Max Manus: Valorizing Heroes

The Norwegian film celebrates the wartime career of the famous resistance figure.

If Hitler had won the war, Norwegian resistance fighter Max Manus would have been executed as a terrorist and the resistance movement of which he was an integral part would have been called a counterinsurgency of saboteurs and spies. Of course, the Allies won and along with the spoils of victory go the ability to nominate the heroes and villains of history. And so Max Manus is celebrated while the name of Vidkun Quisling, the former army officer and fascist politician who collaborated with the Nazis, is synonymous with traitor.

In reality, the process is not usually as clear cut as in the movies. Most populations were neither heroes nor villains – the masses usually consisting of witnesses, bystanders, innocent and not-so-innocent victims, and major or minor collaborators. However, it’s hard to cheer for films or get big box office numbers showing the complexity of human choice under adversity in a million shades of grey.

Much more uplifting to create films such as Max Manus, a biopic largely based on Manus’ decorated wartime career as a resistance hero par excellence. Actually, it would be hard to invent the story of Manus as his exploits are legendary and his skills superlative. Although the film only deals with a handful of his operations, there was hardly a German military or industrial target he did not successfully attack, usually by blowing it up.

Max Manus opens in Toronto on April 2, although it was originally released in 2008. A Norwegian-Danish-German co-production directed by Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg, the plot drips with equal parts suspense and anti-Nazi adventure.

Manus is so well known among his Norwegian compatriots that it is surprising that there has been no major cinematic treatment of his life before now. And although Norway is hardly a powerhouse of international cinema, the production values here are solid, although the special effects somewhat less so. In particular, the backdrop for the sinking of the German supply ship Donau looks like one of those sweeping and overly-romantic pieces of war art one finds on the 2nd or 3rd floors of continental military museums.

Aksel Hennie as Manus is at times wooden and one-dimensional, although he does manage to develop to an appropriate level of survivor’s guilt and emotional complexity by the conclusion of the film. But when British Colonel J.S. Wilson asks him why he wants to be a saboteur, Manus so earnestly replies, “My country was stolen from me, sir…and I want it back” that one thinks perhaps Hennie had just been pulled off some casting director’s contact list under the heading “overly patriotic and attractive resistance hero.” And attractive the cast is – so tall, blond, and blue-eyed that in another time and place they might have appeared as poster boys for the Hitler Youth. Understood this way, it’s no wonder that they could move so easily around Oslo without disguise.

The best performance comes from Ken Duken as the Nazi commander Siegfried Wolfgang Fehmer, who delivers his lines in flawless Norwegian and German and displays an admirable level of respect for his adversary Manus, both for his extraordinary ingenuity and his ability to elude capture. A quick side note – after Fehmer’s performance here and Christoph Waltz as the infamous and imaginary Colonel Landa in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, the bar has been set pretty high for actors playing multilingual Nazis with the perfect combination of perfidy and charm.

Max Manus belongs to a new wave of revisionist Second World War cinema that seeks to valorize anti-Nazi resistance in seemingly impossible situations. It’s a popular genre, especially in countries that have a lot of real-life collaboration to answer for. Thus, in Germany we have Margarethe von Trotta’s Rosenstrasse, which unearths a little-known story about German women who, in 1943, protested the detention and potential deportation of their Jewish husbands in the heart of Berlin. Or the more well-known case of Sophie Scholl—die letzten Tage, Marc Rothemund’s account of the final days of Germany’s most famous anti-Nazi heroine who, along with her brother Hans, led the Munich-based “White Rose” student resistance movement. Hollywood has gotten into the act as well, but prefers the happy ending variety of revisionism. Edward Zwick’s action-thriller Defiance explores the conflicts and triumphs of the Bielski brothers, Belarusian Jews who escaped the German massacre of their village in 1941 and went on to lead a large and varied group of survivors who sought refuge in their forest camp.

Because the Second World War still remains the consummate “good war” and its product – the greatest generation – still possess so many stories to bequeath to their grandchildren and great-grandchildren, it’s doubtful this wave will be cresting anytime soon.