Fatherland isn’t like other movies — at least not like most of the movies we see these days. Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski (Ida and Cold War) hovers somewhere between realism and carefully honed style. He seldom squeezes his characters into suffocating close-ups.
But Pawlikowski, who isn't afraid to film in black and white, shouldn't be considered a pure stylist; his movies are rooted in substance. In Fatherland, Pawlikowski follows a 1949 journey famed author Thomas Mann made to Germany, returning to a country he had left in 1933, escaping Hitler's rise.
Every image in Fatherland seems to have been calculated to create an atmosphere that reflects the disorientation Mann (Hanns Zischler) and his daughter (Sandra Huller) experience in a country they no longer consider home.
But Mann was at home in the German language, and he tries to use his stature to advance an optimistically lofty view of the possibilities for a new Germany, one steeped in cultural achievement.
Mann arrives in Germany to receive two Goethe awards, one in West Germany’s Frankfurt, the other in East Germany’s Weimar. For him, Geothe stands as a writer of lasting influence, a high point of German culture.
As portrayed by Zischler, Mann becomes an art narcissist, an author who believes he can climb a cultural mountain that’s high enough to see a transformed Germany as an exemplar for the world.
That’s a big and perhaps naive ambition for Germany in 1949 when, as the movie acknowledges, many former Nazis were trying to establish themselves in West Germany, and much of the country was in ruins.
Mann's imposing presence aside, the movie’s soul belongs to two of Mann’s children. Nervously smoking and ill at ease, Huller’s Erika is tightly wound enough to slap her ex-husband at a reception for the author. A well-known actor, the former spouse remained in Germany and courted Nazi favor.
Mann’s son, Klaus (a briefly seen August Diehl) opens the movie in what amounts to a prologue. Naked on the floor of his room, Klaus barely acknowledges the lover who's on the verge of exiting.
In a phone call with his sister, Klaus poses the choice facing the West as one of conflicting polarities, the crass commercialism of a Mickey Mouse culture or the murderous calculations of Stalin's communism. Disgusted by both options, Klaus commits suicide, something we learn about later in the movie.
The suicide underscores Mann's aloofness. He insists on continuing his trip, delivering a speech that outlines his vision for a new world to a stoic audience in East Germany. The audience looks as if the life had been drained from it.
In some ways, Mann is a pawn. The Soviets want to use him to prove that a great artist supports the world-improving goals of Communism; the Americans hope he doesn’t go too far in that direction. By the time the movie opens, Mann was an American citizen living in California, a sun-splashed state that couldn't feel further from a decimated Germany.
With Mann nearing the end of his days, the movie functions as a dirge for the author and for something larger, a cultural moment when grand, elevating visions seemed possible.
Pawlikowski’s approach may strike some as airless. That’s not entirely wrong, but Pawlikowski has made a clear choice. At times, the movie feels like a low-grade nightmare. A sense of disconnection seems to preclude the possibility of a life in which it’s possible to feel at home, as reflected in the German word “heimat,’’ i.e., the place one belongs.
Weariness and resignation penetrate Zischler's performance, as if Mann knows that his day is done.
It’s worth noting that Pawlikowski doesn’t adhere to historical fact. Mann made the trip with his wife, not his daughter. His son committed suicide after the trip, not during it.
Presumably, Pawlikowski wanted to bring the sharply edged Erika into play. Klaus’s death emphasizes Mann’s haughtiness and self-absorption and supports Pawlikowski's depiction of the irreparable alienation that defines a challenging and deeply fraught world where many of the old guideposts have crumbled.
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