Mark Reviews Movies: THE CAPTAIN

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 2, 2018

Someone once said that the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. The Captain asks the question of what it takes for a man to do evil, and the simple answer is terrifyingly simple. All that it takes is a reason, an excuse, or a justification.

The film is based on the true story of Willi Herold, a German soldier during World War II who became a war criminal in the closing weeks of the conflict. Writer/director Robert Schwentke's dramatization of Herold's actions as the war comes to a close doesn't exaggerate what the man did, which would be absurdly comic if it weren't so arbitrarily horrific. This is the tale of a man who fakes it until he makes it. The "faking it" part is lying about being the sword of purported justice for Adolf Hitler, and the "making it" part is becoming a man who takes great pride in a long list of murders.

The real Herold either deserted or was separated from his unit as the Allied forces began to take over parts of Germany. The film opens with Willi (played with a frightening degree of calmness by Max Hubacher) running for his life from a truck filled with German soldiers and an officer. Schwentke obviously goes with the idea that the man is a deserter, but there's no righteous motivation for his desertion from the Nazi army here. He's simply trying to save his own skin. When he discovers another solider at an empty train station, Willi leaves him to be killed by farmers trying to protect themselves and their possessions from looters, who have become a plague on the civilian population of Germany as the war effort looks hopeless.

The reality of the story continues, as Willi discovers a uniform an abandoned truck. It's the uniform of an officer—a captain of the Luftwaffe to be specific. Willi puts it on, pretends to be the officer who was chasing him at the story's start, and finds that the attitude of such a man is a perfect fit for him. The uniform itself is not, since the legs of the pants extend past his boots. Only one person, a deserter whom Willi enlists for his fictional task force, notices this, but he doesn't say anything—at first because he admires the audacity of the charade and later because he sees the possibility to do terrible things under an air of authority.

Willi's task force is a band of soldiers who always say they were separated from their respective unit. We might believe that of Freytag (Milan Peschel), who happens upon the fake officer just after he puts on the uniform. He's eager to be under command again, and Willi grants him that wish.

The man who notices Willi's pants is Kipinski (Frederick Lau), an actual deserter who has taken over that aforementioned farm by force with a few of comrades. Later on, Kipinski imagines himself as the initiator of Willi's descent into a murderous arbiter of illegal executions in a prison camp and in a German town. Kipinski isn't there, though, when Willi kills his first man. The man is a deserter who has become a looter. Willi has convinced the locals of a village that he's under authority to reimburse them for their stolen, and in order to keep up appearances and to pay off his bar tab, the locals want him to execute the thief.

That he does so tells us about his willingness to survive. That he does so without hesitation tells us something about his true nature.

A significant portion of the story takes place at a prison camp, which has, according to the officer who runs it (played by Bernd Hölscher), a "storage problem." There are simply too many deserters here, and the bureaucratic maze of the Nazi government prevents him doing anything about it. Surely, though, a man like Willi, who claims to have direct orders from Hitler, can bypass such roadblocks to "justice."

At no point does anyone here make any effort to actually see those purported, non-existent orders from the leader of Nazi Germany. There are two reasons: One is the fear of consequences if Willi is telling the truth, and the other is that the authority, whether real or fake, gives these men the justification to do what they want. It allows Kapinski to beat one prisoner to death in front of the other prisoners and camp guards. After a game of dueling phone calls with the camp's inner warden (played by Waldemar Kobus), it allows the camp's military overseer to arrange a series of mass executions of deserters without a court martial. Given free rein to kill, the only thing left for the executioners is a matter of numbers—how many prisoners within how many groups to be killed.

Schwentke simply watches this unfold without any external commentary (save for a moment when the film flashes forward to the present, in order to show the field where the prisoner camp once existed). The film is shot in crisp black-and-white by the director and cinematographer Florian Ballhaus, and aside from a few jarring camera movements, the story is presented with the objective distance of a documentary.

It's frightening, not because Willi undergoes a transformation of character within the uniform, but because the uniform simply provides him and others the freedom to carry out the impulses of their darkest selves. In The Captain, the uniform doesn't make the man. It gives this man the ability to be as evil as he is.

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