![]() There’s a hint of paranoia, a seething distrust of “educated” members of the German gentry like von Hartmann. “Downfall” veteran Matthes makes his Hitler a precursor to the “final days” Hitler Bruno Ganz gave us in that landmark film. What’s fascinating to anyone casually acquainted with this era and this particular event is how the principal figures in it are portrayed. The leads are quite good, even if their characters are thinly-developed and the big moments of suspense and action few and far between. German director Chrisian Schwochow (“Je Suis Karl”) and screenwriter Ben Power (TV’s “The Hollow Crown”) don’t avoid them, but make them land lightly enough. The tropes of such “What if” tales, indeed of espionage movies in general, are clearly spelled out in the Robert Harris novel this is based on. “Munich” reminds us that changing history like that takes more than desperation and “wishing someone” would do it, and that when the chips are down, few are capable of it.Ī “falling out” between the two college friends must be ignored as back-channel word travels to Hugh that Paul might be reaching out with some information that could sway Chamberlain into acting differently. It’s more seriously addressed here than in the glib “The King’s Man,” this idea that history might be changed and this or that ideal or state can be saved by one rash act, an assassination when all the “debates” and political maneuvering has failed. It’s a remark that stings today, magnified by the historical distance, resonant in other crises. “Hope,” von Hartmann now believes, is futile, this notion that “somebody (else) will do something” to prevent a catastrophe. Von Hartmann’s idealism has been replaced by vain “hope” and promises that the German Army will intervene if Hitler pushes them into war just 20 years after the last one ruined Germany. Legat has worn the “distant” label von Hartmann gave him at university, which puts his marriage ( Jessica Brown Findlay) on thin ice long before he gets the “one’s family has to take a back seat” lecture from his Foreign Office boss as the crisis begins. ![]() Jannis Niewöhner (“Je Suis Karl”) is Paul von Hartmann, the idealistic classmate who drunkenly extolls the promise of “The New Germany” in 1932, but who finds himself alarmed enough to have joined “deep state” resisters to “this madman” by 1938, He works as a translator in the foreign ministry, someone a bit over-awed when he finally meets Hitler ( Ulrich Matthes) in the crisis leading up to the conference. George MacKay (“1917”) is Hugh Legat, who graduates from Oxford to join the foreign service and become one of the private secretaries of Conservative Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, given gravitas, wariness and a much deeper voice by casting Jeremy Irons in the role. ![]() The story begins, as any tale of World War and Cold War intrigues must, at Oxford in the early ’30s, and climaxes at the actual Munich conference, where Britain and France signed over a corner of Czechoslovakia to forestall a threatened German invasion in 1938. But it’s worth taking in just for its novel views of Neville Chamberlain and Adolf Hitler and the accord that became historical shorthand for “appeasement.” Handsomely-mounted and well-acted, never quite lapsing into melodrama if never quite breaking from formula, it’s too narrow in focus and too shallow a gloss on the subject to placate historians. “Munich: The Edge of War” is a moderately suspenseful piece of historical revisionism, a thriller that dangles an intriguing “What if” in its fresh take on the shameful Munich Agreement, which delayed but did not prevent World War II.
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