The last time I cried at a movie, I was twelve years old and had the flu.
It was "Phar Lap," the story of a racehorse that died not long after winning
its first race in America. I was a kid, I loved horses, I had a fever,
okay?
I've never been much for crying at movies. Everything from "Steel Magnolias"
to "Fried Green Tomatoes" left me without a tear. I watched "Terms of Endearment"
while pregnant and didn't cry.
But by the end of "Conspiracy," an HBO movie that premiered this weekend,
tears were streaming down my face.
This column is not really a movie review. But sometimes movies can clue
you into something much deeper than simple entertainment.
"Conspiracy," for those who don't know, is the story of a meeting among
about a dozen German military and bureaucratic folks in 1942, detailing
their plans for the Final Solution. From that meeting came the Holocaust.
Kenneth Branaugh as Heinrich and Stanley Tucci as Eichmann were both chilling.
The rest of the Nazis tended to blend together at first, and only as the
end approaches do they begin to take on a life of their own.
It is a hard movie to listen to. Set aside the anti-Semitism for the moment.
They talk callously of the practicality of sterilizing Jewish men and women,
the "legalities" involved with killing Jewish people who may be married
to Germans. And there are some who have a physical reaction as the realization
sinks in that they are not talking about exiling or containing Jews, but
about annihilating them. It is the last gasping breaths of humanity and
morality in them trying to fight against the evil they are proposing.
And there is the dance of the SS, a slight comment here, a hint there,
that never quite threatens those who are considering voting against the
Final Solution, but subtly pressures them into it.
So by the time Branaugh briefs them on the efficiency of gas showers and
the construction planned at this little place called Auschwitz, I was crying.
See, it occurred to me that in all the millennia we have been writing fiction,
performing plays, making up television shows and motion pictures, of all
the fairytales and nightmares we have recorded for subsequent generations,
we have never been able to top this horror.
For one who believes in a benevolent God, it is doubly horrible, as I could
imagine the Almighty shedding his own tears at the hideousness of his creation.
Like Victor Frankenstein, he created monsters, too. If there is a hell,
you can bet these men are roasting in it.
Kenneth Branaugh said in 20 years of acting, Heinrich was the most uncomfortable
character he had ever played. I could believe it. He speaks so casually
of Auschwitz, and behind the calm words in a pleasant dining room, with
plates of delicacies before them, lies the deaths of millions of people,
starving, beaten and maimed before they were exterminated and incinerated.
Heinrich brags that Auschwitz could eliminate 2,500 Jews in an hour at
peak efficiency, as though discussing the gas mileage of his new car. That
was when I began to weep.
It hurts to watch this movie, hurts somewhere in the civilized human being
at one's core. When doing a less-than-tasteful story from time to time,
I would complain that my ethics hurt. Watching "Conspiracy" made my morality
hurt, and yet I could not turn away.
What is it about the Holocaust that so captures us? Is it the train-wreck
theory, that human beings cannot help but be curious about monstrosity?
Perhaps. But I believe it is a warning to us, the museum display of the
worst that human beings can ever be, the most horrific hell-on-earth we
are capable of creating. It warns us that such monstrosities can never
happen again.
But more frightening is that the Nazis were not alien monsters or devils
up from hell - they were intelligent, rational, efficient men, obsessed
with a hatred none of us have ever been able to explain.
That is the most frightening thing about "Conspiracy." These men belonged
to us. They were one of us. If they were capable of this, so are we. And
that is enough to make a grown woman cry.
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