stefan ruzowitzky’s THE COUNTERFEITERS (2007)

it’s not particularly hard to see why Stefan Ruzowitzky’s Die Fälscher (The Counterfeiters) walked away with 2007’s Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. even if the Academy hadn’t so typically snubbed more notable films like Persepolis and 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days, Ruzowitzky’s handsome, inessential tale of the Third Reich’s counterfeiting efforts is still just the kind of flick that usually grabs the award: palatable, prestigious, and neutered by bland, Americanized cinematic traditions.

that’s not all bad, of course, and The Counterfeiters is, if nothing else, evidence of that. based on a memoir by its lone non-amalgamated character, the film is a necessarily fictionalized account of Operation Bernhard, which saw the Nazis recruiting bankers and printmakers from prison camps into an operation to faithfully reproduce British and American currency, first in hopes of economic sabotage and later with the loftier goal of continuing to finance their doomed military struggle. the audience’s window into this rich subject is fictional master counterfeiter Solomon Sorowitsch (Karl Markovics, showcasing a DeNiro-like intensity), who is imprisoned in 1936 and eventually recruited for Bernhard by the same detective (now a Major in the SS) who busted him years earlier. heading the counterfeiting operation, Sorowitsch sympathetically butts heads with “coworker” Adolf Burger (August Diehl), a printer and political agitator preoccupied with sabotaging Operation Bernhard, no matter the cost to him or his fellow prisoners.

The Counterfeiters uses this testy, philosophically-charged relationship between Sorowitsch and Burger as a jumping off point to address some compelling ethical questions, made all the more immediate by the backdrop of the Holocaust. are Bernhard’s participants morally obligated to undermine the force that has so harshly imprisoned them, yet now given them meager creature comforts and a chance at survival? would their sabotage and subsequent martyrdom mean anything when a new group of prisoners came in to replace them? and if they continue to cooperate, are they anything less than Nazi collaborators?

it's a credit to Ruzowitsky’s talents that these questions very rarely bog down the film’s smart pacing or considerable dramatic intrigue, and that most of them are explored with surprising, thoughtful depth. but the focus afforded these quandaries also makes the lesser among them seem labored and overcooked, and thus undermines them in the end. it’s unfair, perhaps, to ask true profundity of a film like The Counterfeiters, but it’s equally unfair that it should get our hopes up.

(from the KNOXVILLE VOICE)