Even Caine slogs through 'The Statement'

By Kenneth Turan
Los Angeles Times

Michael Caine and Charlotte Rampling star in "The Statement," screening at the Doris Duke Theatre beginning Tuesday. Jerome Prebois • Sony Pictures Classics 'The Statement' R, for violence 120 minutes 7:30 p.m. Tuesday; 1 and 7:30 p.m. Wednesday; 1 p.m. Thursday; 7:30 p.m. March 5-6; 1 p.m. March 7; 7:30 p.m. March 8; Doris Duke Theatre at the Honolulu Academy of Arts

Oscar-winner Ronald Harwood ("The Pianist"), is adapted from the admired novel by Brian Moore that is in turn based on one of the most intriguing incidents in modern French history.

That's the case of Paul Touvier, a Vichy commander sometimes known as "the torturer of Lyons" who, following Nazi orders during World War II, selected seven Jews who were executed in June 1944 in the village of Dombey.

Touvier was pardoned by President Georges Pompidou in 1971. And when French authorities decided to prosecute him decades later for crimes against humanity, he was aided and hidden by conservative elements of the Catholic Church who, in the words of Moore's novel, included "nakedly anti-Semitic members of the old French church" as well as those who "simply feared the Communists more than the Nazis."

Films, however, can't just sound good on paper; they have to be effective on the screen, and in that form "The Statement" is disappointing. Phlegmatically directed by Jewison from Harwood's lumbering dramaturgy, "The Statement" shows how little fine actors can do when they're prisoners of a tepid, unconvincing script and ennervated moviemaking. "The Statement" is pedestrian almost from beginning to end.

After a black-and-white prelude showing those murders in Dombey, "The Statement" picks up its 70-year-old protagonist, here called Pierre Brossard and played by Caine, in Provence in 1992. He's being shadowed by an assassin whose assignment, in addition to murder, is to plant on the body the statement that gives the film its title: "This man is Pierre Brossard. He has been executed for being a Nazi collaborator."

Though Caine is an impeccable actor who rarely sets a foot wrong, he has not gotten his usual firm grasp on this slippery character.

There's too much worry and hysteria in his twitchy Brossard, too much groveling neurosis as he goes from one church-sanctioned hiding place to another. Brossard isn't just unsympathetic here, he's not even interesting.

Not that Brossard doesn't have a lot to worry about. Besides the assassins who are after him, the French government is on his trail, looking to have him stand trial for those crimes against humanity.

Regrettably, the two bastions of rectitude assigned to the case, Judge Annemarie Livi (Swinton) and the army's Col. Roux (Northam) are just as uninteresting as Brossard.

As the good guys try to figure out who the bad guys are, and both sides try to figure out where Brossard is, we're left trying against all odds to minimally care about any of the above.