Review: ‘Bonhoeffer,’ a dramatization of a celebrated theologian’s life, makes him a superhero

For filmmakers with points to make about good versus evil (and not necessarily subtle ones), World War II would seem a safe space. Take the shortened life of anti-Nazi German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a voice against intolerance who worked to save Jews, who may have aided people trying to kill Hitler and who was executed by the crumbling Third Reich in its final days.

There’s righteousness there that’s hard to ignore, and it’s made Bonhoeffer, the author of dozens of books before his death, a figure of admiration and a martyr to many. But writer-director Todd Komarnicki’s aggressively lionizing, faith-driven movie about Bonhoeffer seems uninterested in any complexity about pacifism and violence coexisting in one man. Instead, it presents him as a steadfast superhero for justice, no less in the full title itself, which adds the descriptors usually saved for a summer-blockbuster tagline: “Bonhoeffer: Pastor. Spy. Assassin.” The poster, too, ups the action ante, giving this blond, bespectacled Lutheran thinker (played by Jonas Dassler) a conspicuous handgun and the air of someone all too ready to use it.

First, though, the movie hustles us through some early-years mythologizing: childhood in a loving family, losing an older brother to World War I, and some time in New York in 1930 as a seminary student, learning about American racism from no less than the Rev. Adam Clayton Powell (an authoritative Clarke Peters). It’s also not enough that this eager white ally is the one to get punched by a spitting bigot — the first of the movie’s curious choices in depicting who experiences violence — but he’s also called on stage at a jazz club to jam with the band. So make that “Pastor. Spy. Assassin. Has Black Friends.”

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Back in Germany, though, the rise of the Nazis is what sets Bonhoeffer on his Christian resistance path, disturbed by the country’s sudden fealty to a false god stoking “rumor and rage.” He calls out sympathizing clergy (one of them looks like Max Shreck of the original “Nosferatu”), rails against Hitler from the pulpit and takes to teaching seminarians in a hideaway before deciding to do more dangerous work, like sneaking into Britain to muster clandestine support from priests.

Some of the movie’s hand-wringing conversations — about politics poisoning the church, dividing people, fostering lies and hypocrisy — sound timely and will strike a chord. But label the movie’s politics at your peril, because it comes from conservative Christian outfit Angel Studios (the “Sound of Freedom” distributor). Bonhoeffer’s own legacy has lately been usurped by outspoken Christian nationalists, enough so that his own descendants have come out to decry anyone distorting his life and words as anything but a peace-loving man of God.

What to make, then, of a movie that puts Bonhoeffer in the room with assassination plotters or asking British clergy to smuggle in explosives? It’s disputed history, for one thing, which means it unnecessarily slathers genre suspense on an already overwrought, cookie-cutter and ideologically ultra-confident biography. What’s missing are the character nuances that speak to hard times under a divided church, and how that affected Bonhoeffer the man and a citizen, not just the servant of God.

Every awkwardly declarative, stagy scene in “Bonhoeffer” is just a right-against-wrong equation to be answered by the title character’s virtue. And while one scene does have him meeting a handful of Jews he’s helping, the only camp victim ever shown from arrest to imprisonment to suffering to death is you-know-who. No matter how historically significant the subject is, that kind of framing will only ever be queasy.