Sophie Scholl: The Final Days (2005): When She's Right, She's Right
In Munich in 1943 the members of a secret student organization called the White Rose meet in a studio to produce their sixth anti-Nazi leaflet, informing the benighted German populace about the defeat at Stalingrad and the inevitable Allied victory and calling for resistance to the fascist regime.
These noble subversives stuff leaflets into envelopes for an anonymous mass mailing, but when they run out of envelopes Hans Scholl (Fabian Hinrichs) rashly announces he's going to distribute the remaining sheets at the university (where the group has also painted slogans on the walls). Another member pleads with him not to, it's too dangerous, but Hans's sister Sophie (Julia Jentsch) says she'll carry the briefcase and help him.
Hans and Sophie work fast and efficiently, laying the leaflets out in neat piles by the classroom doors. As they're about the leave, undetected, Sophie tells Hans there are more leaflets in the case, so they go back up to the top floor and set the last ones out. As the bell rings Sophie can't resist pushing one stack off a balustrade into the atrium. Before Hans and Sophie reach the bottom of the staircase, they're stopped by a patriotic janitor who saw them on the top floor and quickly taken in for interrogation by the Gestapo.
The movie follows Sophie's interrogation by Robert Mohr (Gerald Alexander Held), a ferrety zealot, and at first her well-practiced alibis seem to be working. Unfortunately, however, the Scholls are just about to be released when Mohr receives fairly unambiguous evidence taken from their apartment. When Sophie sees that Hans has signed a confession, she admits her part (claiming more responsibility than she bore in order to shield others) and begins a debate with Mohr about the despicable, murderous Third Reich.
Sophie is an impressive liar and then an impressive debater, and Jentsch is impressive as both. Mohr may not be affected by Sophie's Protestant spirituality or her German liberalism, but we are. (Trained as a children's nurse, Sophie movingly describes to him how mentally handicapped children were killed and went singing to their deaths; Mohr says that such people are unworthy to live.)
Mohr does admire Sophie's courage, discipline, and industry and urges her to submit to ideological reprogramming so that he may let her live. She refuses, of course, and after a brief show trial is guillotined along with Hans and a third member of the White Rose. (She is not tortured or physically mistreated in any way; her discussions with Mohr are surprisingly civilized perversions of justice.)
The movie, directed by Marc Rothemund from a script by Fred Breinersdorfer sticks to the facts and moreover tries to keep away from movieish hype. Yes, the distribution of the leaflets and the timing of Sophie's near release are a little fakey, and Held's acting is too intent. (The way he removes the damning evidence from a satchel one item at a time is badly staged - it starts to look like a magic act.) But the moviemakers give most of the running time over to the verbal confrontations between Sophie and Mohr and that's unusual in itself. What is not so unusual is the content of their back-and-forth.
The White Rose is legendary in Germany, a cynosure of disinterested political righteousness despite personal cost, all the more heroic because the members were almost all students in their twenties. To function as a tribute to the Scholls and their comrades, the movie has to present Sophie's ideas pure. No one in the audience for this movie could possibly disagree with anything she says, and Jentsch says it better than we could imagine saying it in the circumstances. If you want to hear the sensible, humane argument against Nazism spoken with ardent fluency directly under the monster's glaring eyes, then this is the movie for you.
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