The Counterfeiters, winner of this year’s Academy Award for Best Foreign Film, is based on the largest counterfeiting operation of all time during the waning years of World War II. The film is undeniably moving but suffers to some extent from being partially reconstituted from earlier Holocaust films.

Salomon Sorowitsch (Karl Markovich) is a wealthy Russian Jewish immigrant living in Berlin shortly before the Nazi crackdown on the country’s Semitic population. Salomon, an artist with a mouth perpetually down-turned in a sneer, has not gathered his wealth through the usual means. While plenty of sweat and industry has been poured into his monetary success, Salomon turned his considerable artistic talent toward one goal — counterfeiting the money by which he pads his lavish and often licentious lifestyle.

Tipped off that the police are hot on his trail, Salomon hesitates in Berlin an hour too long and is captured. Sent to a concentration camp, he stays alive only by ingratiating himself to his guards and making his talent indispensable to the camp’s Commandant. Six years pass until he finds himself standing before the police officer who originally busted him, Sturmbannführer Friedrich Herzog (Devid Striesow), now a high-ranking SS officer. Herzog knows well of Salomon’s singular forte and conscripts him into an elite group of prisoners whose job it is to manufacture perfect reproductions of the British pound and the American dollar, allowing the Nazis to flood their enemies’ markets and devastate their economies.

A sort of dark guardian angel, Herzog watches over the group the way one would prized, but no less inferior, pets. Salomon and his fellow prisoners live in a golden cage. Pampered as much as one can be in a concentration camp, most of the men, Salomon included, work knowing that if they do not they will be sent back to the general population to face certain death. But others in the group refuse to obey. They will not support the German war machine and are willing to take everyone down in order to sabotage the Nazi’s plan. As the Allied stranglehold on Berlin tightens, Salomon must decide if simply surviving is enough to claim victory or must he work purposefully for the lives of others in order to reclaim his hijacked humanity.

Although The Counterfeiters covers some of the same ground as other Holocaust films, it does it on a much smaller scale. While titanic death camps like Auschwitz are mentioned repeatedly, they are never shown. We are never allowed to lose the perspective of Salomon’s gilded cage among so vast a canvas of horror. For The Counterfeiters, the true intersection of life and death comes not in a place of steel and barbed wire, but synapse and soul. The Counterfeiters is a story, first and foremost, of conscience.

The Counterfeiters is not a perfect film. Aside from intermittently rehashing moments from other films we’ve already seen, its overly melodramatic score music telegraphs our emotions a bit too much. This may be a compensation of sorts, for while The Counterfeiters is certainly not void of Nazi barbarism, the film’s hermetic feel often isolates what should be moments of greater emotional wallop. Here, the real holocaust is in the mind and far less often on the screen. While there are moments of abject inhumanity, they do not come until late in the film. Instead, we are asked to monitor the epic contest from a man’s tempestuous conscience, admittedly a more fertile battlefield, if far more difficult to portray.

What The Counterfeiters gains metaphysically, it loses practically.

© Copyright 2008 Brandon Fibbs. All rights reserved.