Boy, has The Tower been put through the wringer in the last 6 years. It began its life as a novel in 2008; was translated into a two-part television event in 2012; and now has had both of those halves stitched together into a theatrical release for American theaters in 2014. Did Uwe Tellkamp anticipate that any of this might happen when he first penned his sprawling tale of life in 1980s East Germany? Tellkamp’s novel won the German Book Prize in the year of its debut, and went on to become a massively important work of cultural critique, so maybe he did.
But how clearly do his words translate into visual media? That is a far more sensitive question. However great the original work may be, it’s ultimately treated with uneven hands in Christian Schwochow’s The Tower, a film that struggles to capture Tellkamp’s intended scope and winds up feeling clunky and disconnected for it. Novels like The Tower demand room to breathe; they’re enormous, so much so that distilling them into one picture feels like folly. Imagine stuffing the entirety of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings into a single film, or squeezing every last horrible sentence of Atlas Shrugged into a two-hour framework. That’s the kind of studio thinking that utterly decimates great art (or, in the case of Atlas Shrugged, kindling).
The Tower doesn’t suffer quite so much as one might expect a 1,000-page book to suffer in making the leap from page to screen. At times, it’s even very good. But there are imbalances in how Schwochow handles the source, tonally and otherwise, that prevent it from being consistent. Like Tellkamp’s text, the film captures daily existence in the German Democratic Republic in the decade leading up to 1989, when the Berlin Wall underwent a pretty heavy duty remodel; the narrative fixates on the family Hoffman as audience identification figures to latch onto throughout Schwochow’s virtual tour through history. There’s patriarch Richard, a successful surgeon and less successful adulterer; his wife Anne, herself an accomplished nurse; and their son, Christian, a kid on the verge of adulthood who’s trying to feel his way through life. In a time of stringent rule, they lead a cozy, bourgeois existence, keeping to themselves in public while laughing at their leaders behind closed doors and throwing lavish parties with their friends.
They make an empathetic leading trio, supported in turn by a rotating stable of background characters (notably Meno, Christian’s uncle, a biologist and editor for a renowned publisher). The problems they face are myriad; just getting by in the GDR, with its strict brand of governance, is its own challenge, but Richard’s extramarital activities, and the spectres from his past, create tangles in his relationships with his family. Meanwhile, Christian’s bookish bent clashes with teenage rebellion in the film’s most compelling, driven plot line. All the while, The Tower casts a shroud of paranoia, portraying the hopelessness and helplessness of the era – but only just.
The Tower engages with its literary and historical bases without saying much about them. Maybe that’s unfair; Schwochow, arguably, need only let the material speak for itself, particularly once Christian enters the East German Army and we see military behavior that’s quite as despicable as that exhibited by the Nazis. But fiction like The Tower needs to do more than just point impressively at a subject to convey feeling or perspective, and if The Tower desperately needs anything, it’s the latter. (Plus, the theatrical cut of the movie shows its seams. If you must watch this, and there’s no reason you should skip it straight up, watch the full 3-hour version submitted for television. It’s far less of a cheat.) How do the events unfolding before us have meaning for a national – or international – audience today? Try as he might, Schwochow cannot produce a satisfactory answer.
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