Another Hollywood Gloss

Watched Eric Till's Luther last night. It is interesting to note that this effort was in part underwritten by a Lutheran Investment Company. What they got was a shallow treatment of a very complex man. There were 95 debating points--theses-- nailed to that church door but this bio concentrates almost exclusively on John Tetzel and the selling of indulgences. We see an individual who is tortured by self-doubt and self loathing. An unwashed monk who, before he is to meet the Pope's representative, is asked to take a bath--so he won't smell or give the prelate lice and fleas. Although much is made of his obsession with confession and later his work translating the Bible into German, aside from the support of his confessor we barely meet Melanchthon who may be recognized as having "ghostwritten" much that is credited to Luther. That he suffered from lifelong bad digestion and is quoted as having said he would love to fart in the face of the devil seems to have been censored. Apparently burning books, and monks as it happens, does make good footage.

The Lutheran Church was founded and the Reformation fomented by an unwashed (drunken) monk who marries a nun. Contrast this with a pope who delighted in hunting wild boar and supported a stable of up to a thousand concubines. The Germany of the Sixteenth Century was a welter of independent city states, electorates, and protectorates and Luther survives the Inquisition because he has the protection of Frederick who is tired of seeing his subject's money going to Italy to build St Peters.

Joseph Fiennes looks terrible in tonsure, his make-up artist must have cringed and as Ulric, Marco Hofschneider, now in his thirties, is barely recognizable as the prepubescent stripling lad whose dimples charmed everyone in Europa, Europa. Interesting that the Czech Republic stands in for Germany just as it did for Medieval England in Tristan and Isolde. Although things tend to drag at certain points one can forgive them for not presenting us with one of Luther's hour-long sermons or the four-hour-long German Mass of which these were a part. And to think people stood through those services--guess that's one way to ensure they stayed awake. I am disappointed they didn't use more of Luther's hymns though. Literal translations of an opus such as "Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott" show a man who used salty language and for whom the fires of Hell were very real. Modern audiences might not want to sit through all 30 or so verses of these hymns sung 'lento'. We do get to meet Katey, the woman behind the man; though Claire Cox is no one's idea of a buxom German Frau.

To summarize, even though this movie is just two hours long, the pause button comes in handy often. Without some exercise I'd have been hard-pressed to stay awake. The screen-writers could have used more research and tightened up their plot lines considerably using the time saved to present more well-rounded character development. For a movie about a man whose ideas shook the world we see very little theology here.