“Fatherland” Cleans Up the Rough Edges of History

Paweł Pawlikowski’s “Fatherland” offers an amiable eighty-two minutes of condensed history, centered on the septuagenarian novelist Thomas Mann’s trip, in the summer of 1949, to Germany—West and East—in order to receive each country’s Goethe Prize on the occasion of that great predecessor’s bicentenary. If Pawlikowski’s aim was to portray Mann (played by Hanns Zischler) as a terminal bore and a pompous ass, he succeeded brilliantly, even if he failed to suggest the reasons for his own animosity. Mann, who has been living in Los Angeles since 1941, is accompanied on the journey by his daughter Erika (Sandra Hüller), who serves as his assistant, even editing his speeches. And he does gives speeches. He gives an impromptu one at a press conference at their first stop, Goethe’s native Frankfurt; he gives a carefully crafted one at the formal prize ceremony there, and he gives another at the East German ceremony in Weimar, Goethe’s longtime home, overtly under Soviet dominion. What’s more, he gives speeches, terse but fusty, in private, to Erika.

For the most part, Mann struts around looking iconic, bearing an air of absurd vanity in his belief that, as an eminent anti-Nazi exile and a Nobel Prize winner who left Germany, in 1933, soon after Hitler came to power, his supra-ideological presence in both Germanies, at a time of Cold War tension, could indeed matter. But Mann most of all strikes an air of formality even in private, even when, in Frankfurt, he gets the grim news of the death of his son Klaus (August Diehl)—Erika’s brother and confidant, who is also a noted author—from a drug overdose. (His death was ruled a suicide.) Most pompous of all are the silences; the most conspicuous of them hollows out one of the major early scenes, when father and daughter, newly arrived in West Germany and travelling by car to Frankfurt, pass through streets of destruction, a country ravaged by war—and remain silent. Yes, awestruck and horrified, no doubt; still, I wondered throughout why silence served Pawlikowski as an optimal mode of expression.

Throughout my viewing, something felt off—in style and in substance—and the first concrete diagnosis came through in my colleague Anthony Lane’s recent New Yorker Profile of Pawlikowski, which I had deliberately delayed reading until after seeing the movie. (History may have no spoilers, but drama does.) That in-depth portrait mentions a fundamental change the filmmaker wrought upon Mann’s real-life 1949 journey: the author was, in fact, accompanied by his wife, Katia, who, in “Fatherland,” is said to be too weak to travel. The character of Erika, a writer and intellectual with her own range of uneasy connections to Germany—she’ll encounter an ex-husband and an ex-lover there—is a screenwriter’s convenience, a walking plot-production machine. Behind closed doors, however, the switch from a spouse to a child, from Mann the husband to Mann the father, is the switch from the intimate to the casual, from uninhibited speech to guardedness.

It took no more than minutes of curiosity to find that the fulcrum of “Fatherland,” the death of Klaus —the first character seen in the movie—occurred not during the Germany trip but some months before it. As for the trip itself, it was far more tumultuous, far more infuriating to Mann, and far more unflattering toward West Germany than the movie lets on. Upon his return to the United States, Mann wrote, for the Times, that, in West Germany, “they live by the slogan: ‘Everything was better under Hitler!’ By virtue of the experiences they claim to have had, they declare triumphantly that democracy has been tried and found wanting. Democracy to them means the Occupation Powers and all who ‘collaborate’ with them.” This isn’t the elegant stuffiness of “Fatherland”; it conjures a Fassbinder-esque film—outspoken, insolent, crude, loud, and brazen. Mann may not have shared his testimony, his vision, his voice with Erika during the tour, but he might have with Katia.

To share that voice in “Fatherland,” Pawlikowski would have to imagine it. But his economy of expression also suggests that the film, which is never at risk of spilling out beyond the confines of its scripted pointedness, depends on an economy of imagination. Its contrivances are less like conveniences or abridgments than like deceptions: the facts and the tone are in service to a style that itself has little room for variety or range. “Fatherland” is a muted, muffled quiet-box of understatement, twisting history less for dramatic effect than for affectlessness. Pawlikowski has developed a felt-lined aesthetic—of black-and-white images, in the traditional nearly square screen dimensions, that leave space around the characters—that bespeaks observational detachment and comes off as culture personified. This forced reserve and mannered dignity create a hermetic atmosphere of refinement (from behind the camera) and of elimination (in front of it). It is a cinema of prefabricated meaning and predetermined moods, in which images limit the very kinds of events that can be depicted.

Here, Pawlikowski further rarefies the style that he developed in “Ida” (2013) and advanced in “Cold War” (2018), but not to advantage. I found myself thinking of other filmmakers who rarefy: Christopher Munch, whose 1991 feature, “The Hours and Times,” about the 1963 Barcelona jaunt of John Lennon and Brian Epstein, has the decency to stick to these characters and not replace Epstein with, say, George Martin; or Hong Sangsoo, whose radical reduction of space and span in his new movie, “The Day She Returns,” creates great cinematic leeway for the uninhibited voice of its actress-protagonist; or Robert Bresson, whose severe restraint served artistically as both microscope and microphone, to experience infinitesimal gestures on a cosmic scale of moment and morality.

In “Fatherland,” such microscopy is reversed. Pawlikowski’s camera reduces the figures and voices, in order to fit them into his own rigidly molded spaces. The characters are petrified like specimens, expressing and embodying only what fits into the film’s design, with no potential for inconvenient loose ends for viewers to follow outside the frame’s borders. It’s a sieve too fine for anything as inconvenient as bodies or as coarse as discourse to get through—an aesthetic of purification, disincarnation, signification, as if the mere fact of keeping voices down and holding thoughts in were itself a mark of urbanity, conferring that cultural virtue upon a dignified audience. The movie sanitizes the past and removes its tang, its pungency, leaving a craving for contact with nature, with raw experience, with incongruities and accidents and anything but what fits, in lieu of such synthetic sophistication. ♦