Schindler's Fist

Rating: 5/10 (16 May 2007)

It's the counter factual rambling of movie loving drunk; what if Paul Verhoven, the dutch director of such big-budget exploitation fare as Robocop and Showgirls, and not Hollywood master Steven Spielberg, had abandoned his commercial comfort zone to make Schindler's list  his personal war project? Though such a thing may seem more Verboten that Verhoven, it is nevertheless now a reality. The man who would have put an invisible rape into cinemas if the MPAA hadn't stopped him has returned to his homeland to front a $40M exploration of the Netherlands under Nazi occupation and if we're surprised that the result is so straight-laced, fans should know that the old pervert isn't going to let something as undignified as the conduct of the Dutch under occupation put the brakes on his pet obsessions of sex, nudity, bodily fluids and gratuitous violence.
This, at least in the mind of the director, is the Basic Instinct helmer's think piece. You can rationalize this as the surrender to inverted snobbery. After all, Robocop is a thoughtful piece of work  no really  plenty to say about what being human actually means, the bleed of corrupt corporations into national institutions, etc.. but you don't win many plaudits for melting a man in a toxic waste dump or shooting a rapist in the groin. What gets you credibility, particularly if you're Paul Verhoven  the only man to collect his Razzie, is something a bit more worthy and that means historical drama with European backers.
The return to Holland was rationalized by PV as essential for the film's dramatic and tonal authenticity  a European cast adding a polyglot polish to a impressively mounted recreation of the occupied territory and to begin with it's a sober, carefully paced affair, detailing Carice van Houten's plight as a hidden Jew living with a Dutch family under an assumed identity. When the barn where she spends most of her time is bombed, her I.D card is discovered by the Germans and she accepts an offer for her and family to escape by boat to Belgium. Unfortunately, in the first of some pornographically realized sequences, the Germans are waiting for them and slaughter the family with close up machine gun fire, the girl narrowly escaping and subsequently joining the Dutch resistance to gain revenge on the Nazis.
As it goes on however, Black Book's tone starts to feel a touch confused, the cinematic equivalent of a beaten wife trying to reconcile her love for her abusive husband. The script, co-written by Verhoven with Gerad Soeteman, is content to paint its plot in very broad strokes. It relies on a fair amount of contrivance and unusually for a film that has pretensions of seriousness, airport lounge novel plotting  the kind you'd expect in a Hollywood thriller but not in a film that has one beady eye on the non-English speaking European market. PVs time in the US has certainly given him ample opportunity to indulge in his love of excess and his time in America has left an indelible signature on his method. A certain amount of Hollywood blowback is evident here, so during some sequences, for example the scene in which the resistance attempt to free their captured comrades from a German base, it's almost like watching a Nazi version of Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves only not quite as much fun.
It's a strange fugue; yes that's right fugue, of continental fastidiousness and old fashioned pulp espionage plotting with the overall package not entirely satisfactory for either the Dutch destroyer's audience of gore whores and masturbators, or the subtitled set that might have expected something more subtle and less predictable.
As befits a Verhoven picture, it's confidently realized and well staged stuff but as you might have expected, as subtle as a naked man in a girl's school. The Dutchman is no Spielberg and can't reign in his penchant for breasts and blood. It's widely known that squib making families eat for a year when Verhoven is in town and true to form the violence, through sporadic, is graphic and abruptly rendered. The sex too is vintage Verhoven, painted pubic hair, fondled mammaries and a great riff on the 'is that a gun in your pocket are you just happy to see me' line. None of this adds much to the story of course and only serves to highlight its lack of depth and the simplistic take on wartime morality and its complexities  the good German solider and the bad Dutch resistance fighter. There's probably a myriad of fascinating stories about such things but Verhoven may not be the man to tell them.
They'll be letting James Cameron make a film about the Titanic disaster next!