsee conference, starring Kenneth Branagh as Reinhard Heydrich, Stanley Tucci as Adolf Eichmann, and Colin Firth as Wilhelm Stuckart (the principal author of the Nuremberg laws), and a cast of famous-for-Brits character actors. Rather than try to summarize the plot, I'll refer you to a very intelligent review from IMDB.com. Money quote:

The well-deserved demonization of Adolf Hitler has the regrettable side effect of obscuring the evil of his cronies and subordinates from anyone but historians, like a baleful sun whose light obscures the stars. Below the level of Hitler, the public's view of the German government dissolves into an amorphous mass called `Nazis,' the interchangeable automatons of the Führer. If the movie achieves nothing else, it will put Reinhard Heydrich and Adolf Eichmann on the map as villains in their own right, not mere extensions of Hitler. Kenneth Branagh's performance as Heydrich, the `Blond Beast,' is unnerving; he is the personification of that ruthless will, impervious to either reason or human feeling, which Hitler admired. This performance would be a star-making turn for a young actor; for Branagh, it is routine, maybe even a bit below average for this amazing performer.

When I travelled through Germany a few years ago, I actually had the chance to sail around the Wannsee. The mansion where Heydrich and Eichmann formally enacted the Final Solution was visible from the boat, and the experience of seeing it, amid the breathtaking beauty of the lake and the surrounding woods, was sort of ineffable. That such horrific, inhuman cruelty have been carried out in a setting of pristine serenity, casts Hannah Arendt's ideas about the banality of evil in a new light. The same haunting combination of beauty and evil is evident in the movie, when Branagh as Heydrich claims that the adagio of a Schubert symphony "will just tear your heart out" and tells Major Lange (Barnaby Kay) that he is a dreamer.

Perhaps it's paltry of me to point this out, but watching Conspiracy again (I saw it when it first came out) made me feel an intense hostility towards ideologues of the left and right who compare their opponents to Nazis. This applies especially to the Bush is Hitler morons in Europe. They lived through the real thing, and they ought to know better.