Best Picture Watch: HHhH, the Weinstein Project About Nazis

My friend Michael Patterson at Michael’s Telluride blog, where he tracks potential Telluride picks, was talking about the upcoming HHhH and we’re wondering what it would be, what it might be, what it could be without really knowing as yet. What we do know is that it’s been picked up by the Weinstein Co. Its director and co-writer is French filmmaker and relative newcomer Cédric Jimenez. The film is based on one of the most dangerous Nazis in history, Reinhard Heydrich. The title stands for Himmler’s Brain Is Called Heydrich. Hitler called him “The Man with an Iron Heart,” so that is one tentative title Weinstein Co. might nab unless they want to go balls out with HHhH, which they might do since it is such a popular novel.

In the true story (HHhH is historical fiction), Reinhard Heydrich was assassinated. From Wikipedia:
[quotes quotes_style=”bquotes” quotes_pos=”center”]Heydrich was attacked in Prague on 27 May 1942 by a British-trained team of Czech and Slovak soldiers who had been sent by the Czechoslovak government-in-exile to kill him in Operation Anthropoid. He died from his injuries a week later. Intelligence falsely linked the assassins to the villages of Lidice and Ležáky. Lidice was razed to the ground; all men and boys over the age of 16 were shot, and all but a handful of its women and children were deported and killed in Nazi concentration camps. [/quotes]
The novel is slightly different in that it’s been described as “breezy.” How you tell such a horrific story as “breezy” I do not know, but the tone will likely mean the difference for this film as to whether or not it lives up to the book or not. Gee, no pressure.

In his review of the Laurent Binet book, The Guardian’s James Lasdon writes:

[quotes quotes_style=”bquotes” quotes_pos=”center”]A breezily charming novel, with a thrilling story that also happens to be true, by a gifted young author amusingly anguished over the question of how to tell it … In principle there’s nothing not to like about Laurent Binet’s acclaimed debut, and HHhH is certainly a thoroughly captivating performance. Whether you find it something more than that will depend on how you feel about the application of breezy charm and amusingly anguished authorial self-reflexiveness to a book about the Nazi security chief Reinhard Heydrich, who must be one of the most unfunny figures in recorded history.

It’s about his assassination, specifically, and the undersung Czech resistance heroes who carried it out; an angle that licenses a certain jauntiness in the tone. But Heydrich’s icily demonic character necessarily dominates the book, and his pivotal roles in the key atrocities of the era, from Kristallnacht to the final solution itself, take up a substantial part of the narrative. (He was Himmler’s right-hand man, and the title refers to a piece of ponderous Nazi waggishness: Himmlers Hirn heisst Heydrich – Himmler’s brain is called Heydrich). So the question lingers: is the corpse-strewn story of Heydrich’s ascent to head of the Gestapo and “Protector” of annexed Czechoslovakia (where he earned his nickname, “the Butcher of Prague”) in any significant way enriched by its author’s playful anxieties about his girlfriend, musings on his dreams, or even by his more obviously pertinent struggles over whether to invent the dialogue or imagine the inner feelings of his real-life characters?

The shifting nature of Binet’s self-insertions, not to mention the very poised assurance of his writing, makes it a harder question to answer than you might expect. At their crudest they seem purely self-regarding: there to present him as an appealing type of slacker-scholar, glued to the History Channel, addicted to video-games, given to amiably flip outbursts of opinion, while also winningly obsessive over questions of micro-historical accuracy, and obsessed with his own obsessiveness. Was Heydrich’s Mercedes black or green? Which side of the train did the exiled head of Czechoslovak secret services sit on during his clandestine trip through Nazi Germany to set up the resistance networks in Prague?[/quotes]

Jason Clarke will star as Heydrich, and Rosamund Pike will play his wife and fellow racial supremacist. The book’s publisher offers this synopsis: “In Laurent Binet’s mesmerizing debut, we follow Jozef Gabcík and Jan Kubiš from their dramatic escape from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia to their fatal attack on Heydrich and their own brutal deaths in the basement of a Prague church. A seamless blend of memory, actuality, and Binet’s own remarkable imagination, HHhH is at once thrilling and intellectually engrossing―a fast-paced novel of the Second World War that is also a profound meditation on the debt we owe to history.”

We don’t know much more about it except that it’s flying under the radar at the moment, and that it goes up against the other big Weinstein movie for this year so far, Lion.