REVIEW: Bracing John Rabe Revisits the Horror and Drama of Nanking

It's hard to know why movies that tell completely made-up stories often feel more real than those that tell true ones. Maybe it's because fictionalized versions of real-life events always stir up questions not just about what really happened, but about how that something happened. Watching a filmmaker interpret those events dramatically demands that we trust him or her implicitly: A fiction film based on real events is a kind of shaped reality, which isn't, of course, reality at all. The best we can do is to trust a filmmaker's instincts, and his heart.

German director Florian Gallenberger earns that trust in John Rabe, a fictionalized but conscientious retelling of the story of a German businessman (and member of the Nazi Party) who saved the lives of some 200,000 Chinese citizens during the Nanking Massacre. In mid-December 1937 Japanese troops, as part of the country's gradual infiltration of China, moved into Nanking and initiated an eight-week spree of murder and rape. Young civilians who were suspected of having fought in the Chinese army were brought to the outskirts of the city, where they were gunned down, beheaded, or doused with gasoline and burned alive. Women were raped, often in front of their own families, and in some cases watched as those family members were killed. Furthermore, Japanese soldiers refused to allow citizens to bury their dead. Historians estimate that upwards of 200,000 civilians and prisoners of war were killed during this period.

At the time John Rabe -- here played by Ulrich Tukur (Séraphine, The White Ribbon) -- was the head of the Siemens branch in Nanking, a job he'd held for 27 years. Although most foreigners left the city at the time of the invasion, Rabe and a handful of others -- among them a U.S. doctor, Robert Wilson (Steve Buscemi), and the head of a school for young women, Valérie Duprès (Anne Consigny) -- remained to form an international committee to establish a safety zone for Chinese civilians. Rabe was the chairman of that committee, and the safety zone was established on the grounds of the Siemens Company.

Gallenberger tells Rabe's story deftly, establishing essential elements of the man's personality in subtle shorthand. Rabe is devoted to his wife, Dora (Dagmar Manzel), and although, as the movie begins, they're preparing to return to Berlin, it's clear he's reluctant to leave the place that has been his home for nearly 30 years. Tukur plays Rabe as a reserved, proper gentleman who, as part of his mandate as a businessperson, feels the need to make sure his employees are treated fairly: His manners are decorous, and sometimes condescending, but he clearly has a great deal of fondness for the people of his adoptive home. He's also naïve: He believes Hitler will look after the Chinese people, despite the fact that Japan and Germany were, at the time, allies, and he's gullible when it comes to swallowing the propaganda dispensed by the Japanese, who shamelessly present themselves as saviors of the Chinese people even after they've begun slaughtering them.

But Rabe's reserve toughens as the Japanese invasion becomes more horrific, and the gentle principles of kindness and fairness to which he's always adhered turn into a kind of stubborn reserve. Dr. Wilson -- whom Buscemi plays with a great deal of sardonic good humor -- distrusts Rabe because he's a Nazi, but the two forge first a grudging truce and then a solid friendship. Gallenberger dramatizes the first step in that evolution by showing the two sharing a bottle of whiskey after a particularly devastating day. They begin by insulting each other with a grudgingly complimentary toast and end by joining in a rousing rendition of the Colonel Bogey March -- the bowdlerized version, that is, with lyrics that begin, "Hitler has only got one ball."

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