History Is Not Necessarily Drama

When Hollywood deals with history, it often pisses people off. They take an actual event and twist it around for the sake of drama or comedy or what have you, apparently with little regard for what actually happened. It's bad enough when something is "based on a true story," but when it's merely "inspired," it really gets bad. Having said that, the basic goal is usually laudable - fiction, even fact-based fiction, is supposed to be engaging and dramatic. If it's just the base facts we need, a documentary will do.

Those thoughts were going through my head last night after I watched Sophie Scholl - The Final Days, an Oscar-nominated 2005 film from Germany. The movie tells the amazing true story of a young woman who, along with her brother and other students, urged resistance to the Nazi regime during World War II while deep in the heart of the Reich. And it plays it straight - according to Roger Ebert's review, much of the dialogue comes from court records and transcripts of Scholl's interrogations.

While that's admirable, the end result is a film that has almost no dramatic tension to it. The title gives away the inevitable conclusion - it covers the last few days of Scholl's life, during which she is caught distributing anti-Hitler leaflets, arrested, charged, tried, and executed. The interrogations she undergoes at the hands of a cold Nazi cop are oddly dry - the reviewers who call them "intense" or "harsh" have apparently never seen videotapes of real interrogations in the United States, or even an episode of Homicide. The odd fact that our heroine actually did what she is accused of doing opens up lots of potential avenues, but since we're hewing to the historical record, they can't be explored. Once the charge comes down, the rest is all inevitable and while it's hard to watch (the court scene, in particular, will make your skin crawl), it lacks anything that really draws you in.

With that said, it's not a bad film - far from it. The performances are good, particularly the guy who plays the interrogator. The end of the film contains perhaps the most chilling bloodless killing ever put on screen. But there's just not much in it by the end, at least for me.

So next time you're watching/reading something "based" on history, keep in mind that it's still fiction and that fiction has different goals than documentary works. Take it easy on Hollywood when it's trying to entertain.