Release Date: Feb. 22 (limited)
Director: Stefan Ruzowitzky
Writer: Stefan Ruzowitzky, Adolph Burger (book)
Cinematographer: Benedict Neuenfels
Starring: Karl Markovics, August Diehl, Devid Striesow
Studio/Run Time: Sony Pictures Classics, 98 mins.
On the silver screen, it’s not unusual for master criminals to receive the royal treatment. They’re doted on by cameras that love the mechanics of their occupations, fetishized by storytellers who love the quirks of their personalities and excused by audiences who love their admirable traits—loyalty, tenacity—enough to ignore their sociopathic tendencies.
The Counterfeiters tells the story of one such criminal, Salomon Sorowitsch (whose name in real life was Smolianoff), a forger so skilled that when he ends up in a German concentration camp during World War II, the Nazis enlist him, under the threat of execution, to organize a massive counterfeiting scheme that has the dual effect of funding the war effort and destabilizing the Allied economies.
And it’s there, in the Nazi prisons, that this film butts up against another pattern of cinema, the justifiably sacred Holocaust drama, where the morality of characters is no game. This could be an uneasy fit, but filmmaker Stefan Ruzowitzky recognizes that the machinations of gangster drama don’t apply in this world. And yet, his screenplay is astute enough to rely on the main character’s inherent ambiguity to build suspense: Does Sorowitsch care only about his own neck, or does he wrestle with this moral dilemma like his fellow inmates do?
Karl Markovics is exceptionally well cast as Sorowitsch. He’s not wildly expressive, but his physicality—a small frame, a nose that bends northwest due to events we can only imagine—is enough to carry those ambiguities like a particularly well-textured canvas. Unfortunately, the characterization drawn on that canvas is little more than a sketch, which makes the whole movie feel a bit cold. The Counterfeiters over-reaches when it suggests that this band of prisoners may have had a big impact on the direction of the war (perhaps trying to inflate the movie’s importance), but it’s otherwise an efficiently told, appropriately gritty story based on a little-known piece of history.