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THE UNKNOWN SOLDIER
Directed by: Michael Verhoeven.
Produced by: Verhoeven & Ernst Ludwig Ganzert.
Director of Photography: Stefan Schindler, et al.
Edited by: Gabriele Kröber.
Music by: Martin Grubinger & Art Percussion, Mike Herting.
Released by: First Run Features.
Country of Origin: Germany. 97 min. Not Rated.

Another apt title for Michael Verhoeven’s new film could be It’s All True. The director continues to probe into modern Germany’s past, centering his documentary on the 1999-2004 Wehrmacht Exhibition, which brought to light the war crimes of the ordinary foot soldier. A sideshow of picketers accompanied the 11-city tour, protesting the connotation of the Germans as a criminal people – not my Großvater! Among them, Verhoeven actually finds a few articulate distracters among the crowd – when they are able to speak. More times than not, anyone interviewed before his camera is silenced by the mob, largely made up of young male neo-skinheads. And more than once a hand blocks Verhoeven’s lens.

He lays out the exhibit’s graphic message of how the German Army was instrumental for Hitler’s plan to wipe out the native populations of Poland and Russia (where starvation was a weapon) to make way for German colonization, and in the Holocaust. In fact, the army had authority over the SS. In the occupied East, the military occupiers protected the population and involved the locals in the archaic slaughter of Jews. Through the few surviving photos, donated by individual families of former soldiers (which were a part of the exhibit), and wartime footage, Verhoeven builds a solid case, aided by riveting first-person accounts.

It has been over 15 years since Verhoeven’s award-winning The Nasty Girl was a hit in the U.S. Based on a true story, that feature film confronted a small Bavarian hamlet’s hidden but widespread Nazi past through its young, crusading title character. Imaginatively filmed and edited, the tone was mischievous, but never undercut the film’s subject matter. Much more somber and straightforwardly told, The Unknown Soldier, relying a lot on talking heads, was made for European television and should, appropriately, find a berth on PBS. Kent Turner
August 28, 2007