Earnest to a fault, this biopic of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German Lutheran pastor who resisted the Nazis and was eventually murdered by them in a concentration camp mere weeks before Adolf Hitler’s suicide, is old-school moviemaking of the sort that would have been up for Oscars 10 years ago. (Well, maybe. It would perhaps have needed a starrier cast; the actors here are solid stalwarts of German cinema, of the sort that Hollywood largely remains unenthusiastic about.)
Contributing to this slight sense of the passé is the decision to have everyone speak English but in a German accent, a curious choice that was standard practice for years but is now largely avoided. In a film aspiring to moral seriousness, it strikes a slightly odd note. It’s hard to take a line like, “I can see you standing here with a grass stain on your new lederhosen,” quite as seriously as perhaps the film-makers would like.
