Plot Details: This opinion reveals major details about the movie's plot.

I don’t know why it took so long to adapt the memoirs by Max Manus (1914–96) of sabotage during the Nazi occupation of Norway to the screen (2008, directed by Espen Sandberg and Joachim Roenning). The initial conquest of Norway in 1940 was all but unopposed. Manus himself (played by Aksel Hennie) had been a volunteer fighting with Finns against Soviet conquest of Finland. Memories of an engagement in the “Winter War” haunt him throughout the tale of daring acts of sabotage in Oslo Harbor, culminating in sinking the troop ship (which had also been used to transport Norwegian Jews to Nazi death camps) Donau, preventing troops being moved at the time of the Battle of the Bulge.

Before the organized resistance (with management through Stockholm from London), Manus was arrested by the Gestapo, dived out his window, and escaped from the hospital. A bonus feature on Manus’s life details the startling route he took to get to Scotland (Edinburgh is 581 miles west of Oslo), where he was trained as a saboteur. In the movie, he just appears there from the hospital, but he got from Oslo to Scotland across Russia, around the Cape of Horn, across North America and the North Atlantic.

The main set pieces are attaching bombs to ships in Oslo harbor. There is also the bombing of records to foil plans to draft Norwegians to be volunteered to fight the Red Army in defense of Germany, followed by burning folder by folder of other records in the apartment of the Gestapo chief, Siegfried Fehmer (Ken Duken).

There is no backstory, no insight offered into what drove Max Manus to such daring acts ("My country was stolen from me” is the explanation he offers.) The only psychology in the movie is his mounting survivor guilt as his associates are killed, including the more charismatic Gregers Gram (at least Nicolai Cleve Broch is more charismatic than Hennie…).

Though based on the  true case, there is what seems a hoary movie cliché about an antagonistic first meeting metamorphosing into love and marriage. The Norwegian Resistance control officer Tikken Lindebrække (Agnes Kittelsen) is a married woman. After the war she divorced, married Manus, and they lived happily ever after.

From the movie one does not have any idea how many missions Manus completed. I’m not sure that the Gestapo chief was as focused on Manus as the one in the movie is. I’ve seen such personalized duels of wits (always lost by the Nazis) in many other movies. For that matter the Danish movie “Flame and Citron” (also made quite long after the fall of the Third Reich) provided a pair of Resistance fighters similar to Max and Gregers.

Though the only other movie I recall seeing about sabotage specifically in a  Norwegian location, “The Heroes of Telemark,” starring Kirk Douglas, is all snow (taking out a heavy water manufacturing plant), and “Max Manus” (after its opening Finnish sequence) is all urban, the plucky Resistance covertly supported by almost the entire population outwitting the Germans is a template that has been used and used and reused. The late-blooming French Resistance has been particularly glorified (Melville’s great “Army of Shadows” is a rare instance of showing the price along with the heroism).

I don’t begrudge people taking pride in the heroes of Resistance (who were “terrorists” in the view of their puppet governments), and recognize that the effect of making change (the overthrow of a powerful regime) conceivable are hard to measure, but I think that such movies (throw in the “terrorist” independence fighters and reprisals in “The Battle of Algiers” and “Outside the Law”…and the slaughter of civilians in “The Dirty Dozen”) beg the question of the price of derring-do resistances, and obfuscate the scale of collaboration, focusing on a few dissidents and not showing the reprisals. (It does show many of the other resisters being shot, or having been shot, and one being tortured.)

There were some Norwegian historians, most notable Erling Fossen arguing that the Norwegian Resistance was “inefficient, irresponsible, and in some cases directly counter-productive.”

The movie was a big hit in Norway. If I had never seen any WWII sabotage movies, I’d have been more impressed than I was. I realize that for Norway, this is a big-budget action movie (the most expensive-to-make Norwegian film ever) and that for many the motivation is obvious (resisting evil) and cost-benefit calculations are irrelevant. I’d rate it average (3 stars) except for the fascination of the documentary about and with the real-life models (Tikken as well as Max Manus and sites of some of the movie action and respites). I think that “Army of Shadows,” “Hangmen Also Die,” “The Guns of Navarrone,” and “Flame and Citron” are better movies, but “Max Manus” is certainly not a bad movie; it’s just that it doesn’t seem to me to add anything to the stack of celebration of anti-Nazi derring-do (I don’t think “The Heroes of Telemark” is as good a movie, but it provided some fresh material: the saboteurs operating mostly on skis. “Hamsum” is a great Norwegian movie about collaboration and its discontents with a very great performance by Max von Sydow in the title role. I have not seen the 1943 movie adaptation of John Steinbeck’s “The Moon Is Down,”  set in Norway.)

The directors are currently directing “Kon-Tiki” about the dering-do during the 1940s of another famed Norwegian Thor Heyerdahl (played by Pål Sverre Valheim Hagen, who played a supporting role in “Max Manus”).

©2011, Stephen O. Murray

Thans (yes, again!) to Mona for adding this to the desolate movies database.

Recommended: No

Viewing Format: DVD