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Face The Music
Skarsgård conducts (Photo: New Yorker Films)
Taking Sides
Directed by István Szabó
Hungary, 2003
The recent death of maverick filmmaker and photographer Leni Riefenstahl lends a bit of topicality to the worthwhile yet seriously flawed Taking Sides. Because of her association with Hitler, Riefenstahl (to the end of her 101 years) was denied ever making another film, and we were robbed of one of cinema’s consummate artists. Even as recently as the last decade, public outcry (in the form of censorship from the Left) blocked Riefenstahl from speaking about her films at the Goethe Institute in San Francisco. What politically correct do-gooders hope to achieve with such retroactive purges remains debatable; certainly we are poorer culturally as a result.
In Taking Sides, the famed Berlin Philharmonic conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler occupies the hot seat. Unlike many artists who fled Germany when the Nazis rose to power, Furtwängler stayed. He never joined the Nazi party, and like Riefenstahl, he maintained the unpopular point of view that art and politics were separate. The recordings Furtwängler made of Bruckner and Beethoven symphonies inspired generations of conductors who came after him—including Daniel Barenboim, who leads the Berlin Phil on the movie’s soundtrack. During the Nazi regime, Furtwängler helped Jewish musicians escape to freedom, yet after the war he was derided as no better than a gas chambers flunkie: his subsequent appointments to lead American orchestras were sabotaged by the same mindset that kept punishing Riefenstahl.
Unfortunately, this sumptuous production (where even bombed-out piles of rubble look exquisite) misses too many opportunities. The filmmakers keep Furtwängler at a distance, rarely portraying him outside endless interrogations; we never get a sense of the man. Furthermore, Stellan Skarsgård is too young for the role. Furtwängler was approaching 60 at the time of his denazification trial, and in the archival footage used he conveys a sense of delicacy. Skarsgård merely looks haggard. And Skarsgård doesn’t suggest the capacity of an artist who would muse over (as Furtwängler did in the 1937 tome Concerning Music) the “…half-moods of Mozart or the early Romantics, in which the soul itself seems not to know what it wants.” That leaves Harvey Keitel minding the shop, and Keitel runs with it. Defaced by a thinly tweezed variation on the Hitler moustache, Keitel, as Major Steve Arnold, re-invents his inquisitor role as a charming, smiling man—the sort of courtly, avuncular chap who melts your defenses even if you despise his politics. It’s a superb performance in a structurally haywire contraption. Taking Sides asks us to root for the Ugly American. – NPT
September 2003
Movies into Film
© N.P. Thompson, 2004
npt [at] moviesintofilm [dot] com