The Ogre (1996) User Reviews

Original, featuring a fine performance by Malkovich

[DennisLittrell · 8/10 · 12 October 2001]

(Note: Over 500 of my movie reviews are now available in my book "Cut to the Chaise Lounge or I Can't Believe I Swallowed the Remote!" Get it at Amazon.)

This strange and original work is a French film about Nazi Germany done in English. There are no subtitles. Director Volker Schlondorff is German, the screenplay is by veteran French writer Jean-Claude-Carriere, who has scores of films to his credit including Bell de Jour (1967) and Valmont (1989), and the star is the American, John Malkovich, who plays a French simpleton named Abel Tiffauges who ends up as a servant in Field Marshall Herman Goering's hunting estate during World War II, and then later in a Hitler youth academy for boys.

Malkovich's Abel is enormously sympathetic because he has suffered but harbors no bitterness, because he genuinely loves children, and because he has a certain magic about him based on his childish belief that somehow he will survive any catastrophe. In a boy's home as a child he survives the brutality of a proto Goering-like fat boy, and then later as an auto mechanic he overcomes a false accusation of child molestation. Both of these little stories are vividly rendered and seem entirely realistic. Then begins Abel's war time adventures, and it is here that the story becomes, as some have observed, something of a fairy tale. Abel is able to leave his barracks at the prison to wander about where he meets a blind moose and then a German army officer at a deserted cabin in the woods. This leads to his being established at Goering's hunting estate, and from there to the Hitler youth academy where he is treated as a privileged servant. We see the Nazis as just another part of the bizarre personages of his world.

The depiction of Goering as a kind of self-indulgent Nero, living in opulence as the world burns, seemed entirely believable. The overall portrait of the Germans in an objective and balanced manner was refreshing and thought-provoking and one of the strengths of the film. The Nazi eugenicist is contrasted with the officer who was part of a failed plot against Hitler, both men enormously sincere and dedicated, the one unbalanced, the other unlucky.

This is not a film for those looking primarily to be entertained. This is a work of art, dark, uneven, and a bit curious.

Euro Gump during the second world war

[siderite · 8/10 · 21 July 2009]

John Malkovich is doing a fine role here, as expected, and the movie depicts Europe around 1940 from the viewpoint of an emotionally challenged French orphan. You might have thought from the plot that it is about pedophiles or something similar. It is not. This guy moves from "prison" to prison, while happily doing the work assigned to him, all the time seeing the world as no one sees it. All his good deeds result in punishments and all his bad deeds make almost no impression on him. He perseveres in both.

The movie is spanning a few years of time and the rhythm is slow, as one would expect from a film made from a book, and, while a little boring and depressing, it is a nice movie.

Bottom line: imagine Forrest Gump in Europe. No humour, no hope, no cares in the world. Oh, except the war. ;)

Glorious failure?

[Redeye-2 · 7/10 · 14 December 1998]

Interesting film! Such a wealth of crucial questions, great performances - and yet, the final cohesion remains lacking here. The paradox of the enchantment of Nazism has been too little problematized in the cinema, and any attempt to say anything new on the subject is welcome. Schlöndorff does a cinematically good work, but where the film falters is in the way actual, brutal history and Abel's vision of Nazism as the Magic Kingdom are bound together. It's hard to pinpoint where the fault lies; there's just a sense of maybe trying too much at once. Anyway, an honorable and perhaps too multi-layered analysis of the 20th century nightmare.

Treason in the Name of Child Protection

[lawprof · 5 November 2001]

Abel is not simply slow-witted, he is morally shortchanged and has little if any ability to recognize even the reality much less the depth of his willing collaboration with the Germans. Abel is a survivor and while his concern for the children being trained as proto-Nazis in an ancient castle is real, so is his ruthlessness in collecting them by force for his German superiors with the aid of snarling Dobermans.

The film abounds in caricatures beginning with an outdoor picnic by complacent, indeed moronic, French officers who fail to even remotely perceive the danger of the onrushing Wehrmacht. Reichsmarshall Goring is portrayed as a grinning fool except when he approaches the state of barking madness. This is a legitimate dramatic device but the real Goring, cured before World War II of doctor-induced morphine addiction, was more complex and, in that sense, more interesting (decades ago I took a psychology course with Dr. Gilbert, who examined Goring at Nuremberg and wrote a book about the experience which is still available in second-hand bookshops. HIS Goring was chilling, no one to laugh at.).

The film is most effective when it eerily recreates what must have been the almost erotic attraction of nighttime rallies with flags, bunting, torches and the steady beat of martial music. That little boys were inculcated with the madness of Nazism through these rituals is powerfully shown here.

It was hard for me to care about Abel one way or the other but the character is well-acted as are the other main roles.

the story of Michael Jackson?

[btodorov · 7/10 · 27 June 2006]

Tournier is among the great French writers of the latter 20th century, maybe the only one living competitive enough for the Nobel prize. The movie is, however, rather unsatisfactory, even if Malcovich does a good job. The reason for the lameness of the production is that the director never dared to explore more fully the darker side of Tiffauges, to make it clear why people were afraid of him, why he could not build friendships and so on. Apparently the producers were afraid that if they made the main character more graphic, this would really turn him into a pedophile and alienate the viewer. Here is the big hitch in putting great books on screen. In cinema characters most often end up gaining the sympathy of viewers. So in view of making the character likable and keeping hope alive that one day he would be able to survive his obsessive manias, the screenwriter and the director deliberately twisted the end. In the movie, Abel turned into a real Christopher carrying the child-Jesus (a Jewish refugee from a concentration camp) as a sign of his Christian redemption, but... in the book Tiffauges does not survive the crossing of the Mazurian swamps: on the contrary, he deliberately drowns, together with the young boy, in a tragic culmination of his unending obsession with young children. This is why the original title of the book is "Le roi des aulnes", the elven-king from Goethe's dark poem. Even if I greatly admired the book, I long suspected Tournier to have been carried too far away in his creative search, up to the point of inventing a kind of mania which does not belong to the list of pathological states. Such non-sexual pedophiles, obsessed with children, but harmless and protective, do they exist? Are there really people who want to protect children from growing up?

An interaction between an asocial and the nazism

[salvador-4 · 7/10 · 12 June 1999]

The movie describes the experiences of Abel on the third Reich. For me the only fault of this movie is its cut with the Goering's court and then the Hitlerjugend school. But the way it pictures each other is well done.

A poignant and compelling film

[FlickJunkie-2 · 9/10 · 18 April 2000]

This 1996 film, which was not released in the U.S. until 2000 in the rental market, offers a fresh German perspective of World War II. It puts a more human face on the people of the Third Reich, much in the same way as ‘Das Boot'. We are used to depictions of German soldiers as brutally evil, soulless killing machines (and there is a bit of that here) but this film mostly presents a softer more balanced portrayal.

This is the story of Abel, an affable simpleton from France with a love of children and animals (no, there are no undertones of pedophilia). Prior to WWII, he is wrongly accused and convicted of child molestation. While working in the work camps, he is captured by the Germans and through a series of events ends up as a prisoner of war worker in a training school for Hitler youth. He is emotionally seduced by the romantic notions of Hitler's national socialism and the great devotion to the fatherland that is being taught there. And of course, he loves working with the boys. The Germans notice this and how much the boys like him as well, so they ask him to recruit more boys for the school from the local countryside. Things go along well until the Russians invade and the only defense of the school must be made by the students (who are well trained in the art of war).

This is a terrific story that gives us a more realistic look inside Germany during the war. No, it wasn't an idyllic free society. But it wasn't exactly a factory for mechanized inhuman killers as it has been routinely portrayed either. We come to understand that what we considered evil was being presented to the children in terms that seemed good and noble. They felt as if they were on an idealistic quest, not on a diabolical mission of subjugation.

The direction of this film was expertly done. Volker Schlondorff's presentation of the story, though slow moving at times, offered an excellent character study of Abel and was patient in proffering revealing looks at the people and the feelings of those around him.

Malkovich is fantastic as the naïve and slow witted Abel. He is wonderfully childlike and sincere in his portrayal; reminiscent of his role in ‘Of Mice and Men'. This is the best I can remember him in quite some time.

This is a poignant and compelling film of substance. I rate it a 9/10. The sophisticated viewer will enjoy it.

A brilliant study in disparity (*****)

[JJTTbean · 9/10 · 15 November 1998]

Known in English as "The Ogre" this has got to be John Malkovich's finest film to date. He plays an ignorant man, Abel, living in a small town at the dawn of the Nazi movement. He seems to be mentally slow, but emotionally heightened as has a great passion for the vitality of the children in the town. He is fond of photographing, especially children. However, due to a mis-understanding, because the people of the small town are so ignorant and afraid of the quiet lumbering Abel, he is sentenced to jail (undeservedly) for the crime of molesting a child. He is transferred to help with the war effort in France, and eventually comes to work for the Nazi party, "recruiting" children for the cause. He, however, does not seem to know what the Nazis stand for, or why he shouldn't be taking in children. He cares for the children as if they were his own, and is eventually persecuted for harbouring a young Jewish boy, which is when he begins to realise the ramifications of his plight.

A brilliantly scripted film (filmed in English despite the foreign origin). A must see. It saddens me, though that it is so difficult to find, and that it was never released in the US (as far as I know).

-jjj

Defies belief

[harryplinkett14 · 1/10 · 3 July 2019]

In what fantasy world did Germans kidnap their own children, and Hermann Goering fondled jewels to calm himself down? You know, for decades after the end of WWII, film makers could come up with any insane fantasy about Germany, and people would watch it. Now, all these years of promoting outrageous lies are catching up with those who promoted them.

Beauty in malign inversion, per Tournier

[Cantoris-2 · 9/10 · 11 September 2000]

One published reviewer said that Goring's character was written, and played, for comic effect. This complaint sounded plausible, but a glance in Encyclopedia Britannica reassures our confidence in the production's respect for authenticity. It suggests that Volker Spengler's characterization may be on the mark.

During Hitler's Putsch in 1923, Goring sustained a painful injury whose relief by means of morphine turned him into a drug addict nearly the rest of his life. This influence, in turn, made him "alternately elated or depressed; he was egocentric and bombastic, delighting in flamboyant clothes and uniforms, decorations, and exhibitionist jewelry." We see all these traits in Spengler's scenes, e.g. in his drunken alternation between a tirade and a blue funk at the fact that someone else had shot a stag that he wanted to shoot. When a soldier enters to bring him some really bad news, Goring is already so gloomy that he barely raises his hand from the table to salute, and his "Heil Hitler" is just a slurred grunt.

The article also establishes his corpulence and luxuriousness, to a point resented by his colleagues in the party. "His hunting interests enabled him to obtain a vast forest estate in the Schorfheide, north of Berlin, where from 1933 he developed a great baronial establishment" called Carinhall, full of artistic war booty, to which he retired whenever he could.

The film showed Goring as an often jovial man given, like Hitler, to occasional fits of imperious screaming. This behavior, according to one book I read recently, was to be expected of any top leader of the Third Reich not merely as a habit but as a deliberate technique. People outside of Germany were slow to take Hitler seriously as a threat because this conduct was so strange to them. They did not realize that German culture of the time regarded it as a standard part of the fatherly role. Therefore, as Hitler understood well, the more he screamed and shouted at his countrymen, the more closely they would identify him as a father figure and the embodiment of Der Vaterland.

Many superstitious beliefs have been associated with precious stones. The novel explains that Goring was not unique in imagining that plunging his fingers into a bowl of gems would drain away nervous energy and uncomfortable emotions. Other sources recount that when Hugo von Hofmannsthal's first poems appeared, under a pseudonym, they were so heavy with sensuous Weltschmerz that one critic declared they must have been written by an opulent old man while dipping his fingers in jewels. (He would soon be surprised that the poet was still a youth). So even this strange indulgence of Goring is in keeping with the ambient culture among those few who could afford the experience.

One could say much, much more about this complex film, but perhaps this elucidation of just one minor aspect suggests the multilayered care with which it has been put together.

Pretentious, illogical distortion of history

[hof-4 · 2/10 · 24 February 2021]

The first blow: Germans, French and Russians speak English. Some actors try to deliver their lines with stock Hollywood accents, others don't bother. The distortions of history and the sins against logic are legion. Here are some:

The movie states France was "overwhelmed" by Germany in 1940, and what we see of the war is German soldiers casually strolling into France and slacking French soldiers. France was defeated only after a bloody campaign with horrendous casualties including 90.000 dead and 200,000 wounded. French soldiers were badly led but fought gallantly.

Hermann Göring is presented as a grotesque buffoon. That he was not. He was competent, sinister, the epitome of evil and, unfortunately, did not indulge full time in silly fantasies.

The main character, Abel, makes friends easily with children, so he is sent from a castle/school into the countryside to find young boys and lure them into joining the paramilitary Hitlerjugend. Lured by a Frenchman speaking at best broken German? Besides, German youth did not need to be lured: not joining had very bad consequences.

The castle belongs to a member of the "old nobility," who nobly opposes the Nazis for destroying his "beautiful country" and its culture. German nobility, as any other nobility was intent on preserving their privileges. The Nazi regime filled the bill until it became clear Germany would lose to the Soviet Union. Only then some of the nobility woke up.

And, last but not least, would a Russian commander solicit the surrender of a fortified castle standing in front of his tank? Would a child trying to escape a swarm of Nazi thugs in the dark sing non stop at the top of his lungs? In Hebrew?

The movie does not let any allegory get away. Abel is Goethe's Erlkönig and, since there is a river and he carries a child across, the St. Christopher legend is dragged into play. The script was obviously written with no ear for English, and is frequently stilted and artificial. There are some fine actors in the cast but they can't overcome the clichés and are frequently over the top. Cinematography is good but some scenes are shot in sepia, others in color and still others in black and white for no reason I can see. All in all, a pretentious failure.

The Sorrow and the Pity

[tieman64 · 19 July 2011]

Volker Schlondorff's intermittently powerful "Ogre" stars John Malkovich as Abel Tiffauges, a seemingly mentally handicapped Frenchman who finds himself gallivanting across Europe during the Second World War.

Like his character in "Of Mice and Men", Malkovich plays Abel as a dim witted, obedient giant. Abel's only joy comes from tending to, protecting and helping children, a love that many in the film mistake for paedophilia.

Pretty soon Abel finds himself working for the Nazis, firstly at Hermann Goering's hunting lodge, and later at Kaltenborn Castle, an elite training camp for Hitler Youths. At both locations, Abel's fawning attitude toward children epitomises Nazi delirium. Nazism, like Abel's whole being, is a pathology bent upon preserving and protecting a certain "chosen people". It's an ethnic pathology which mirrors Abel's own drive to "photograph" and "preserve" a very specific, idealised view of youth and beauty. What the film stresses is how both stances operate in a cloistered, secluded realm in which the distinctions between the internal and the external world no longer hold, both Abel and Nazism creating fantasy, fairy-tale narratives for themselves and their believers. In this regard, everything Abel does, though benevolent and altruistic in his mind, leads to great violence. And so Abel, like the film's Nazis, is mild mannered, has little insight into his nature, lives in a fantasy world, always defers to authority, does not believe he is hurting anyone, and yet causes great harm. This "Nazi pathology" (the desire to "not see", a form of disavowal that is hard-wired into the very structure of modern life) is still very much a part of our modern, or post-modern, world.

The film ends with Abel rescuing a Jewish child. For Abel, love is by definition always never-ending and always excessive; he loves all children. This brings him in conflict with Nazi ideology, which, of course, demands that he kill the boy. This contradiction leads to Abel betraying his masters during the film's climax, and subsequently wading off into the sunset with the Jewish boy on his shoulders. Hauntingly, the duo think that they're protecting each other with magical powers. They are now each other's "chosen one", a stance which itself now foreshadows contemporary politics (protecting the Jew to protect oneself, protecting Israel to protect America).

Aesthetically, like Schlondorff's earlier film, "The Tin Drum", "The Ogre" takes the shape and tone of a dark, grisly fairy tale. Some passages recall both Goethe and the Brothers Grimm (and a hunting sequence Renoir's "The Rules of the Game"), though Schlondorff tones down his customary surrealism (and removes all sexual subplots present in the original tale), his eyes now on the more direct tastes of mass market, global (ie Western) audiences.

8/10 – Ranges from great to watered down and very poor, but Malkovich sucks us in. See Pasolini's "Salo".

John Malkovich gives a commanding performance.

[PWNYCNY · 10/10 · 2 May 2011]

First, John Malkovich's performance is incredible. He is one of the greatest actors today, and maybe in all cinematic history, and proves it in this movie.

How is that someone can honestly believe that they are doing good when in fact all they are doing is harm? This is the theme of this movie. John Malkovich gives a commanding and chilling performance as a man who is frightening and engages in harmful behavior but has no insight as to the abominable nature of his conduct. The Malkovich character is utterly depraved yet his depravity is not driven by animus which makes it even harder to figure out. He wraps himself up in some kind of fantasy world but he is not psychotic, is essentially mild mannered and deferential to authority and does not seem intent on hurting anyone. Yet, everywhere he does people get hurt because of him. He believes that he is doing good when he is doing bad. This what the Nazi war criminals apparently believed. They believed that they had a mission to accomplish and had no problem rationalizing and denying the destructiveness of their program. In fact, they vigorously defended their actions as being in the best interest of humanity. The Malkovich character thinks in much the same way and not surprising is equally warped.

War drama, human drama

[RodrigAndrisan · 9/10 · 19 July 2017]

Three actors that I love are here: John Malkovich, Armin Mueller-Stahl, Gottfried John. There is also Dieter Laser, doing a role like only him can do. It's the work of a fine expert in cinematographic art, Volker Schlöndorff, who, in his youth, was the assistant of Louis Malle, Jean-Pierre Melville and Alain Resnais, three huge talents. Schlöndorff's "The Tin Drum"(1979) is his masterpiece but, "The Ogre" too is also a great achievement and, this especially because of Malkovich, he is a human-locomotive for any film in each he is the lead. When he has a small role or just a cameo, he steals that film.

an adaptation

[Kirpianuscus · 24 August 2021]

The novel is so generous than it is just difficult to imagine a real fair adaptation. Or, more correct, an adaptation giving the real portrait of Abel Tiffauges. So, the film is more Volker Schlondorff than Michel Tournier. But, yes, John Malkovich gives just a beautiful job and, maybe, this is the only significant thing about this adaptation.

over the top fairy tale

[da critic · 26 September 2000]

Through the eyes of a French man who never grew up, The Ogre depicts wartime life in Hitler's Germany. At the same time that the film takes up loaded questions of power and subjugation, recreating the process of recruitment and training for the Aryan army, it further challenges the viewer by presenting the growing Nazi regime in a very human way. A great deal of the variety in characterization and the breadth of reach can be attributed to the fairy-tale nature of this film. By introducing the character Abel as a troubled and weak youth, the film is able to trace his life's events under the spell of `Fate.' And indeed, Abel is sheltered and provided for throughout the course of events, even when faced with the most irrational of men. In film, characters are arguably always proponents of a few key traits, around which a believable person is constructed. In a fairy-tale, this is true to a greater extent. So of course, a combination of the two leads to a meeting of quite extreme characters. In The Ogre we are presented with a man who cares so much for children and animals that he is unable to see any evil in their presence. This oversight, or, in the heavy-handed symbolism of the film, blindness, is the basic motivation behind all events.

A great deal of the film is artfully done, with many subtle displacements to stimulate emotions in the viewer. Although the oft-mentioned 'front line' is never seen, instead we are faced with the massacre of hundreds of wild animals. The childhood friend of Abel returns to him in the form of the military official in the forest, and yet, Abel does not make a connection beyond a vague similarity. He is oblivious to the extravagant decadence of dipping one's hands in jewels, or keeping a wild cat for pleasure. In his simpleton's way he meanders through a landscape of potential knowledge, yet learns nothing. It is the viewer who is given the chance to learn what he can't. Unfortunately, this schema reminded me a bit too much of Forrest Gump. However, the film speaks a great deal to the fairy-tale effects of idealism and propaganda on young children, as finally Abel is cut off by the very boys he loved, their allegiance to a greater unseen force much stronger than their understanding of fellow man.

A Postmodern Critique of History

[jcsatana · 20 September 2000]

Throughout the tenure of Western Metaphysics, conceptions of History have, for the most part, followed logical and foundationally epistemological models. The causally linear chain of historical events has, at its inception, a causa sui which, in turn, results in a progression of events much like the links in a chain-a conception that postmodernists have, at the very least challenged. Volker Schlöndorff also challenges, or at a minimum complicates, the metaphysical heritage of history in his film The Ogre. Schlöndorff foregrounds the importance of history by setting his narrative during the Twentieth-Century's most seminal moment, World War Two.

His criticism, however, filters through his mise-en-scene. Throughout The Ogre, monuments of historically influential figures or symbols make their presence-i.e. Jesus, cathedrals, the swastika, aristocrats, etc. And the film is replete with very dominant straight lines. But Schlöndorff subverts the dominance of these straight lines on several occasions. When Abel and the other French prisoners are transported via train to their prison camp, Abel looks to the exterior at a series of telephone/telegraph lines running concurrently. In an eye-line match, the camera provides us with a point of view shot, aligning our view with Abel's. Eventually, however, these lines end by moving offscreen to the top. In another instance, Abel assists his fellow prisoners in the digging of trenches. Abel's task is to lay rope or wire along the distinctive lines of the trenches. In one shot, Abel moves increasingly deeper into the frame lengthening the line not only of the trench but of the rope or wire as well. But with a quick 180-degree edit to a medium shot, the lines disappear. Throughout The Ogre, institutions are associated with structures composed of bricks or other patchwork materials such as stained glass windows. The construction of these establishments are founded not upon linearly laying brick upon brick, but by piling a brick upon two other bricks in such a way that they interlock to make a whole. In other words, institutions are built by the confluence of numerous factors and not a direct relation from an immediately preceding event. In fact, intersecting lines appear throughout The Ogre and the numerous shots in which the characters are displayed through the filter of these enmeshing lines exemplify their effects upon the lives of the characters. The strongest representatives of Western Metaphysics in the film are the Nazis and the Hitler Youth program for which Abel is a servant. In one scene the boys line up assembled in a courtyard listening to a speech by their headmaster. This scene takes place at night and in a swooping crane shot the boys are indistinguishable from the night. The boys look ahead and their supervisors are lit from behind by the flames of torches hence making them appear only as shadows. This spectacle seems particularly reminiscent of Plato's `Allegory of the Cave.' The boys' headmaster informs them that they no longer have parents and that they now belong to the Fatherland. This proclamation also calls to attention Plato's ideas respective to the Academy and the necessity to remove children from their parents for the purposes of indoctrinating the youth with concepts to which their parents would be adverse. Schlöndorff also directly criticizes the Hitler Youth program through the very materials on which they trod. In one shot, the boys are gathered on a driveway paved with cold gray bricks. The pavement is deteriorated and formed by disparate bricks in opposition to the strongly embroidered buildings around them.