PLUMMER'S CRACKLESS

Opening this week:

The Exception—Has any actor since Paul Newman aged as well as Christopher Plummer? He seems to get more majestic-looking every year, and he has more wry, mischievous charm now than he did as a young man, by quite a large margin.

Having played the aged, gulled Tolstoy in 2009’s The Last Station, he now plays another washed-up historical figure, Kaiser Wilhelm II, in this roiling yarn, the feature debut of Brit stage director David Leveaux. Based on Alan Judd’s novel The Kaiser’s Last Kiss, it’s set near the beginning of WWII in the Netherlands, where Wilhelm has been living in comfortable exile with his wife, the Princess Hermine (Janet McTeer), feeding ducks, chopping wood and brooding over the loss of, you know, WWI and his throne.

The Nazis, who have just invaded the Netherlands, loathe and mistrust the Kaiser, but aren’t quite ready to eliminate a relic for whom the German people retain a fondness. So they send a young SS Captain, Brandt (Jai Courtney), disgraced by an earlier act of conscience, on the dead-end assignment of guarding the old man against the possibility—a long shot, he’s sure—of an assassination attempt.

As he glumly enters the Kaiser’s manse, Brandt catches sight of a darkly beautiful housemaid, Mieke (Lily James). She catches sight of him right back, and the two immediately develop one of those unspoken sexual passions that arise so conveniently in tales of this sort. As their intimacy increases and he learns, among other secrets, that Mieke is Jewish, Brandt’s already tenuous loyalty to the Reich is tested.

For stretches The Exception seems like potent moral drama, and for other stretches it seems outrageous, on the borderline of camp, like a sanitized prequel to The Night Porter. Either way, though, it’s a tense thriller. I found myself caring for these people whether their plight was plausible or not.

All of the acting is strong, from the intelligent hunk Courtney to James with her angry erotic avidity to McTeer’s pitiful Princess to Ben Daniels as Wilhelm’s sad, loyal aide to Mark Dexter as a vexed Gestapo man. But the anchor is Plummer, as the handsome, irrelevantly regal old Wilhelm, trying without success to mask his bitterness and guilt behind a rueful, chuckling humor.

Indeed, the only performance quite as vivid as Plummer’s comes from Eddie Marsan in the small role of Himmler, who drops by with a proposal for the Kaiser. The ever-resourceful Marsan’s portrait is deeply repellent and terrifying—a murmuring, milquetoast monster.

CROWE DE COEUR

Opening here this weekend:

The Water Diviner—Russell Crowe’s feature directorial debut begins with the slippery-phrased assertion that it’s inspired by true events. Set a few years after the ANZAC retreat from Gallipoli, it’s an epic melodrama about parental grief and the horrors of battle.

The “true events” which inspired the film, scripted by Andrew Knight and Andrew Anastasios, involved an Australian father who appeared at the battlefield looking for the body of his son, lost there. From this poignant little episode Crowe and his writers have spun the character of Joshua Connor, played by Crowe, a farmer with the ability to “divine” water beneath the deserts of rural Australia.

In the vein of The Fighting Sullivans or Saving Private Ryan, all three of Joshua’s sons have disappeared down the ravenous throat of WWI’s Gallipoli Campaign. When his wife succumbs to her grief as well, Joshua posthumously vows to her to travel to Turkey, use his divination ability to find their bodies in the killing fields, and bring them back Down Under.

His quest seems essentially useless—not to mention belated—but sadly understandable, but when he arrives in Turkey the British Army is unsympathetic to him (hostile, really). They initially refuse him admittance to the battlefield, where a sad-eyed Turkish Major, Hasan (Yilmaz Erdogan) is helping the Brits try to sort out their thousands of unidentified dead.

Hasan is sympathetic to Connor, and the two form a bond. Indeed, in its later acts The Water Diviner becomes almost a buddy picture, as Connor travels with Hasan and his fellow Turkish Nationals into Anatolia, where the latter fight the Greeks and where the former looks for his one still-missing son. The movie also includes a strand in which Connor is befriended by the son (Dylan Georgiades) of the beautiful Turkish war widow Ayshe (Olga Kurylenko) who runs the hotel where he’s staying.

Ravishing and poised though Kurylenko is, this love-interest subplot is surprisingly saccharine, and it’s the one part of The Water Diviner that came across forced. About the rest of the film I’m still not sure how I feel. At times it seemed grotesquely heavy-handed, and at others it felt, well, almost primal, with Crowe’s directorial flourishes on war reminiscent of—though not on the same level as—those of silent-era masters like Griffith, Gance and King Vidor.

But this much I'll say: The Water Diviner didn’t bore me, and more than once it brought tears to my eyes. Crowe doesn’t show much gift for subtlety, but he also doesn’t seem in the mood for subtlety. His movie is unapologetically grand, mushy and mystical-minded, and it’s entirely heartfelt in its disgust over the waste and agony of war.