Sophie Scholl: The Final Days flounders in its obsession with historical accuracy

Sophie Scholl: The Final Days is a movie with an identity crisis. Caught between biopic, historical artifact, and suspenseful thriller, the film tries on different categorical hats without ever finding the right fit.

Sophie Scholl tells the story of Sophie and her brother Hans, members of the White Rose, a German anti-Nazi organization of students. The group concerned itself mostly with a leaflet campaign calling for opposition to Hitler and an end to German participation in the war.

At a clandestine meeting at the beginning of the film, members of the group realize that they have mimeographed too many copies of the latest leaflet they planned on distributing through the mail. Hans suggests they distribute the extras at their university, promising to take full responsibility if he is caught. Sophie is quick to volunteer her help: security personnel are less likely to bother a female, she reasons.

Within the first ten minutes of the movie, our title character is already propelled to her fateful end. After dropping the leaflets in stacks throughout the empty halls of Munich University, Hans and Sophie are prepared to make a clean getaway when Sophie stops: they forgot the third floor. In a burst of energy, she’s up the stairs, laying stacks of paper on the balustrade, to one of which she gives an encouraging shove, sending leaves of paper fluttering down into the empty atrium as the bell sounds and students begin pouring out of classrooms. As Hans and Sophie try to quietly join the sea of students, a janitor screams at them to stop, claiming he saw them on the third floor.

This is the most action that Sophie Scholl: The Final Days offers. The bulk of the film is Sophie’s interrogation by the unrelenting and severe Gestapo investigator Robert Mohr (Gerald Alexander Held). These are also the scenes that buoy the film’s claims to historical accuracy; as a disclaimer at the beginning of the movie lets audiences know, the film is based on Nazi documents detailing Sophie’s case, made public with the fall of East Germany in 1990. But do the details contained in these documents provide enough narrative fodder to sustain a whole movie?

Sophie’s interrogation certainly has some compelling moments. Julia Jentsch is convincing and endearing as the young dissenter, and Held’s Mohr has a certain amount of depth and humanity (he tells Sophie at one point that he has a son her age). But the interrogation scenes drag on without ever really revealing anything new.

Sophie Scholl certainly is not a bad movie. Along with Jentsch’s and Held’s performances, Fabian Hinrichs is a vivid and tenacious Hans Scholl. Director Marc Rothemund and cinematographer Martin Langer do a good job of creating a compelling World War II Munich, though we only get doses of dark streets, shadowed rooms, and municipal buildings. But the movie’s biggest shortfall is its clunky development of Sophie’s character, which is only really hinted at. Apart from her politics and personal resolve, Sophie’s personality is only delivered through rationed-but appealing-glimpses: Sophie and a girlfriend giggling and singing along to Ella Fitzgerald’s “Sugar,” Sophie writing a gushy letter to a friend describing the sensation of listening to Schubert. The film stumbles over other potentially rich material as well: Sophie’s apolitical boyfriend fighting in Hitler’s army, the White Rose’s connection to the Munich intelligentsia, the tormenting personal experience of facing imminent death.

The filmmakers seem determined to define Sophie only by her martyrdom, only by her role as historical figure, her role-important as it may be-as the solemn figurehead for the undeniable good that is freedom of expression. So most of her time on the screen is spent as the daring political activist, the earnest and determined accused, and the tragically persecuted.

In the end, it is not clear why the filmmakers wanted to make this movie. There have already been two films detailing Sophie’s trial and execution, The Last Five Days (1982) and The White Rose (also 1982). Sophie Scholl is already famous as a national heroine in Germany; her bust sits alongside those of Albert Einstein and Johannes Brahms in the Walhalla temple, a hall of fame for German luminaries and heroes, in Bavaria. Does her story really need to be told again?

The most apparent reason for making the movie seems to be the relatively new availability of the Nazi documents. But is this reason enough for making, and then asking audiences to sit through, a two-hour movie? It would be if the documents contained new, surprising and revealing information. But the film’s interpretation certainly doesn’t suggest this. In fact, there does not seem to be any detail in Sophie’s interrogation or trial-the scenes in which the film apparently draws most heavily from the documents-that a historically informed screenwriter could not have imagined up.
It may be argued that there is some inherent value in reenacting “what really happened”, the “chilling authenticity” as the film’s poster brags, that Sophie Scholl: The Final Days is important because the characters say the lines actually uttered by their historical counterparts. In describing Andre Hennicke’s portrayal of the unequivocally sinister Nazi judge Roland Freisler in the film, New Yorker critic Anthony Lane claimed, “Freisler is not complex, or leavened with irony; he’s a bore. But he existed, and the eagerness with which he dispatched good people to their deaths means that he should be dishonored forever.” Lane justifies Hennicke’s one-sided Freisler by assigning some purpose and responsibility to the role. But there are many other boring details in the film that are not as easily excusable. Can we really forgive bad storytelling if it’s historically accurate? As viewers, how do we know where the historical accuracy stops and the filmmakers’ fiction begins? That is, in talking about the movie, which parts do we hold up to narrative fictional scrutiny and which do we let off the hook as history, reality, the truth or some critically-immune combination of the three?

In any case, there is still an important historical phenomenon happening with the making of Sophie Scholl: Germany’s ongoing project of coming to terms with its sordid history. Maybe Anthony Lane is right in suggesting that Sophie Scholl: The Final Days is valuable as a civics lesson. But it’s a lesson that shouldn’t take two hours.