Scoop's notes:
Paul Verhoeven has had two quite separate careers as a
director. In the 1970s and early 80s, he made some
generally excellent films in Dutch:
(7.88) - Soldaat van Oranje (1977)
(7.42) - Voorbij, voorbij (1979) (TV)
(7.28) - Vierde man, De (1983)
(7.09) - Turks fruit (1973)
(6.68) - Keetje Tippel (1975)
(6.59) - Spetters (1980)
(5.75) - Wat zien ik (1971)
Many of those films touched on
resonant themes and/or provided typically European
transgressive content but, unlike many European
directors, Verhoeven did not eschew comprehensible
narratives, and he always stayed mindful that film is
an entertainment medium first and foremost. His
ability to make high quality films with commercial
potential made him attractive to Hollywood, where he
worked for about a decade and created some
entertaining studio pictures.
(7.40) - RoboCop (1987)
(7.30) - Total Recall (1990)
(6.80) - Starship Troopers (1997)
(6.80) - Basic Instinct (1992)
(5.30) - Hollow Man (2000)
(3.80) - Showgirls (1995)
With the possible exception of
Hollow Man, each of those films is fun to watch. Even
the much-denigrated Showgirls has some great
entertainment value, sometimes in terms of unintended
guffaws, but also in terms of what Verhoeven was
trying to deliver. The film looks good. The nudity is
gorgeous. The sleaze is sleazy, as it well should be.
As for the top four on that list, I could pop any of
them into my DVD player right now, and within ten
minutes you would not be able to pull me away.
Verhoeven is a good entertainer who tries to scope out
what a film needs in order to work, then tries his
best to deliver that.
In recent years he has come to feel that Hollywood has
no more to offer him except large budgets, so he has
migrated back to the Netherlands to go back to making
the films he wants to make, perhaps in Dutch, and to
take a larger role in choosing the projects and
writing the scripts with his former collaborator
Gerard Soeteman. Not surprisingly, the first major
effort, Black Book, was themed similarly to his best
early film, Soldier of Orange. Both Black Book and
Soldier of Orange are films about the Dutch resistance
in WW2. Both films combine sex and small personal
stories inside the greater theme of defeating the
Nazis. In many ways Black Book is the more complicated
of the two films, because it doesn't draw a solid line
between Germans and Dutch, with evil ending on one
side of the line.
Black Book is filled with duplicity. There are Nazis
who double-cross other Nazis for wealth and power.
There are Dutch resistance fighters who double-cross
their colleagues for the same sorts of opportunistic
reasons. There is a Nazi who seems like a genuinely
decent human being. There are Dutchmen who seem like
total asses. All of this provides complex
characterization and a rich environment for intrigue,
but it also creates a tremendously intricate web of
plots and counter-plots which I didn't always follow.
Imagine that the Dutch always know what the Germans
are planning because they have planted a microphone in
the German HQ, but then imagine that the Germans know
the mike is there and act disingenuously in front of
it. Then imagine that the Dutch traitor who told the
Germans about the mike knows that they know, and knows
they are providing disinformation, but uses that
knowledge for his own personal post-war fortune, owing
allegiance to neither side. Finally, imagine that you
don't really know all of those things until they are
revealed in the story, and even then you're not sure
which Germans and which Dutchmen are co-operating
until the last veil is removed. Even after watching
the film a second time I was still unclear on some of
the details.
All of those machinations provide a
steady nail-biting level of suspense and mystery, and
the film even includes some music and romance, but
Verhoeven doesn't shy away from the real tragedies of
the war. He just works them into the story. During the
war there are rich Dutch Jews slaughtered for their
wealth, mowed down by a combination of Dutch traitors
and rogue Nazis. After the war there are collaborators
bathed in shit by their own countrymen, and feckless
Allied administrators who make poor decisions with
fatal consequences. Along the way there are
sympathetic characters mowed down by machine gun
bullets and tortured by the SS, as well as people
killed by bombs dropped in error, and numerous other
tragedies of war.
You should not expect this film to be part of a smooth
continuum with Verhoeven's early Dutch films. It is
very much a slick Hollywood-style film, except for the
extensive nudity. The budget was $22 million, but it
looks bigger. And it's not a heavy-handed or preachy
film. In terms of combining romance and entertainment
with tragedy and stirring themes, Black Book might be
fairly called the Dutch Casablanca. And considering
how much I love Casablanca, I do not make that
comparison lightly. Of course, the tragedy of war is
portrayed more graphically and in more accurate detail
in 2006 than it was in Casablanca's time, given the
new levels of film technology and the public's current
level of tolerance for extreme sex and violence, so
this film is more realistic, less romantic than
Casablanca, but given the differences in time and
place, the comparison is not unwarranted. Good
characters, good story, important ideas.
I shouldn't leave you with the impression that this
film is flawless. Perhaps it should have been, with a
little more effort, but Verhoeven and his co-author
got some period details wrong. In terms of
anachronisms, there are modern-style toilet paper
dispensers, electric trains, bikes with rubber tires,
and sheep in the fields, all details which don't
correspond to the reality of the Netherlands in the
winter of 1944 and spring of 1945. But in the context
of what the film does accomplish, those are small
matters.
Not everyone admired the film. The New York Post
wrote, "On the one hand, Black Book has the artiness
of subtitles, the dramatic weight of history, and the
desperate heroics of Jews hiding from Nazis. On the
other hand, it has Paul Verhoeven." The New Yorker
wrote: "This is trash pretending to serve the cause of
history: a Dirty Dozen knockoff with one eye on
Schindler’s List."
Fair enough. Accurate statements.
Except that's what I liked about the film!
The film fails neither to honor history's heroes nor
mourn its incalculable losses, but it remembers to
tell a story in an entertaining, engaging way.
Personally, I do not see that as a negative. There are
intrigues and romances and good yarns which can
lighten even the darkest of times, and we need not
always dwell entirely on the darkness. (Nor does
Schindler's List do so.) Politics and greed and love
and the minor struggles of life always continue inside
the greater ones. Even if you do see the "Dirty Dozen
meets Schindler's List" aspect in a negative light,
you should find your distaste largely offset by the
very strong female lead (one of the greatest roles
ever written for a woman), and the film's stubborn
unwillingness to fall into the "black vs. white" view
of history.