'Taking Sides'

Off-key

CAN ART STILL be considered brilliant, innovative, or transcendent if it's produced for the amusement of a madman? Can anything produced under those circumstances even be considered art? Witness the furor over the recent passing of Leni Riefenstahl, the filmmaker best known for furthering Hitler's myth; it's a debate that seems destined to rage on ad infinitum. István Szabó's Taking Sides, another phoenix in the growing pile of ashes in the public consciousness, examines the case of Wilhelm Furtwängler (Stellan Skarsgård), considered by many to be one of the greatest symphony conductors ever to wield a baton. Including, unfortunately, his nation's despot, who not only allowed the maestro to flourish under a Faustian bargain but also insisted on having Furtwängler perform at his birthday celebration in 1944. As the Allies begin indicting war criminals in postwar Germany, Furtwängler's case becomes a pet project for Major Steve Arnold (Harvey Keitel), a Nazi hunter who goes after the broken genius like a rabid rottweiler. Like many of his compatriots, Furtwängler claims ignorance of the atrocities; if no one was aware, Arnold counters, "then why did all those Jews need 'saving'?" Szabó has examined these themes in depth before (see his 1981 masterpiece Mephisto), which may be why his latest take seems to be lacking a fire in its belly. There are other strikes against it, starting with the banal title and ending with a rickety narrative structure (a subplot involving Arnold's Jewish second-in-command and his secretary withers on the vine). Skarsgård invests his Furtwängler with a sweaty, shifty-eyed neurosis that suggests confusion and a dawning realization of complicity, but Keitel's monotone Bronx bark, gluing the film's dialogue dial at "scream," keeps the proceedings at the level of a community-college production of Judgment at Nuremberg. (David Fear)