The Hunt

As a self-professed Catholic, I generously (or at least I think so) volunteer my time for Catholic activities.  A requirement for such volunteering is that I undergo “Safe Environment” classes.  In these classes, I learn about child sex abuse, signs of a predator, and what to do in case of abuse.  As you have no doubt surmised, the Church has imposed these classes due to the recent spate of child sex abuse cases.  At any rate, I have sometimes wondered what happens when a child falsely accuses someone of abuse.  Isn’t the child given the benefit of doubt?  Does a bare accusation (from a six year old, who is barely aware of him or herself) transform an otherwise good man into a loathsome predator?  Well, The Hunt deals aptly with this situation.

In The Hunt, Mads Mikkelsen (a most handsome man) plays a down-on-his-luck fellow who lives in a small and somewhat tribal Danish town.  His career consists of helping at the local Kindergarten, and one day a girl claims that Mads showed her his penis…  Even though he didn’t.  The town proceeds to lose its collective mind and Mads becomes a pariah.  Other children create their own tales of abuse.  Shopkeepers deny service to Mads, hooligans throw stones through his window, and someone even kills his dog.  But Mads is never convicted.  The paucity of evidence apparently didn’t convince the judge that a crime had occurred.  What is striking is that Mads sticks it out in the town.  He suffers the abuse and insists on his innocence.  Eventually, a reconciling of sorts occurs.  The chief accusator recants her tale and Mads is eventually brought back into the town’s embrace…  But not all forgive.

A simple accusation can ruin a person’s life, which this movie depicts in mesmerizing fashion.  Wonderfully simple yet tremendously effective – a modern classic.

The Lives of Others

Monochromatic apartment buildings, box-like cars, a hovering despair, an unspeakable paranoia –  this is East Germany of the 1980s, the subject of The Lives of Others.  The protagonist is a loyal member of the Stasi (State Security), whose days are orderly yet vacant.  His superiors assign him to monitor a playwright, whom they suspect of subversive activities.  In East Germany of that time, monitoring means wiring the playwright’s home, listening to his every word, and watching him without rest.  As our protagonist listens in on the lives of these others (the playwright and his girlfriend), he empathizes with their plight and begins to see the brokenness of the regime for which he works.  So changed does he become that he covers up the playwright’s unpatriotic activities, thereby risking his own career.  After the Berlin Wall falls and the Soviet edifice crumbles, the playwright discovers what the Stasi agent did for him and is moved by the charity of this unknown man.

The movie is a striking portrayal of an era.  The suffocating surveillance of the Stasi fills the country with fear.  Yet not just fear, but also hopelessness.  Characters are faced with a dilemma.  They can accept the state of affairs and go on with their humdrum but shackled lives.  Or they can risk the danger of speaking out and perhaps losing all that they cherish.  A few characters compromise.  But even those that do not are by no means pure freedom fighters.  The struggles of ordinary humans in an oppressive state is the theme of the movie, and our protagonist lives this struggle most poignantly, working within and eventually against the Stasi.  Most interestingly, however, his reasons for doing so are never fully apparent.  He does not appear motivated by ideology, but rather by empathy – empathy for the people whom he monitors.

William Buckley Jr. apparently considered this one of the best movies ever made.  That may be hyperbole.  But this is certainly a classic.