Also this issue: Good Grief The heartfelt but confused Moonlight Mile processes real-life tragedy. -Cindy Fuchs Werner Herzog -Sam Adams New Continuing repertory film Screen Picks -Sam Adams Showtimes

October 3- 9, 2002

movies

From a Scream to a Whisper

Iron-willed: Zishe (Jouko Ahola) lifts his way to vaudeville fame.

Werner Herzog’s quiet Invincible.

by Sam Adams

Poorly received in Cannes for its failure to be Fitzcarraldo II: Shore Leave, Werner Herzog’s Invincible is a tidier, quieter film than you’d expect from the dedicated chronicler of monomaniacs and delusional obsessives. It also features perhaps his first wholly good character: Zishe Breitbart (Jouko Ahola), a Jewish strongman from a Polish shtetl who travels to Weimar Berlin to seek his destiny. There, he’s employed by one Erik Jan Hanussen (Tim Roth), an occultist and fakir who stages vaudeville spectacles for Nazi higher-ups, all in the hopes of being Hitler’s Minister of the Occult. (Both characters are based on real people.) With his grandiose dreams and flexible ethics, Hanussen is a more familiar Herzog character, but what’s surprising about Invincible is how doggedly it sticks by Zishe’s side. Ahola, twice named World’s Strongest Man, is a soft-eyed bear of a man; when the residents of Zishe’s shtetl brag about his strength, you think it’s a joke until he pulls off his shirt -- surely no face as kind as his could rest atop so mountainous a body.

Zishe is initially transformed, via a cheap blond wig, into "Siegfried, the Iron King," the better to please his Aryan audience. His eventual change of heart and self-proclamation as "the new Samson" give the movie its forward motion, but at times, it's curiously static, as if it took all Herzog's energy to will himself back into the 1930s and he hasn't the strength to move forward again. But if Ahola has no acting experience, he still radiates purity and determination off the screen, enough to push against the historical inertia. The closing, with Zishe trying to warn his shtetl against the coming holocaust, is uncharacteristically mawkish, without the operatic sentiment of Herzog's most ecstatic creations, but what's gone before is an intriguing variation, if not the start of a new corpus.

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