The Counterfeiters

B

Directed by Stephen Ruzowitzky

Winner of the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film in 2008, Stephen Ruzowitzky's paper hanger suspense is an umpteenth cinematic rendering of the Holocaust, this time highlighting a little known operation by the Nazis to counterfeit huge amounts of foreign currency to finance their crumbling empire. The end result is an enjoyable suspense that nonetheless suffers from a lack of depth as well as a superficial portrayal of many of its characters.

Salomon Sorowitsch, one of Europe's greatest counterfeiters, is enjoying a life of luxury in Berlin until he is busted by the CID for attempting to pass off fake US bills. A jew, Sorowitsch is quickly swallowed up by the concentration camp system and would likely have suffered the same fate as 6 million other jews had it not been for the establishment of "Operation Berhard" which aimed first to flood Britain with hundreds of millions woth of pounds and destabilize their currency but eventually focused on producing large quantities of American dollars to prop up the Third Reich in its final days. Sorowitsch is recruited by former CID agent Friedrich Herzog to lead the project for which he and this fellow participants are given safe haven and good living conditions in Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Sorowitsch's efforts to successfully counterfeit the dollar and thus save himself and the rest of the counterfeiters are trumped, however, by Alfred Burger, a counterfeiter who has decided to ruin the operation by sabotaging the counterfeit prints.

Does the world really need another film about the Holocaust? Probably not, but it got one nonetheless and I suppose we can all be thankful that "The Counterfeiters" is not all that bad. Ruzowitzky crafts a rather suspenseful narrative that succeeds in putting the audience on pins and needles but not necessarily in fostering any further understanding of the psychology behind the perpetrators of the Holocaust nor in eliciting the types of emotional reaction to the suffering of their victims that the film obviously aspires to. This film certainly will spark some heated debates about collective responsibility vs. individual loyalty and I admit that the tension created between on one hand Burger's attempt at derailing the Nazi's plan and his fellow prisoners desires to simply survive does raise something interesting questions about the nature of human's responsibilities towards each other.

On the other hand, Ruzowitzky's portrayal of the camp's guards is about as semi-three dimensional as it comes. Herzog is presented as the reluctant, Eichmann-esque bureaucrat just trying to make his way up the Nazi career ladder while his fellow guard Holst is the evil, heartless SS guard that enjoys killing for its own sake. Neither character appears in any way realistic although I have no doubt the film's director would take offense to this criticism. I must say that I've always felt that using a tragic, complex event like the Holocaust as a backdrop for an almost anecdotal story--something "The Counterfeiters," despite its strengths, certainly is--strikes me as a bit cheap. The only films I've ever watched that I felt truly delt with the Holocaust in a manner deserving of its grave historical importance were those that delt solely with the tragedy itself rather than focusing on some human interest type story that happened to take place during the Holocaust. Ruzowitzky obviously had no choice to set "The Counterfeiters" during the Holocaust because that is, after all, the context in which the operation took place but I still felt that Ruzowitzky's film had nothing of note to say about this dark chapter of human history.