A Strong Man in a Strange Land

Besides the minor misstep of lending his services as actor and maniacal presence to "avant-hack" Harmony Korine for the latter's otherwise odious Julian-Donkey Boy (1999), German auteur Werner Herzog made several of contemporary cinema's most dazzling and complex documentaries, including Little Dieter Needs to Fly (1997), during his nearly decade-long absence from fiction filmmaking. In other words, there was all the reason in the world to believe that Invincible, his return to the form that put him on the map in the 1970s and made him an exalted participant in the New German Cinema, would be something special, a new step for Herzog. I am disappointed to report that the result is something quite less than monumental.
As with most Herzog films, the basis of Invincible's story is extraordinary actual events, in this case those surrounding the legendary "Invincible," Zishe Breitbart. Herzog begins his film in a shtetl in the Polish countryside. It's 1932 and Zishe Breitbart (Jouka Ahola), the oldest son of a Jewish blacksmith family, is a gentle giant of a young man, proud of his heritage and unwilling to put to use his extraordinary physical strength unless it's to protect his precocious little brother Benjamin (Jacob Wien) from anti-semitic barroom brawlers. After dethroning a local circus strongman in a contest he enters, Zishe is visited by a talent agent interested in luring him to Berlin. Zishe, played by Finnish weightlifter and former "Strongest Man in the World" Ahola, whose genuine naiveté compensates for his limited range as an actor, is initially reluctant to go, but after seeing images of the thrillingly modern Berlin in a newsreel he is seduced and sets off for the city on foot.
Once Zishe arrives in Berlin he is put to work as the mythic Siegfried in a stage show at Erik-Jan Hanussen's (Tim Roth) Palace of the Occult. Hanussen, a clairvoyant and mysterious Dutch aristocrat, presides over the nightclub both onstage and backstage with malevolent will power, prophesying the rise to power of Hitler and the Third Reich and manipulating his hopelessly bound Czech pianist Marta (real-life concert pianist Anna Gourari) into sleeping with the high-ranking Nazis that make up his audience. Prompted by a surprise visit from his mother and little brother, as well as a growing affection for Marta, Zishe, one night during a performance, removes his blond wig and proclaims his Jewish identity to the absolute shock of the audience that had fetishized his "Aryan" strength of body and hulking masculinity.
Billed as the new Samson, it isn't long before Zishe has both Nazis and Jews packing into the audience each night. As the conflict between the two groups escalates, so does the personal conflict between Zishe and Hanussen, culminating in the former exposing the latter as not only a charlatan, but a secret Jew. Eventually, Zishe returns to the Polish countryside and becomes something of a prophet himself. In the film's final section, which feels needlessly protracted, Zishe warns his fellow people of the imminent danger they face with Hitler's rise to power and tells them that something must be done before it's too late.
It all sounds interesting enough, but there's a lot to Invincible that goes wrong. For starters, the film was shot in English, rather than in German, and the result with non-actors like Ahola and Gourari reading lines is so stilted that the film sounds like it was dubbed. Herzog's film is also his most literal-minded. What seems to be missing from this film is the unique feeling of natural surrender that characterizes his best work. Unlike his masterpieces Aguirre, Wrath of God (1972) and Stroszek (1976), Invincible fails to glimpse a sustained chaos or quasi-documentary capturing of events within its mythic framework. Instead, the viewer often gets clunky, conventionally-staged mimetic recreations of historical events which ultimately defeat the film's potentially allegorical material.
Still, Invincible is also Herzog's most literal-minded film in its presentation of dramatic action. Tim Roth's performance as Hanussen is captivating in its intensity and in its execution, and is no doubt inspired by some of Weimar Cinema's most ghastly and physically distinct characters. Herzog himself also manages two scenes (one a hypnotism, the other a rocky beach covered in giant red crabs) of his signature visionary power, proving that even in compromised form he is still a formidable mythic image-maker.