Anti-Nazi martyr movie well acted

Published 9:00 pm Thursday, March 16, 2006

The story of Sophie Scholl and her brother Hans, young Germans executed by the Nazis for their anti-Hitler activism, is a piece of World War II history that stands out as a too-rare moment of German resistance. Their story has been told on film before, but never with the straightforward concentration of “Sophie Scholl: The Final Days.”

The new film uses transcripts from the Gestapo interrogations of Sophie Scholl, which came to light in 1990. Screenwriter Fred Breinersdorfer took the records and did new research on the last six days of Scholl’s life, building a clean, lucid portrait from the facts.

The movie begins as members of the White Rose, an anti-Nazi underground group in Munich, are preparing to distribute leaflets at a university. Sophie (Julia Jentsch) and Hans (Fabian Hinrichs) are arrested on the spot.

The next act is a superb cat-and-mouse interview between Sophie and a Gestapo interrogator named Mohr (Alexander Held). Sophie professes her innocence and has a logical explanation for every apparently implicating clue.

This is a remarkable sequence for many reasons, one of which is that the actress plays the scene straight-she doesn’t signal to the audience that she’s lying, which many actors do in fabrication scenes. By the end of it, like the interrogator, you’re almost convinced she’s telling the truth.

The rest of the film details Sophie’s days in prison with a sympathetic cellmate and the sham trial that sentences her to death, along with her brother and another resistance fighter.

Director Marc Rothemund’s strategy of factual reportage works well, and he has a brilliant lead actress to carry the dialogue-heavy scenes. Julia Jentsch, who was in “The Edukators,” a muddled but interesting film from last year, has a diamond-like intensity that she keeps throttled down. She doesn’t look like she’s doing anything, which is one kind of great acting.

In choosing to focus on the details of the case, rather than the story of the White Rose and the larger picture of Third Reich Germany (as Michael Verhoeven’s 1982 film “The White Rose” did, for instance), Rothemund maintains a strong through-line. Still, the Scholls were the exception, and the film has just a whiff of comforting mythology about it.

“Sophie Scholl” was nominated for the foreign language film Oscar, but lost to “Tsotsi,” which also opens today. I prefer the simplicity of “Sophie” to the busy pyrotechnics of “Tsotsi,” but both were worthy nominees.