Search - The Ogre on DVD

Children of Light, Children of Darkness

Dark Mechanicus JSG | Fortified Bunker, USSA | 10/19/2003

(4 out of 5 stars)

"Is a man's character forged at birth, in his genes---or is it determined by his experiences, by his loves, by his ambitions, by his will? What is the difference between a man and a child? Why is the dreamworld common to a child's playtime any more---or less---real than the often nightmarish, brutal 'reality' common to grown-ups? These are questions that Volker Schlondorff's fine, haunting, surreal and compulsively watchable "The Ogre" spends a great deal of time with, though Schlondorff is far too subltle and skilled a craftsman to beat the viewer over the head with these things---at least, until the movie's final minutes, which felt oddly ham-handed (given what had preceded them) and grafted on to a film that devotes itself to the mysteries, secret fantasies, and occasional horrors of childhood. "The Ogre" mixes a very modern evil, Nazi Germany, with a very ancient one, the legend of the Ogre (known in Germany as the Erl-Konig, the horrible "Erl-King"), stirs them together in Schlondorff's black cauldron, and produces a potent, visually haunting witche's brew indeed. The movie chronicles the short, bizarre, and strangely happy life of Abel Tiffauges(played brilliantly by John Malkovich), a Frenchman who strikes up easy friendships with children, chiefly because he himself is in many ways a child: innocent, simple but not simplistic, drawn to myths and fairy tales and ripping yarns of adventure in the Canadian wilderness---and especially the silly faces and scary spook voices that endear him to his young friends and, as "The Ogre" progresses, his charges. Wrongfully accused of attacking a young girl, Abel is spared prison by the outbreak of World War II, and agrees to join the army to fight the Germans. His brief military career is brought to a halt when his command unit, blithely sipping champagne and discussing the use of carrier pigeons on the front, is captured by German soldiers. Abel is sent East on a prison train, and it is at this point "The Ogre" slips into high gear---and takes a decidedly surreal turn. While Abel's companions plot everything from escape to using Abel's pigeons to convey information back to the doomed French High Command (they ultimately eat the pigeons, causing Abel, in his fanciful way, to renounce the Motherland forever), Abel sees his imprisonment, ironically, as a doorway to freedom. He gazes upon the passing German countryside he glimpses from the slats in his boxcar, and imagines his dream: a cabin, smoke curling up from the chimney, deep in remote woods. Interned at a German prison camp, while his comrades toil to build a landing strip, Abel wanders off into the nearby woods, discovering the cabin of his dreams---and a moose, "The Ogre", who roams the surrounding wilderness. Rather than plot escape, Abel returns to his prison camp, but makes weekly visits to the cabin in the woods, and ultimately encounters the keeper of the estate, Hitler's Chief Forrester, who takes the simple man under his wing and transfers him to SS Reichmarshall Hermann Goerring's hunting lodge, where Abel begins his slow, strange transformation into a procurer of young boys for nearby Nazi Kaltenborn Castle and Hitler Youth training camp, and into the Legend itself: the Ogre, eater of children. There is far too much to "The Ogre" to describe in a brief review; it is a masterful, compelling, gorgeously shot film, and from Goerring's opulent hunting lodge, to the medieval castle that is the SS redoubt, to the sublime carnage of the hunt, to the sequences in which Malkovich pursues terrified boys through a darkening forest on a black horse with snarling dogs at the leash---every shot, every sequence tells. The acting is also excellent, from Volker Spengler's childish, impudent Goerring to the deranged eugenicist played by Dieter Lasser; particularly important are the child actors, all of whom turn out utterly believable, naturalistic performances. But this is Malkovich's movie, and his Abel is no simpleton, but rather a grown child, which is why he is so good with children of all ages himself, and ultimately so much more innocent than the young SS footsoldiers he recruits from the surrounding countryside. Malkovich plays the role with restraint and with a childlike, affable quality which underscores why so many decent minds could have been ensnared by Nazi Germany, and this touches on the film's underlying notion of childhood: Nazi ceremonies, with their dark pageantry, their torchlit marches and ceremonies, their pounding drums, were calculated to appeal to the mind of the youth, the adolescent, the dreamer of dreams. Even the wicked, depraved Goerring is himself an easily distracted child, and is soothed by Abel in a moment of pique, dipping his fat hands into a bowl of gem stones to calm himself. "The Ogre" is shot as a dark fairy tale, from Abel's rambles in the woods, to Hermann Goerring as the reincarnation of Abel's sensual childhood friend Nestor (look at Malkovich's face when the eugenicist praises an SS youth's "Nestorian" nose), to shots of Malkovich riding out through haunting forests straight out of the Brothers Grimm, to the image of Jews, fleeing concentration camps in the final days of the dying Reich, viewed as "legions of the dead" marching past Castle Kaltenborn.

There are some missteps, particularly the ending, which strikes me as completely out of character for Malkovich's Abel; Mueller-Stahl also phones in a performance in which his lines are so mumbled that you need subtitles to decipher them. But that is quibbling. "The Ogre" is an amazing movie, one that requires repeat viewings to unlock its treasures. Darkly fanciful, hoplelessly tragic, it is a deeply rich study of the Children of Light and Darkness."