Invincible (2002)

Simply Perfect

Absolutely Fantastic

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

It's 1932. Zishe Breitbart is a Jewish blacksmith in Eastern Poland. He and his little brother Benjamin are attacked by racists at the restaurant. To pay for the damage, Zishe takes on the strongman at a traveling circus. Landwehr is impressed and recruits him to Berlin for Hanussen (Tim Roth) in his Palace of the Occult. The audience is mostly Nazis party members and Hanussen turns Zishe into an Aryan ideal.Werner Herzog picks interesting characters and subject matters to do films about. Sometimes it works really well. This one works somewhat. I really like Jouko Ahola. Despite his size, he has a gentle innocent demeanor. He is perfect for the role. Tim Roth is mercurial. The style of the movie lacks the needed tension. It's simply not exciting and the excessive running time of over two hours really drags out the story. Herzog needs a sharper editing style to pump up the excitement.

Herzog, is not a Director I admire much, but I enjoy his epic stories. Boredom, comes to mind when I watch a Herzog movie. For money, in recent years, he's done a lot of trash, I mean, if you ever see any of his novelties, you'll wonder, what went wrong when Herzog went to Hollywood. You would've expected, better quality output, but you get a Herzog who robs the rich with his name.Production wise though, Herzog is interesting in that he's directed massive uncivilized crowds in some of his films, which takes skill. Herzog is very primitive in that regards, and in it's most basic form, Herzog is King of his cult fame.This film, is good output, in that it's about Nazi Germany, and the little theatre based on a real life story, that demonstrates a interesting drama, with a heart of heroism.If you like cult films, and if you like production. This is good viewing. Could be disappointing to you though as it's a niche film.

There are two very interesting stories struggling to get out of this long, weirdly subdued and studiously undramatic movie. Unfortunately, neither of them manage to break free.Based on a true story, Invincible tells the tale of Zishe Breitbart (Jouko Ahola), a young Polish Jew who leaves his hometown in 1932 to become a strongman on the stage in Berlin, Germany. Lured to Berlin by dreams of the world and a mysterious woman, Zishe becomes a star attraction at a club called the Palace of the Occult. There he meets Hanussen (Tim Roth), the owner of the club and what we would today call a "mentalist". He performs feats of hypnosis, clairvoyance and mind reading for his Nazi-filled audience. Zishe also meets Marta (Anna Grouari), a young piano player who is married to Hanussen and silently suffers under his mistreatment. At first, Hannusen forces his gigantic Jew to portray an Aryan superman, thrilling his supposed German brothers with his example of physical greatness. But Zishe eventually throws off that facade and enrages the Nazis who believe no Jew could or should be that strong. Zishe's example inspires Berlin's Jewish community and the show becomes more popular than ever. Zishe comes to tire of Berlin life and after a decidedly non-explosive confrontation with Hannusen, he returns to Poland and desperately tries to warn his fellow Jews about the threat he sees coming from Germany. The strongman isn't much of a speaker, however, and finds it hard to convince anyone but his little brother Benjamin (Jacob Wein).If Invincible had either focused more strongly on the German preoccupation with the occult or on Zishe's struggle to spread a warning about Nazism when he returned to Poland, this might have been a very good movie. I t doesn't do nearly enough with either, though, and wallows in a wholesome, boring stupor. This is one case where a film based on a true story would have been far better off taking a few liberties with the facts to construct a firmer, more dynamic narrative. Invincible is less a work of entertainment and more an educational film you'd show kids in Hebrew school, and I bet they'd find it as tedious as I did.The fascination with the occult of the Nazis and German society as a whole is an aspect of pre-WWII Germany that hasn't gotten a lot of serious attention in drama. Outside of the outlandish take seen in Hellboy and the "find the magical MacGuffin" elements of the first and third Indiana Jones movies, this is a rare aspect of the Nazis that hasn't been done to death. And Invincible does something quite intriguing with it. It weaves the personal story of Hanussen trying to exploit Nazi superstition for his own benefit into a look at why the occult became such an object of interest in pre-war Germany. The film suggests that Germans still suffering from the aftermath of WWI saw the supernatural as a way of recapturing the greatness they thought they had lost. After military defeat, economic ruin and political impotency, the supposedly mystical powers of someone like Hanussen were a dark beacon drawing in Germans who had lost their faith in the real world. Unfortunately, the movie doesn't spend enough time with Roth and the Nazis to get any further into the subject than I have in this review.The story of Zishe returning to Poland and desperately trying to convey the real menace of the Nazis to his disbelieving fellow Jews could also have made for one heck of a movie. But Invincible spends about 5 minutes on that before moving on. What could have been a poignant struggle against skepticism that the Nazis could really be that bad and with Zishe's own inarticulateness is dispensed with in a cursory fashion. Imagine if all the killings at the end of The Godfather happened off screen and were only referred to by other characters and that's sort of how it feels in this film.Poor storytelling choices aside, Invincible probably never had a chance to be any good once Jouko Ahola was cast as Zishe. Now, the role is that of a huge muscle man, so it's not like Tim Roth could have played the part. But Ahola is distractingly terrible. His performance would get him laughed off the stage during a high school play. He makes Dolph Lundgren look like a master thespian. Not only can't he act, Ahola has absolutely no screen presence at all. I don't know how drunk writer/director Werner Herzog was when he decided to use someone this talentless and flat as his main character, but I'd bet that instead of measuring the level of alcohol in his blood, you'd have to measure the level of blood in his alcohol.This movie has to be remade. There's simply too much about the basic story that's obviously captivating to allow it to remain stuck in this well-intentioned but unfocused and ill-considered trial of a film.

Let me first state that I ended up enjoying this movie more than I thought I would. Also, Tim Roth's acting simply makes this movie. The strongman's acting actually improves as the movie goes on but is still mediocre at best. This is probably no fault of his, but his inexperience is really obvious when acting besides Roth. The proto-Nazis are easy to hate, which is fine by me, but again, the best scenes are the stage scenes with Rothman--he really sells the spiritualism angle of the movie. His discovery of being a Jew near the end of the movie is not fact-based, apparently, it was not a well-kept secret, but it moves the movie along, and makes Hannussen seem like a hypocrite of the first order.