3.5 stars. Rated R, for violence and dramatic intensity
By Derrick Bang
Terrible title, taut thriller.
And historical authenticity
doesn’t necessarily justify the choice. Nor does historical authenticity
conceal another issue.
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| Having parachuted into Czechoslovakia only the night before, Jan Kubiš (Jamie Dornan, left) and Josef Gabčík (Cillian Murphy) steal a truck in order to reach Prague, where they are to link up with resistance fighters |
To cite another recent example
... despite the care with which 2000’s The
Perfect Storm was assembled, I couldn’t overcome the core paradox:
Sebastian Junger’s book — and,
thus, William D. Wittliff’s screenplay — were based on an actual event that
left no survivors. Ergo, everything we watched was no more than an educated presumption
of what actually happened: a narrative conceit that can’t help pulling us out of the story at every significant
juncture.
This is never a problem with
dramatic fiction, which allows us to simply go with the flow; we accept the
saga on its own merits. But no matter how persuasively George Clooney and Mark
Wahlberg delivered their dialogue — no matter how heroically they behaved — it
was impossible to accept things at face value. Were the men in question really that brave? Actually that selfless?
Similar questions emerge during
the course of Anthropoid, director
Sean Ellis’ often gripping account of a World War II incident that forever
changed the fate of Czechoslovakia, and quite likely altered the direction of the
entire war. Ellis and co-writer Anthony Frewin have developed their script from
what is known about “Operation Anthropoid,” and while the clandestine mission’s
preparation and outcome are the stuff of recorded history, much of this
storyline can’t be any better than speculation.
Whether that’s vexing enough to
be an issue, will be up to the individual viewer. It’s easy to imagine that things may have gone down
this way, and that might be sufficient. Ellis certainly draws persuasive
performances from most of his cast — with one unfortunate exception — and
there’s no denying the suspenseful nobility inherent in WWII resistance
fighters who risked everything to thwart Nazi advances.
The film begins in December 1941,
three years after the Allies’ notorious “Munich Agreement”: the act of
appeasement that passively allowed Hitler to take over Czechoslovakia without a
shot being fired. Two soldiers from the London-based Czechoslovakian
army-in-exile — Jan Kubiš (Jamie Dornan) and Josef Gabčík (Cillian Murphy) — parachute back into their occupied homeland, and
carefully make their way to the few individuals who remain in the underground
resistance.
