All surface, no feeling

Rating: 4/10 (26 October 2006)

Shout it from the roof-tops: after years spent churning out enjoyable action movies (Total Recall, Robocop), iconic "erotic thrillers" (Basic Instinct) and utter, utter tripe (Showgirls, Hollow Man, Starship Troopers), Paul Verhoeven has turned Serious. Out go the overwrought action sequences, the gratuitous nudity and the obsession with bodily fluids. In come the sensitivity, the subtlety, the delicate touch that a film about Jews and Nazis in WWII surely require. Just kidding. Verhoven couldn't be subtle if his life depended on it. Sensitivity? Get real. Delicate touch? This is war. And what a curious war it is. People  even the most downtrodden  wear immaculate, brand-new clothes straight out of the wardrobe department. Our heroine gets shot in the head, and her charming little scar lasts almost two entire scenes before it is dispensed with altogether. Most ludicrously of all, when a man takes a bullet in the shoulder he is advised not to worry  "it's just a flesh wound". Ah yes, the old flesh wound routine. Cue close-up of pincers extracting said bullet from said flesh. Seconds later, the fortunate victim is up and about and back to his usual self. Wonderful things, flesh wounds. Verhoeven has obviously seen the same recent war films that everyone else has. Unfortunately he has not learned anything from them. He is still labouring under the impression that nudity, obscenity, and endless violence are the hallmarks of seriousness and profundity. Anyone who might disagree with him just doesn't get it. Don't you know the man is an Artist? Don't you know that nothing can compromise his unyielding vision? What Spielberg and Polanski understood instinctively when it was their turn to tackle WWII was that while the horror demanded to be shown, there had to be more than that. Humanity was what they brought to the table, and their audiences left the cinema reeling because they had seen something recognisable and terrible. Verhoeven doesn't seem to care about humanity at all. Perhaps he prefers robots, and guns, and Michael Douglas. He seems unaware of what actually happens to a person when they go through violence and torment and abuse. His doll-like heroine starts the film as she ends it  unaffected by the vile events that have occurred. But if she is unaffected, what about us? If none of these things seem to actually matter, then what are we doing sitting through them? I can imagine well enough, thank you, what it might look like when you pour a vat of faeces over a half-naked actress. But how does it feel? What effect will it have on the character? None, apparently: the sh*t happens, and in the very next scene she is back to her old self  blonde and bubbly and perfect. So, that's alright then. She sees her entire family wiped out by Nazis  an event that supposedly drives her to seek revenge - but she doesn't seem particularly to miss them or care about them once they are gone. So why should we? Clearly, Verhoeven wants to make his own Schindler, his own Pianist. What he has created instead is a shrill mish-mash of grotesquery and camp. He will, I am sure, condemn anyone who has the gall to laugh at inappropriate moments during his very important movie. My favourite such moment came early on when the Comedy Nazi, looking down on the grisly results of his handiwork, said, in close-up, one simple word: "Excellent". My laughter was a genuine, human response to a terrible event rendered banal by a bad artist. When Verhoeven sticks to action-packed blockbusters he is on safe ground. As soon as he tries to be Important he is doomed. No doubt he will say of his detractors that they just don't understand what he is doing. On the contrary, I understand perfectly well  I just wish he would stop doing it. The Black Book is all surface, no feeling. Nothing hurts, nothing matters: it's just a flesh wound.
Update, April 2007. I wrote the above after seeing the film at the London Film Festival in October 2006. It is reassuring to see that my favourite film critic, Anthony Lane, would seem to agree with many of the points I made back then. (April 9th, 2007 issue of the New Yorker)