Smart war thriller from an international action veteran

Rating: 9/10 (16 March 2009)

OK, so anytime I hear the name Paul Verhoeven I always immediately think of Robocop, which I saw for the first time when I was about ten years old and I never quite recovered from that scene where Murphy gets all shot up by the bad guys. It was a movie moment at a formative point in my life where I really learned the extent to which people can go in doing terrible things to each other (years later, I saw things like Texas Chainsaw and Wes Craven's Last House on the Left and The Hills Have Eyes and realized that I hadn't seen anything yet). Verhoeven began his American film-making career with Robocop, an enormously violent and hugely popular success, and began a career spanning nearly two decades of working on a lot of big budget Hollywood movies like Basic Instinct, Total Recall and the disappointing Hollow Man.
I wouldn't expect a respectable World War II film to come from someone with such a filmography, but Black Book is sort of a return back to Verhoeven's days as a filmmaker in the Netherlands, where he had a successful career before coming to Hollywood. It's becoming more and more difficult for people to come up with unique and interesting stories involving the widespread struggles against the Nazis in WWII. I would even suggest that it's becoming safe to say that a WWII film can be made or broken solely by the performances, which are becoming more and more the most memorable things about these movies because so much of the stories are already known.
In Black Book, however, Verhoeven's European film-making sensibilities mix nicely with his Hollywood experience to bring together a fascinating and even fresh, albeit fictional, story of a small group of people fighting back against the Nazis as the war slowly begins to go wrong for them. The title of the movie refers to a book that lists the names of wealthy Jews who pay handsome fees to be transported to safety, only the be killed and robbed be the Nazis.
The movie takes place in Holland in 1944. Carice von Houten plays Rachel Stein, a young Jewish singer living in hiding. She and her family come into contact with a man who claims to know a way to transport them all safely out of Nazi territory and into a neutral zone. During their night escape, however, they are gunned down and Rachel is the only survivor. She eventually joins a group of Dutch resistance fighters where she works menial jobs for a while before finally being promoted to a job of much higher importance and danger.
Her task  infiltrate the Nazi hierarchy and seduce a high-ranking officer, Ludwig Muntz and bug Nazi headquarters so the resistance can listen in on the Nazis war planning. Muntze is attracted to her and the seduction is easy, but Rachel fails to hide the fact that she's Jewish and, even worse, she ultimately falls in love with him. This all starts to sound a little cheesy, but it's actually one of the movie's strong points. I've read that the movie has been shrouded in some controversy, particularly in America, for having the audacity to portray a high- ranking Nazi official as anything other than pure evil, although I tend to doubt very much that any lack of deserved recognition that the movie found is probably a result of being filmed all in original languages. This was an artistic decision, not an economic one, and it was a smart one. Had they made the movie in English, a huge element of authenticity would have been lost. Indeed, portraying a Nazi official in a respectable light is a lofty goal but the movie pulls it off amazingly well.
And the authenticity of the movie is astonishing. It has all the polish of a Jerry Bruckheimer production but none of the stupid plot devices or cheap romantic subplots generated to drive the weak story. This is a stunning story of betrayal and total sacrifice in the face of insurmountable odds and adversity, and a brilliant cast arranges themselves behind Carice von Houten, who delivers a spectacular performance as a woman forced to bury intense emotions even while she strips herself of her dignity for the benefit of her oafish enemies.
The plot is too thick to explain in its entirety in a review, and it would also subtract from the fun of watching it all develop yourself. But there is real betrayal on the Nazi side and suspected betrayal on the side of the resistance that leaves Rachel and Muntze on the run from their lives, both of them fleeing from the very people that have been providing them with their safety.
There is also a powerful statement on the endlessness of war as the movie shows us that the killing doesn't always stop when the radio announces a victory for either side. It reminds us that after countless thousands of years or wars, human beings are no closer to world peace now than we've ever been. Paul Verhoeven has done something noticeably different with Black Book than we have become used to seeing from him over the last few years, but he has definitely turned around a worrisome direction that his movies started taking with Showgirls and bottomed out with Hollow Man. It's nice to see that Verhoeven has gotten his magic back!