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f i l m The Statement Promising 'Statement' has surprisingly little to say By Robert Denerstein, Rocky Mountain News January 9, 2004 With so many powerhouse ingredients in place, The Statement should have been one of the season's heaviest hitters. The movie boasts an impressive cast, a welcome layer of moral complexity and enough thriller elements to keep the story pulsing. But a kind of dramatic anemia pervades director Norman Jewison's adaptation of a novel by Brian Moore. Passable but not potent, The Statement winds up with surprisingly little to say. Too bad, because Michael Caine, hot on the heels of a towering display of desperation in The Quiet American, gives another exceptional performance. As a man who served the Nazis during the Vichy period of French history, Caine stirs up a complex mixture of cruelty, guilt and religious zeal. A Credible Frenchman Speaking without a French accent, Caine manages a nearly impossible feat: He's credible as a Frenchman who sympathized with the Nazis during the war. Caine's Pierre Brossard, a devout Roman Catholic, later craves absolution the way an addict lusts after heroin. He's almost greedy for redemption. In the early '90s, Brossard finds himself under the protection of a right-wing splinter group within the church. Fearing Godless communism, some in the church supported Frenchmen who worked for the Nazis. When Brossard is exposed, he goes on the run, trying to elude capture by two groups, one led by an Army officer (Jeremy Northam) and a Parisian magistrate (Tilda Swinton). He also seems to be a target of Jewish agents seeking revenge. Brossard's crimes are depicted in brief flashbacks to the execution of seven Jewish men in the town of Dombey. If the mention of an atrocity was supposed to provide the movie with a moral imprimatur, it didn't quite work. The Statement seldom gathers the kind of thematic weight it needed. Northam, an actor who always seems to be a few clicks short of turning into Cary Grant, ignites few sparks with Swinton, who brings the crisp precision of an officious attorney to her role. Watching Northam and Swinton is a bit like watching the air leak from a tire that seems firm only when Caine hits the screen. A small scene between Caine and his estranged wife (Charlotte Rampling) suggests a moral and sexual complexity that mostly eludes Jewison. Caine and Rampling write a neat little essay on the coercive power of fear. Bates Deserves Praise One note: The late Alan Bates deserves praise for his work here. Bates appears in the small role of a French bureaucrat with an interest in preserving the status quo. Bates' natural civility and soothing smile do little to conceal his character's considerable cunning. He issues a threat as smoothly as a master tailor smoothing the shoulders of an expensive suit. Copyright 2004, Rocky Mountain News. All Rights Reserved. Norman Jewison's The Statement offers Michael Caine as a sympathetic villain TORONTO (CP) - Curiously, Michael Caine had no memory of the work he did on Norman Jewison's The Statement, until he saw the finished product on the screen. The film, based on Brian Moore's 1995 book about a Nazi war criminal protected by a secret right-wing element within the Roman Catholic Church, goes into theatrical release later this month. Caine plays Pierre Brossard who, when he was a young officer in the Vichy Milice in 1944, helped round up France's Jewish citizens. In 1992, when the film opens, his church support is rapidly disappearing and Brossard now 70 is running from unidentified assassins as well as a new military-judicial inquiry. Although Brossard is wanted for crimes against humanity, as played by Caine he can still elicit sympathy. Still, the 70-year-old actor found it difficult to play a character for whom he personally had no appreciation. Terribly Sad Caine told a news conference Monday that at this stage in his career he prefers roles that challenge him and decided, since he so disliked Brossard, to make him terribly sad, because, after all, no man is a villain or a racist in his own mind. "I think racists are sad," Caine said. "Can you imagine every morning all your life you get up, you hate someone you never met? What a terrible waste of time." He added that while the part was terrific, he must have had some sort of amnesia because when he finished the film, he couldn't remember a thing about what he did. "I just cut myself off from him, so it was difficult, but very worthwhile." Jewison said he, too, found himself rooting for Brossard and it took him some time to figure out why. "You always empathise with the fugitive," he said. "You're never on the side of the hounds, you're always on the side of the hare or the fox, the person who is being hunted down." Jewison said Brossard was seeking the church's absolution. "If he could be forgiven by the church, then the church could forgive themselves." Asked if the filmmakers were bracing for controversy, screenwriter Ron Harwood said the church's complicity with the wartime French government was a secret that Moore - a Catholic - felt rightly had to be revealed. Toronto-based producer Robert Lantos said he bought the rights to the book after he made the 1991 film Black Robe based on another novel by Moore, who was born in Northern Ireland, lived in Canada for a few years but moved to the U.S. in 1959. He died in 1999. "He is like the vigilante conscience of the Catholic Church," Lantos said. "He was attracted to those spots in the world where the church had not behaved as he felt it should." You get better as you get older Caine, Lantos and Jewison dismissed suggestions there was a Canadian sensibility to the film other than the fact it took someone outside the Hollywood studio system to create and finance The Statement. "These days they (the studios) have a different mandate," Lantos added. "They try and make tentpole blockbusters aimed at kids. I am an outsider to that world but it's not only Canadians who are outsiders to that world, it's pretty much anybody who wants to make a serious film." Jewison agreed The Statement is not a studio-type film. "So therefore independent films always have to search around for funding, and I think there's a lot of Canadian support for this film. So that made me happy. I love my country." And Jewison said he believes he did Moore's book justice, that it was his most Hitchcockian film to date and, frankly, one of his better films. "I think you get better as you get older." The Statement, distributed in Canada by Thinkfilm, is a Canada-UK-France co-production shot in the south of France. Jewison worked with a largely Canadian crew, including his cinematographer son Kevin. The cast includes Tilda Swinton, Jeremy Northam, Alan Bates, Charlotte Rampling, John Neville and William Hutt. ||| © The Canadian Press, 2003

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