message in the movies By Rev. Bruce Batchelor Glader

                
The Counterfeiters  Rated R
In German, with English subtitles.
Directed by Stefan Ruzowitzky.
Starring Karl Markovics, August Diehl



As the film “The Counterfeiters” begins, the Second World War has just ended and we meet Salomon Sorowitsch, (Markovics)  a confident man of means, strolling though the casinos of Monte Carlo.  We don’t know it yet, but Sally is a Jewish survivor of the Nazi death camps.  The film then flashes back to a time prior to his imprisonment, and we learn that Sorowitsch was a master forger, adept at counterfeiting documents and producing phony passports.  His criminal talent not only gets him arrested by the Germans, but proves to be a way of survival, as he is recruited to be a member of a select team of counterfeiters given the task of duplicating British pounds and American dollars.  If they succeed in producing top quality currency, the Nazis hope to flood Great Britain and the United States with bogus bills and bring down the world economy.  The hired forgers are provided soft bunks and given good food to eat while, on the other side of the wall, fellow Jews are being starved and marched to the gas chambers.  As the group get closer to their goal of producing authentic currency, Sally finds himself striving for perfection while, at the same time, another member of the team tries to sabotage the project.  Based on a true story, “The Counterfeiters” is one of the more nuanced reflections on ethics that I have seen in recent years.  What would you be willing to do to procure a higher level of comfort and safety for yourself, even if it demanded that you ignore the sufferings of others?  Austrian Director Ruzowitzky mentioned in a recent radio interview that he didn’t want to make just another Holocaust movie, but hoped to get viewers to think about how the affluent life style of the West is often achieved by disregarding the plight of those who suffer “on the other side of the wall”.  “The Counterfeiters” won the 2008 Academy Award for Best Foreign Film.  Don’t let the title fool you; this movie is the real deal.

Pitchfork Rating: Three halos.  (A thought-provoking morality play told as a real-life suspense thriller.)  Three pitchforks. (For abrupt, shocking acts of violence and the degradation of concentration camps; brief nudity and scenes of unmarried sexual activity.)