Invincible

I just saw this touching movie at the Stockholm Film Festival, and I have to say Herzog is still as poignant, charming and direct in his storytelling as ever. Not afraid to cast people who just have pure feelings, no plastic acting-by-the-book moves and more than one and a half expressions on their faces.

The frame of the story is a little jewish village in Poland in 1932, where a big family lives a poor but happy life. The eldest and the youngest sons, Zishe and Benjamin, mocked by some people as the thick and the thin, lead us through thick and thin of their lives. Based on a true story, the legend of the Invincible Zishe Breitbart, played bravely and somewhat charmingly naive by Jouko Ahola (the 1997 and 1999 strongest man), still is told among the jewish people. A man who accepted his physical strength as the gift of God, and thereby felt obliged to define his goal by that call. When he gets hired at a varieté in Berlin, he finds himself confronted with the Nazis, his strange employer Jan Hanussen, played by the impressive Tim Roth, who wants to sell him off as Siegfried, a blond, germanic hero who can even lift an elephant. It is obvious that Zishe has to decide whether he wants to deny his identity or rather become a Samson and fight for who he is. A touch of romance is added by the real life concert pianist Anna Gourari, who is almost over-acting, almost resembling a silent movie actress.

A very international, very special cast. Told in a simple, poetic and beautifully photographed way, Herzog manages to make you overlook the only downside of the whole movie: the bad language, german spiced english.

For people who care more about the persons than the action, this movie comes highly recommended.

This is a film about a Jewish young man who witnessed the hatred and discrimination towards the Jews by the German Nazis before the Second World War.

I found the first half of the film boring. It was slow, and there was not much to offer. The scenes were not emotional, and lack climax. The acting was bad too, as the actors lacked emotion. It only plainly told the viewers what happened in Berlin's entertainment shows. Zishe was indeed very strong, and the film concentrated on this aspect. The director filmed many shots of Zishe lifting very heavy weights, bending metal object etc. However, all these displays become like a bodybuilding show.

The second half of the movie was more pleasant to watch. Zishe saw the Nazis starting to harm the Jews, and he urged the Jews to leave Germany. However, no one believed him. In this latter half, there are more scenes which makes people think. For example, there was a scene which Zishe walked among an island full of red crabs. I think it means that the Jews were like the red crabs, they could not escape from the island.

In the end, Zishe died of an infection caused by a wound in the leg. His death was two days before the Second World War. I think the directors want to carry a secret message here. As Zishe was the hero among the Jewish population in Germany, his death means that even the strongest Jew could die. Without Zishe the Jewish population became vulnerable. Then two days after that, extermination of the Jews began. Overall, I think this film is thought provoking, but the acting is not good. The actors and actresses showed no emotion, and the story is not convincing.

Werner Herzog's Invincible tells the story of a Polish blacksmith in Nazi Germany who in his provincial integrity thinks he can protect his people after becoming the star at the Palace of the Occult in Berlin, which is overseen by a sinister man who dreams of becoming the Nazis' Minister of the Occult. Much of the movie's uncanny appeal comes from the contrast between the simple-mindedly innocent blacksmith-come-strongman and Tim Roth's wicked Hanussen, who trickles with studied malice. Standing between them is a young woman under Hanussen's mental force, who the strongman loves. The movie is supposedly based on a true story. I can conceive of various ways it could've been told unspectacularly, but Herzog has turned it into a movie in which we mostly have no clue what could possibly happen next.

The movie has the evocativeness of a German silent film, bold in its expressionism and moralistic insistence. Its casting is critical, and intuitively right. Tim Roth is a menacing deceiver, posing as a man with extrasensory abilities, using hocus-pocus and theatrics as he hustles for position within the rising Nazi majority. There's a scene where he hypnotizes the strongman's love interest, and as he stares dauntlessly toward us, I wondered if it was feasible to hypnotize us as well. As for the untrained actor playing the strongman, the camera can look as closely as you like and never see anything insincere.

Herzog always works to push us into the mythic and the mysterious. And here, there are shots of a stark, craggy seashore where the stones are covered with thousands of bright red crabs, all clambering away on their crustaceous errands. As with similar imagery in most of Herzog's other films, there can be no exact interpretation of this. And like most of his other films, Invincible is a unique experience. Herzog has gotten outside the tropes and confines of conventional movie storytelling, and confronts us where our sense of trust and belief keeps its skeletons.

No director has more fascinating stories to tell than Werner Herzog. This one is about a Jewish blacksmith who finds his way from his village in Poland into a German propaganda show at a Berlin theatre which features a grim but locally beloved hypnotist, who claims he has seen into the future of Germany. The year is 1932, Hitler has yet to come to power.

For about fifty minutes, Herzog is able to keep the viewer in his/her seat. He stages a very eccentric show which at times allows for audience participation. During a hypnotism scene, Herzog has chosen the camera angle to be a P.O.V. of the volunteer. Tim Roth faces the camera, and as he starts to work his magic, it is us the viewers who are being hypnotized. But while the show goes on, the spectacle disappears. Invincible looses direction and starts becoming draggy quite quickly. Tim Roth's character is presented to us with so much flair and presentation that we are led to believe that the story is heading more in his direction, but it doesn't. Invincible might have worked better if the movie was about him. The last section of the film is clunky and overlong, and it feels like another movie. When looked at in its entirety, Invincible is almost a docu/drama. Some parts are very interesting but, it lacks important cinematic ingredients; the most important of which is structure.

Invincible could use a major reworking. It is clumsy in direction, unable to generate much emotion, and does not have much to say. This is NOT one of Herzog's more impressive works

Zishe is a Jew living in Poland and working with his family as a blacksmith. When a fight breaks out in a local restaurant, Zishe uses his impressive strength to fend off his attackers but finds himself facing a bill for the damage. To make the money to cover the cost, Zishe enters a local circus to challenge the resident strongman. Easily winning, he draws the attention of a talent scout who offers him the chance for more work in Germany. Despite the reservations of his parents, Zishe travels to Berlin where he joins the high-class show of mystic Hanussen. Playing to mostly film stars and members of the ascending Nazi party, Zishe plays the role of an Aryan strongman. Initially happy to do so, the deception and denial of self gradually eats at him as he performs on stage.

I may not be the most cine-literate person in the world but I know enough to give any film from Werner Herzog a try to see what happens. With this film I was interested from the very start as it throws up an interesting "true" story that I had never heard before. It opens well but it only manages to hang together until the middle of the film, at which point the direction of the story starts to badly waver and, with a mostly amateur cast and some clunky dialogue, it cannot do anything to really turn it around. After a while it does become dull and rather aimless which was a shame given the potential that it showed early on. The problems of narrative will probably worry Herzog's fans less than the casual viewer though but what will surprise them is how visually ordinary it all is. It all looks good and has some nice use of locations but generally it lacks imagination or the flair for the unusual, with only the out-of-place use of the crabs sticking in the mind as an image.

The cast are mixed, with some good performances and some terrible ones. Ahola falls somewhere in the middle; he is not the most expressive man in the world but he has a good presence and his gentle strongman performance works for the majority – it is only in the latter stages where more is asked of him where he comes up wanting. Roth is impressive of course and he does add a much needed professionalism into the film when given the chance. The rest of the cast are mostly average at best – not a major problem but few people will defend the bland and flat deliveries of people like Gourari and Wein – both of whom come over as if they would struggle to read a traffic sign in a convincing manner.

Overall this is an OK film at best – starting with potential but fading away long before the end. The performances are mostly average but what is more surprising is that Herzog doesn't really make the film his own – some of it looks interesting but it lacks the visual style that I had hoped for and it doesn't offer a great deal in its place.