UNLIKELY HEROES
Directed by: Richard Trank.
Produced & Written by: Rabbi Marvin Hier & Richard Trank.
Director of Photography: Jeffrey Victor.
Edited by: Lorraine Salk.
Music by: Lee Holdridge.
Released by: Seventh Art Releasing.
Country of Origin: USA. 120 min. Not Rated.
Narrated by: Sir Ben Kingsley.

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
September 13, 2004