Pawel Pawlikowski's quiet but tremendously vibrant Fatherland is a road movie about the multitudes of grief.
In the story, a father and daughter, Thomas and Erika Mann, travel from West to East Germany after the end of the Second World War for Thomas to receive the Goethe prize in literature. He has already received one in the west, so, naturally, the fractured side of the east must give him one as well. Throughout all this, the ghost of Klaus, Erika's brother and Thomas' son, looms over them. He was supposed to join them for the journey. Instead, they receive word of his suicide mere moments before setting off.
Fatherland is part biopic, part rumination on a fractured Europe and how broken people stitched the country together in ways even they didn't understand. Shot in gorgeous black and white, it suggests we never took the time to heal after the devastation, and every ripple of that has grown into a new tidal wave, which is now nearing a new apex.
The remarkable Sandra Hüller plays Erika, who, in reality, was an anti-fascist writer, actor, and war correspondent. Her brother, Klaus, was the same, as well as an openly gay man at a time when it was a criminal offense almost everywhere. Even as the world celebrated liberation from Nazi thugs, minorities were still rejected from the society that claimed itself a beacon of freedom. Huller once again showcases her innate ability to express so much with mere gestures alone. We can tell how she's feeling from a shift between her feet or a shrug of her shoulders. In a rare moment of overt emotion, as Hüller screams into the night, it's as if she could reach out from the screen into our very soul.
Thomas is played by the veteran actor Hanns Zischler, who some will remember from his tremendously low-key part in Steven Spielberg's Munich. Here, he plays a father to children he doesn't quite understand, but admires from the same distance as his research into Goethe, the German author who died over a century before their road trip.
The film plays out in extended episodes on the road, where Thomas and Erika encounter a new breed of fascist thugs, each of whom claims to understand the intentions of Goethe's language better than the last, and how their plans for an oppressive future will surely work this time. At first, Thomas is bemused, as Erika quietly seethes. As they wander through the ruins of East Germany, watch how Thomas' detachment chips away, and how antsy he becomes at the sight of yet another empire built on the rickety foundations of a still smouldering one.
Pawlikowski is a marvelously understated filmmaker. Yet he's never obtuse, nor is he purposefully muted. His characters have much to say, but lack the ability or opportunity to express it because the world around them is in such turmoil that anything less than a primal scream is lost in the cacophony.
But when things slow down, and a father and daughter listen to music in a destroyed church, or walk down a forested cemetery where the past reaches out through statues, we can trace the roots of their sorrows and joys deep into the Earth and our own history. That says more than a thousand monologues.
