Once when I was walking through Cambridge with a friend, we saw a church dedicated to English martyrs. My friend asked, “Mary’s or Elizabeth’s?”—Protestant or Catholic martyrs, in other words. It made me think that one difference between Protestantism and the older confessions or churches is that martyrs feature much less in modern Christianity, whereas it would almost be trivial to say that the Catholic and Orthodox confessions are built on martyrs. Why do martyrs matter? It has something to do with the kind of death that announces a life of faith.

　　All this came to mind when I watched the recent biopic of, I think, the most famous Protestant martyr of the twentieth century, the German theologian and pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer. That century created more martyrs than we can recall, and even today people are being murdered for their faith, for example in Syria. But even the memory of these individual martyrs has almost been overwhelmed by the sheer scale of tyranny and war. What can fairly feeble, somewhat privatized churches do in such circumstances, when they even lack public standing?

　　I’ll try to give you an example of this problem. There is a church in Rome, the Basilica of St. Bartholomew, where you can see many memorials to these martyrs in the side chapels. Sometimes they bring an Orthodox icon of the twentieth-century martyrs in the paleo-Christian style to the altar. (Someone took a picture of it.) It strikes me that we are as far from that early church as from these recent dead.

　　Christian Cinema

　　Bonhoeffer the movie is an attempt to deal with this problem, which may be the most urgent problem for Christianity. From the artistic point of view, it offers an alternative genre to the hagiography: the Bildungsroman. From the technical point of view, it’s unusually accomplished. From the broader intellectual point of view, it is an attempt to marry democracy and religion in a rather secularizing age; part of that attempt is to lend some of the moral dignity of the life of faith to the rather more banal, not to say the obsolete habit of watching movies. It’s obvious, though not something we talk about, that Christianity will outlive Hollywood.

　　Bonhoeffer is the work of writer-director Todd Komarnicki, who is not a household name, but has real credits to his name, having produced the 2003 Christmas hit Elf and written Clint Eastwood’s 2015 biopic Sully; he is now creating a show about the Mercury astronauts for Netflix. He not only wrote and directed Bonhoeffer, but also produced it. This accounts for the remarkable professionalism of the production, in contrast to most Christian movies. He takes us through Bonhoeffer’s life starting with the tenderness of youth, the moral urgency of young adulthood, and finally the movie turns into a tense drama and even a thriller as Bonhoeffer has to face the Nazis. He rejects the option of exile and embraces espionage, conspiracy, and death.

　　First of all, Bonhoeffer is so satisfying as a film because it looks like a major Hollywood production, shot by Ridley Scotts cinematographer John Mathieson. The same professionalism also marks the work of editor Blu Murray, who has learned to cut working on Clint Eastwood’s movies for 20 years. This kind of talent, unlike actors or expensive locations, is rarely spotted by amateurs, but it makes the difference between persuasive movies and those we reflexively disdain because they don’t measure up to our demands of professionalism. We care normally about the character; but the movie as such is just images in sequence, so to speak moving the character along, and to get that wrong is to fail entirely; here, Bonhoeffer succeeds.

　　Dassler’s performance as Bonhoeffer achieves pathos through the tension between his loyalty to his German people and his faith in Christ, after the Nazis, like the Communists, attack the church.

　　Secondly, it also has a good cast, rare for an American production in Germany. The actors playing Bonhoeffer’s two religious inspirations are especially important to the weight of the story, of course. In Germany, the famous Pastor Martin Niemoeller, played by August Diehl, who was Terrence Malicks protagonist inA Hidden Life, and in America, Reverend Powell, the black preacher Bonhoeffer meets in Harlem, played by character actor Clarke Peters (who the audience may recognize from The Wire). Bonhoeffer is played by a relative newcomer, Jonas Dassler (he had a minor role in Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s Never Look Away), who brings great passion to the role and benefits from juxtaposition with veterans. It’s hard nowadays to accept stars as spiritual figures; we seem to demand our protagonists represent something of our own anonymity, as a form of authenticity instead of the ubiquitous acting in the age of social media.

　　The Progress of Democracy

　　The story has three aspects: faith, the political crisis of the twentieth-century democracies, and the concern with the dignity of the human being as an individual. So far as politics is concerned, its a typical Hollywood production. Bonhoeffer could not possibly recreate an authentic vision of Wilhelmine, Weimer, or Nazi Germany, because among other things it would have to depict an understanding of the power and the dangers of the pursuit of honor in the first case and its repudiation by elites in the second. But to ground the story and Bonhoeffer’s character, it would be necessary to depict the enthusiasm for World War I and the ensuing social collapse, involving everything from hyperinflation to Communist revolutions and paramilitaries putting them down. All this eventful history is quietly skipped over, as is the overthrow of the Kaiser. A pleasant family life in prosperity replaces the upheaval that faced Germany. There are subtleties American audiences cannot be expected to follow easily, but it is not obvious why they should be completely denied a competent portrayal of the history of America’s great twentieth-century adversary. It’s as though we couldn’t bear to look at strangers.

　　Bonhoeffer is instead compelling as a biography of a moral hero, a creature of experience who becomes representative of our moral aspirations. The relationship between experience and reflection is translated cinematically by flashbacks mixed among the prison scenes, adding a chronological element to the narrative. Since the two elements in this narrative correspond to becoming a man and living as a man in terrible times—that is facing up to life’s tragedy and facing death without fear—there is something astonishing about the story, which movies have in recent generations avoided, as though the spectacle were too strong for our more squeamish taste.

　　But then something strange happens. It is not the crisis of European civilization after World War I, but the hope and exuberance of the Roaring ‘20s that are offered as a kind of explanation for the kind of man Bonhoeffer was—these are the things that helped him recognize himself, not stuffy old Germany, but his time in America. His love of black Protestant churches features prominently in the story. Harlem is charming here, not sordid; rather than crime, the moral aspiration of the masses takes center stage. Democracy is hopeful, but patient, as though guided by a divine love, and therefore simply blind to the problem of despair.

　　The obvious problem here is sentimentality, bordering occasionally on moral kitsch. Showing Bonhoeffer falling in love with jazz is not only untrue of the real man, but it’s the kind of insult people now might not even perceive as such. What if, instead, he preferred classical music, which the movie also suggests? It’s foolish to presume that nothing is being lost in the pursuit of progress or innovation or that popular taste is the same thing as human dignity. Making Bonhoeffer cool, in other words, is silly.

　　A related second problem has to do with the genre, the Bildungsroman structure, which fits neither a story of tyranny nor one of martyrdom. Heroic storytelling is, in fact, much closer to what we need in order to adequately portray a man who takes responsibility before God for his people. The bildungsroman is supposed to reveal the distinction between nature and our modern politics of Enlightenment in the relationship between an interesting artistic young man and bourgeois society. What we need here instead is a way of understanding at least two millennia of Christian faith, if not man’s cosmic destiny.

　　To put it another way, maybe we need Mel Gibson directing. It’s necessary to meet the standards of the arts in our times, but perhaps also necessary to hire the most talented people available. No version of journalism would suffice because it is only in the arts that we find a challenge, say, to mathematics, when it comes to the claim of presenting something eternally true. And our understanding of God comes much closer to the beauty of the arts than to the demonstrative truths of geometry.

　　Pacifism and Faith

　　The problem of human dignity in the twentieth century was taken much more seriously than it is now. The need to look at all mankind and comprehend it was to some extent forced on people by the reality of the vast globe-spanning colonial empires. Bonhoeffer, accordingly, was interested in America and the experience of black people who, guided by Christianity, sought political and social freedom. But he was also interested in Gandhi, though he didn’t have the chance to meet him.

　　The politics of Christianity as presented in the movie is a globalized pacifism, yet that is clearly madness. That is the paradox the movie dramatizes. Dassler’s performance as Bonhoeffer achieves pathos through the tension between his loyalty to his German people and his faith in Christ, after the Nazis, like the Communists, attack the church. He must renounce his pacifist view, yet he is not vouchsafed an easier path. Through this drama, Bonhoeffer attempts to articulate the community of martyrs and how they can guide our hopes for the salvation of all mankind.

　　Bonhoeffer has faced controversy in the German-speaking world, as German and Swiss newspapers published complaints about political extremism, leading to the Bonhoeffer Society urging a statement against extremism by the actors. It seems the dustup was merely a result of Angel Studios (which recently had a hit with another Christian movie, Soldier of Fortune) buying the rights to Bonhoeffer and successfully distributing it in America, to primarily evangelicals. But this pathology, an inclusivity or tolerance based on cancelations or political correctness, is the pacifism of our times. Elite opinion is no better at facing our own political and spiritual crisis than it was a hundred years back. Keeping in mind this difficulty, the achievement of Bonhoeffer is more impressive as it tries to recover seriousness about faith and politics.