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Reviews of Recent Independent, Foreign, & Documentary Films in Theaters and DVD/Home Video
UNLIKELY HEROES
Though the events it chronicles are in themselves emotionally devastating, this 2003
documentary about rare acts of resistance during the Holocaust does not fully work as a
film, since it does not appear to be quite sure of what to make of the figures whose stories
it tells. This central flaw is hinted at in the film’s redundant title: after all, isn’t part of
what makes people heroic, by definition, that their actions are risky, and therefore
unlikely? In this way, the documentary - produced by Moriah Films, the Simon
Wiesenthal Center’s film division - seems to be trying to have it both ways, stressing the
averageness of its protagonists’ backgrounds while setting out to depict them as exceptional people. While this may be a too-philosophical - if not semantic - gripe,
it goes to the heart of why Unlikely Heroes is not able to rise above being more
than a museum exhibit-style educational guide (albeit an extremely significant one, as are
all of the Wiesenthal Center’s efforts). The heroic acts include the achievements of
Pinchas Rosenbaum, the Hungarian son of a rabbi who risked his life by posing as a Nazi
to save his fellow Jews; Willy Perl, a Jew from Austria who defied the infamous Adolf
Eichmann by smuggling Jews into Palestine; and Robert Clary, a Jewish teenager in
Nazi-occupied France who survived in concentration camps due to his singing talent.
As is evident, these individuals’ stories are worth telling. However, the documentary - its
best intentions notwithstanding - somewhat misguidedly serves to make them
larger-than-life heroes, particularly during a segment on Lithuanian partisan Leon Kahn,
which, with its soaring music and emphasis on the notion of revenge, turn him,
presumably in an unintended way, into a conveyor of vigilante justice. This manner of
thinking about the protagonists’ remarkable actions in an otherwise hopeless period
(à la Schindler’s List) is simple-minded, with the ultimate message being
that good can survive when confronted with the most destructive forces. Only at the
end, when the film invokes Pinchas Rosenbaum’s declaration that his courage emerged
out of irresponsibility, does the film suggest a complex and infinitely more tragic
perspective on the protagonists’ heroism: not only was it dangerous, it was irrational.
Perhaps to give the surviving heroes and their families a sense of comfort and purpose,
the film glosses over a grim truth: that what these people succeeded in doing was also the
result of luck. It was not, as some of those interviewed suggest, predestined that they
would pull it off. But they did, thereby compounding the sense of absurdity and lack of
decipherable explanation behind the genocide. Reymond Levy
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