主题：【整理】纽约时报影评《拉贝》 -- 元亨利
Here is a movie review from The New York Times for the German movie John Rabe. It seems that the movie didn't get the reviewer's good grace, for whatever reason. Short of the opportunity of seeing the movie itself, we have no ways to make our judgment on it. So it's all up to you readers
A Nazi Businessman Risks His Life to Do the Right Thing? It’s True
By STEPHEN HOLDEN
May 21, 2010 New York Times
The German actor Ulrich Tukur brings an understated intensity and psychological depth to the title role of “John Rabe,” a sweeping historical film that exalts a largely unsung real-life hero who risked his life to do the right thing. Rabe, a Nazi German industrialist stationed in China, is credited with saving the lives of more than 200,000 Chinese during the infamous 1937 massacre in Nanking (now Nanjing) in the second Sino-Japanese war. In a matter of weeks, the Japanese slaughtered at least 200,000 civilians and prisoners of war and committed mass rape.
Rabe had been living in Nanking for 27 years, and was running the Chinese branch of Siemens, the German engineering conglomerate. Today he is venerated in China for his decision to remain in the city and help organize and run a safety zone for civilians during the massacre. It is only relatively recently that the so-called Rape of Nanking has been widely recognized as one of the great atrocities of the 20th century. Even now, the Japanese government resists acknowledging the full horror of what happened.
The German director Florian Gallenberger has made Rabe the central figure in an old-fashioned historical epic that covers much of the same territory as the 2007 documentary “Nanking,” in which Rabe (pronounced RAH-bay) is mentioned. Because its hero was a “good Nazi” who courageously acted on his humanitarian impulses, “John Rabe” has a lot in common with “Schindler’s List.” But despite its gruesome scenes of hundreds of Chinese prisoners of war being lined up and executed and its ostentatious shots of severed heads, the movie is less than indelible.
With its solid performances and sweeping set pieces in which Japanese planes swoop through the streets like mad, fire-spitting bats, “John Rabe,” has its visceral moments. But it is also burdened by manipulative clichés of a screenplay in which exposition outweighs character development. Inspired by Rabe’s diaries, from which short excerpts are read, it tells the story almost exclusively from a Western point of view.
The most prominent bad Nazi is a stereotypical Hitlerian martinet with a cowardly streak and an ugly facial scar; the worst Japanese villain (Teruyuki Kagawa) is a one-dimensional bloodthirsty demon with a shark’s grin.
The story begins as Rabe receives the news that he is being replaced by a Nazi bureaucrat and is being called back to Berlin. But during his farewell party, the Japanese bomb the city and his replacement flees.
Instead of leaving Nanking, as almost everyone else, including his beloved wife, Dora (Dagmar Manzel), does, Rabe decides to remain and serve as the head of a committee of Europeans and Americans who persuade the Japanese to establish a safety zone for civilians. His first brave gesture is to raise the Nazi flag to signal friendship and divert diving warplanes.
Moody and diabetic, Rabe initially clashes with Robert Wilson (Steve Buscemi), a cynical American doctor on the committee who despises Rabe’s Nazi associations. But by the end of a drunken evening together, they are both singing the “Colonel Bogey March” with scabrous anti-Hitler lyrics.
The movie spends considerable time on the committee’s divisive internal politics. Over Rabe’s objections, Valérie Duprès (Anne Consigny), who runs a girls school in the safety zone, secretly violates the agreement with the Japanese and hides Chinese soldiers in her school. The Japanese, who continually threaten to override the pact, are itching for an excuse to storm the safety zone.
In one exploitative scene, schoolgirls whose hair have been cut short to make them less a target of rape, are ordered to bare their breasts to Japanese officers to prove they are not disguised Chinese soldiers. The movie throws in a half-baked romance between Langshu (Zhang Jingchu), a student who furtively photographed events, and Dr. Georg Rosen (Daniel Brühl), a German-Jewish diplomat who helps Rabe set up the safety zone.
From the outset of “John Rabe” you are uncomfortably aware of watching a wartime melodrama that, despite its honorable intentions, will throw in any emotional ploy to keep you engaged.