Sophie Scholl: The Final Days

German cinema has produced a number of really excellent period dramas in the past decade: Downfall and The Baader-Meinhoff Complex chief among them. Their thematic honesty, unflinchingly addressing Germany's troubled past (the Third Reich, left-wing terrorism), is highly commendable: would that Hollywood were half as brave. Neither are these stuffy British period dramas with good-looking actors in pretty costumes acting in service of dull scripts and stories. There's real drama, passion and originality in these films that makes them unique and extremely valuable.

Sophie Scholl: The Final Days (2005) is a truly remarkable film. The second major film about Sophie Scholl's brave stand against Nazism (after Michael Verhoeven's The White Rose (1982)), it's one of the most moving and powerful films made about Nazi Germany. Long on talk and thematic concerns, it's nonetheless gripping from beginning to end, with director Marc Rothemund and star Julia Jentsch providing a powerful story of pure, unremitting decency in the face of oppression.

Hans (Fabian Hinrichs) and Sophie Scholl (Julia Jentsch) are two young students studying in Munich during the Second World War. The two are members of the White Rose, a clandestine anti-Nazi group who distributes leaflets questioning the Nazi war effort. Sophie and Hans are arrested and subjected to intensive interrogation, refusing to reveal to Gestapo Inspector Mohr (Gerald Alexander Held) the names of their accomplices. The Scholls realize just how high of stakes they're playing for, when they're charged with High Treason and threatened with execution. But Sophie refuses to bend even an inch, ignoring offers to save her life by betraying her comrades or to recant her politics.

Plenty of films have been made about the military resistance to Hitler, from Night of the Generals to Valkyrie, but those hand-wringing equivocators aren't half as moving as Sophie Scholl, a 21 year-old medical student whose simple decency and conviction shakes the foundations of the Third Reich. Sophie isn't a naive babe in the woods like Anne Frank, but a very conscious and conscientious protestor. The military experiences of her brother, friends and fiance have turned her against the war, and Sophie's vague knowledge of the Holocaust and other atrocities makes Nazism unpalatable. Her interrogators lambast her as an ungrateful fool, unable to see how a privileged and intelligent girl could dare act against their institutionalized evil. That she's a decent person with a mind and conscience of her own never occurs to them.

Often forgotten is how sensitive Nazi Germany was to public opinion. The Nazis were, of course, an absolute dictatorship, but they'd also come to power on a slim plurality vote and constantly feared the German public turning against them. The T4 program, with the euthanization of the crippled and mentally ill, had been shut down in 1942 due to public outcry and church pressure. Thus, vocal dissenters like Sophie and Hans pose a very real threat to Nazi credibility and power, especially during wartime. So afraid of them, indeed, is the Nazi leadership that Roland Freisler (Andre Hennicke), the frighteningly-hammy judge of the People's Court, is brought in to prosecute them. Of course, their prosecution of the Scholls only brings their evil into stark relief, as any regime that considers 21 year old pamphleteers a moral threat is irredeemably loathsome. Virtue stands little chance of winning, but it scores an irrevocable moral victory.

Dramatically, Sophie Scholl is extremely powerful. The film contains long arguments about politics and philosophy that could be boring in other hands, but Fred Breinersdorf's script pulls no punches. Mohr's pompous pronouncements on Nazi are convincingly deflated by Sophie's moral bluntness: basic good is unmovable in the face of convoluted, torturously-justified bad. It's no less compelling a "drama of conscience" than the genre's best work, like The Passion of Joan of Arc and A Man for All Seasons, and its relative immediacy makes it arguably more affecting than either.

Rothemund's direction is solid. Most of the action takes place indoors, but the film retains a crisp pace and Rothemund manages some fine stylistic touches; a few bits are heavy-handed (especially the coda) but it's an admirably restrained and direct bit of storytelling. Reinhold Heil and Johnny Klimek's moody score is also memorable.

Julia Jentsch gives an exceptional performance. She avoids making Sophie a saintly character without diminishing her basic good. She's very much a real twentysomething girl, with relatable dreams, interests and personality, who's nonetheless willing to die for her conscience. Certainly, she's one of the most compelling and original protagonists you're likely to meet, and Jentsch is nothing short of spectacular.

Fabian Hinrichs is solid; we see far less of Hans than Sophie but he still makes a powerful impression. Gerald Alexander Held's Gestapo chief makes a superb antagonist: he's a dedicated Nazi functionary given a glimmer of humanity, being both frustrated and grudgingly impressed by Sophie's conviction. Andre Hennicke's Freisler is alternately comic and terrifying, the perfect embodiment of Nazi evil. Smaller roles are ably handled by Florian Stetter, Petra Kelling, Jorg Hube and Maria Hofstatter.

Sophie Scholl: The Final Days is a superb film that explores tyranny and human decency in a wonderfully unique and affecting way. If nothing else, it shows that, despite seventy years of books, films and documentaries, there's still plenty of interesting, thought-provoking material to be culled from Nazi Germany, if only one knows where to look.