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

Gallenberger has an astute visual sense, and he's good at transmitting lots of information with a single image: In long shot, he shows Rabe standing at a dock, watching in horror as the ship carrying his wife away to supposed safety is hit by Japanese bombs -- Gallenberger knows he doesn't have to milk the moment for maximum emotional impact. His use of music is, unfortunately, less effective: The score (by Annette Focks) relies too heavily on fraught-sounding violins to cue us to the horror of certain moments.

And Gallenberger, who also wrote the script, is too tentative about dealing with the violence that's so integral to this story. You can't blame him: Attempting to take the full measure of this grim historical episode would risk alienating the audience or, worse, sensationalizing an event whose after-effects are still somewhat raw. (For those who want to learn more, the 2007 documentary Nanking, by Bill Guttentag and Dan Sturman, would make a superb companion piece to this film.) Sometimes Gallenberger hits it just right: A sequence in which Rabe watches as his loyal driver is beheaded by the Japanese, for no reason at all, is both affecting and horrifying, without being particularly graphic. But through much of the film Gallenberger can't quite find the balance between conveying the horror of the atrocities and presenting them discreetly.

Then again, the point may be that there can be no perfect balance: Movies aren't history books and shouldn't be treated as such. But they're worth something when they can illuminate, as John Rabe does so well, even one small corner of history and its effect on one man's behavior. Rabe is considered a hero in China. He wasn't greeted so warmly when he returned to Germany in 1938: He tried, unsuccessfully, to rally the Nazi government to offer more protection to the Chinese, and he died in 1950 in relative obscurity, although his diaries survived. With John Rabe, Gallenberger makes a noble attempt to put brutal historical events into an unsentimental human context. The result may not be as raw as it should be. But it's also compelling enough that we can't turn away.

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