Leaps of Faith

No matter who Time sees fit to anoint Man of the Century, it's difficult not to view World War II--and specifically, the Holocaust--as the 20th century's defining event. Indeed, it is the problem that Auschwitz poses to one's faith that creates the context for millennial movies as otherwise disparate as Errol Morris's new documentary and Agnieszka Holland's theological thriller.

Mr. Death, Morris's troubling portrait of the execution-technician and Holocaust-denier Fred Leuchter, began as part of Morris's Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control and begins with a tacky thunderstorm out of a grade-Z '50s horror flick. Is Leuchter a mad scientist--or a Frankenstein monster? Son of a man who worked for the Massachusetts penal system, Leuchter went into the family business. Having invented an electrocution ''helmet,'' he went on to design lethal-injection machines, gallows, and gas chambers.

Morris, who more or less invented the ironic documentary, seems to struggle here for an appropriate tone even as he allows Leuchter more than enough rope to hang himself. Leuchter proudly describes his product--death--and frames himself as a humanitarian. His graphic descriptions of electrocution are gruesome enough to wipe the smirk off anyone's face. Without meaning to, this specialist vividly makes the case against capital punishment--foreshadowing the way in which Morris's own treatment of the material is at once snide and reserved, bluntly straightforward and surprisingly oblique.

Lost highway: execution-technician Fred Leuchter in Mr. Death
photo: © Nubar Alexanian
Lost highway: execution-technician Fred Leuchter in Mr. Death


Mr. Death
A film by Errol Morris
A Lions Gate Films release

The Third Miracle
Directed by Agnieszka Holland
Written by John Romano from the
novel by Richard Vetere
A Sony Classics release

Highway and Paradise
Two films by Sergey Dvortsevoy
A First Run/Icarus release
At Film Forum through January 11

Holocaust-denier Ernest Zündel, on trial in Canada for publishing ''false history,'' recruited him as an expert witness on gas chambers.

Searching for proof that there were no mass gassings at Auschwitz, Leuchter illegally scraped the walls of the abandoned gas chambers for traces of cyanide. The expedition was videotaped: Ridiculous-looking Leuchter grins inanely while scrambling around the most death-haunted site in European history. (''It was kind of spooky,'' he tells Morris in voice-over.) The footage is additionally distressing for it not being clear that this moron is actually Leuchter. (The movie credits cite a ''re-enactment cast'' and Polish crew.) It does, however, provide a setup for Morris to demolish his subject's methodology.


''We have a hard job executing one man. Why didn't they just shoot them?'' Leuchter asks. Genocide is irrational and Leuchter's apparently nonideological willingness to discount the Holocaust because it doesn't ''make sense'' is one reason the neo-Nazis adore him. His British publisher approvingly calls Leuchter a ''simpleton,'' which is one way of characterizing his willful self-deception. At the end of the movie, Morris is heard (for the first time) asking if Leuchter thinks he could have made a mistake. Mr. Denial doesn't even hear the question. ''I did everything possible to substantiate the existence of the gas chambers,'' he claims--stupidly satisfied in his failure to convince himself.


Played with extraordinary sympathy by Ed Harris, Father Frank is the reverse exorcist whom the diocese uses to debunk such local cults. ''They call you the miracle killer,'' somebody cracks. Father Frank, who became a priest when God spared his cop father (but just for three months), plumbs the lower depths of Slavic Chicago. He asks questions, drinks too much, gets a yen for Helen's bitter, nonbelieving daughter (Anne Heche); The Third Miracleis a sort of Catholic noir. The first half has a nifty B-movie feel--it's a canny little movie with a big, big theme. (This is the precise opposite of The Improbable Mr. Ripley, a pumped-up parade float about very, very little.)

God moves in mysterious ways and so does The Third Miracle--at least until a German archbishop played by Armin Mueller-Stahl enters the narrative as the Vatican's forbidding devil's advocate. (Oh for the days when Barbara Sukowa, who plays Helen in flashback, destroyed Mueller-Stahl in Fassbinder's remake of <The Blue Angel. This supercilious snob gets us rooting for Helen's beatification even after the screenwriter resorts to the sort of dramatically convenient supernaturalism that would embarrass the World Wide News

Unlike Dreyer's Ordet, Holland's movie requires no leap of faith. Nor does it directly address its central conundrum--why did God bother with one small miracle amid the horrific carnage of World War II? If you believe that the question is absurd, the third miracle will have less to do with Father Frank's faith than your own.



Highway(1999), Dvortsevoy's longest film at 57 minutes, is another family portrait filmed in extremely close quarters against the photogenic emptiness of central Asia. Dvortsevoy tags along with an itinerant circus troupe--mom, dad, and their six children. Dad is the ringmaster. The kids do a bit of tumbling and walk barefoot on glass. The oldest picks up a weight in his teeth. Between shows, they catch a baby eagle. As they bump along in their rusty van on the road to Uzbekistan, the eaglet is just a part of the family--like the unseen filmmaker. Highwaygives new meaning to the phrase bird's-eye view.

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