Bonhoeffer: Pastor. Spy. Assassin.

by Mike McGranaghan

There is a trick to making a good historical drama. You’ve got to make history feel alive and urgent to a modern audience. Do that and you get Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln or Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer. If you merely portray events, you end up closer to Bonhoeffer: Pastor. Spy. Assassin. Writer/director Todd Komarnicki, who penned the screenplay for Clint Eastwood’s Sully, lays out the specifics of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s life but lacks the sort of big-picture vision that would have elevated his film into the realm of something truly special.

In fact, the director is primarily interested in just one part of his subject’s journey. The movie has a very disjointed timeline, but essentially tracks Bonhoeffer’s path to the ministry, along with the revulsion of Nazi tactics that led him to activism. There’s a lot to the man’s life, not the least of which was his imprisonment for speaking out against Adolf Hitler, whose assassination attempt he participated in. Much of it is glossed over in order to get to the idea that the Nazis attempted to replace the traditional Bible with one edited and partially rewritten to create their own narrative.

Bonhoeffer zeroes in on that, perhaps unintentionally inferring that a desire to protect Christianity was the primary motivation in fighting Nazism among Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his associates. Obviously, that was part of it, but the systematic murder of millions of innocent Jewish people was inarguably a larger part. The film only feels passionate when focusing on the fight against the so-called “Hitler Bibles.” Everything else is presented dutifully, yet with a distinct lack of energy. Komarnicki skims through the most defining episodes, inexplicably choosing to waste time on dull material like Bonhoeffer’s introduction to jazz music or the specialized hide-and-seek game he played with his older brother as a child.

Minimizing the fact that a pastor helped devise an assassination plan proves to be a puzzling choice. The movie delivers an explicit message about the importance of standing up against fascism. In that regard, the best way to address the theme would seem to be taking the time to examine what led this Christian minister to decide “Thou shalt not kill” maybe didn’t apply to Hitler. So much potential exists in that idea. Instead, the heart of the story is the effort to fight Nazism by keeping the Bible intact.

Compounding the inert drama of Bonhoeffer’s screenplay is its weak dialogue. This is a wildly overwritten picture where virtually every sentence uttered has been imbued with great meaning. The writing is heavy-handed and clunky, and as a result, the characters never sound like real people speaking.

There are certainly a few admirable qualities to the film. The production design is impressive and the performances are generally good. And although it doesn’t always emphasize the right parts, Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s story holds undeniable appeal. Then again, that’s kind of the issue. A cinematic telling of his life ought to be far more stirring than Bonhoeffer: Pastor. Spy. Assassin. is.

---