Rating: 
Summary: Self-Righteous Delusion & The Failure of Good Intentions.
Review: "Taking Sides" is a fact-based account of the attempt to bring Dr. Wilhelm Furtwangler (Stellan Skarsgard), the globally renowned conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, to trial for "serving the Nazi regime". The film is based on the play by Ronald Harwood, who also wrote the script. The story takes place in 1946 while Berlin was occupied by American and Russian militaries. Major Steve Arnold (Harvey Keitel) of the U.S. Army has been assigned the task of determining who among Germany's artistic community aided the Nazi cause during the regime's 12-year reign. Dr. Furtwangler is suspect because he is not dead, and because his work was admired by prominent members of the Reich, including Adolph Hitler himself. The events depicted in "Taking Sides" did take place, although I'm not sure how accurate the film is in the details. The character of Furtwangler has been expanded upon to serve the film's themes. "Taking Sides" is deliberately morally ambiguous, preferring that the audience decide for itself who is guilty of what. Stellan Skarsgard and Harvey Keitel are both in top form. Skarsgard is one of cinema's finest character actors, and here he plays a man who has been defeated, at least temporarily, by the tide of history and who is at a loss to comprehend attacks on his character and good intentions. Keitel is perfection as the well-meaning Major Arnold, whose own intentions lead him to self-righteous delusion. As this was a play, the film takes place primarily on one set. But the occasional change of venue prevents this from becoming conspicuous. "Taking Sides" would be worth seeing for its fine performances. Although it takes place 58 years ago, its subject matter will never go out of style. Both Furtwangler and Arnold seem to have failed in their good intentions to one degree or another, or at least been too indiscriminate in their patriotism . The DVD: Bonus features consist of 9 interviews with cast and crew members and some behind-the-scenes footage entitled, appropriately enough, "Behind the Scenes". The interviews are all brief. Particularly worth seeing are those with actors Stellan Skarsgard and Ulrich Tukur, in which they speak about their characters. "Behind the Scenes" is just random film footage from the set without any narration. It's not actually a documentary.
Rating:
Summary: I did this show
Review: As an actor/producer who chose to do the play TAKING SIDES (on which this film is based) last May at the height of a new era of "post war" occupation by America, I feel I have particular insight into this product. I played Major Arnold, the bullish American who is so traumatized by the Holocaust brought on by the Germans that he is assigned to interrogate artists who stayed in Germany during the war. Furtwangler is the focus of this investigation, as the most renouned conductor of the time. Furtwangler was wealthy, loved by Hitler as well as most Germans. You see, art and culture was big to Nazi life, and though Furwangler never joined the party and actually helped some Jewish musicians escape, he chose to stay in Germany and work. It is known that Hitler so loved him that there was a standing order to not touch him (he was on a list of "immortals" that were viewed as so important they got special treatment even in times of war and hardship.) Furtwangler was openly defiant to other Nazi officials, and they hated him. LIke many Germans, they knew what the Nazis were up to only after the fact. Then they were somewhat trapped. Furtwangler admits to knowing the brutality. And that's the hard part of this piece. There is no clear cut answer as to whom is more right in matters. And if done well, the audience understands both "Sides" of this story. Even if they feel stronger leanings towards one side over the other. There are many parallels to some of the issues in today's current events that make this sampling of history 60 years ago, startling. History does indeed repeat itself in strange new ways. No doubt if you are a liberal, you will feel sympathy for Furtwangler, and agree with him that art can be more powerful than politics, and even negate the horrors of the Holocaust. If you are a Bush fan, you will no doubt find the tactics and mindset of Major Arnold to be on par with your views. I am a liberal, who painfully, and proudly found the humanity and soul of Arnold each and every night and presented it to an audience. The tragedy in all this is that each side always thinks it is right. Hitler thought he was right. Saddam thought he was right. Bush thinks he is right. Michael Moore thinks he is right. And they all have compelling arguements to back up their beleif. It is up to each of us to reach into ourselves and figure out which side we come down on.
Rating: 
Summary: Give It a Rest, Major
Review: Harvey Keitel's character, Major Steve Arnold is offensive in a way peculiar to the American entertainment machine. He fuels his investigation of a symphony conductor with emotion derived from repeated viewings of a bulldozer pushing the dead of Bergen-Belsen into a mass grave. Although it is a pre-trial inquiry, Arnold is convinced from the beginning of the guilt of the "defendant". Guilt of what? Not murder. Not Nazi party membership. Guilty of not leaving Germany in 1934 and continuing to work as a conductor. This, in Arnold's narrow mind, constitutes complicity. The crowning outrage is the conductor's actual handshake with Adolph Hitler after a performance. For this Arnold berates him during endless interrogation sessions in his office, which makes up the bulk of the film. His voice quivering with rage, his vocabulary brimming with street punk vulgarity, he humiliates the conductor in a variety of ways until he feels he's "proven" his case. One watches with a growing frustration as the hapless conductor tries to prove he is not a Nazi or anti-semite with feeble statements on art and the human spirit. No mention is made of the limited choices available in a totalitarian society. What, for example, was the conductor to do when the Fuhrer extended his hand to shake? Slap him in the face? Shake his hand only on condition the Fuhrer come backstage for a lecture on ethics? The major seems to have not the slightest inkling that the Nazis used piano wire for other things than making pretty music. This is based on a true story, but I doubt very much anyone in the US Army conducted himself in this way with the conductor. This movie seems to grow more out of the Hollywoodish belief that if you work yourself into enough of a moral outrage and stamp your little foot loud enough, you can right retroactively all the wrongs of history. It's unclear whether the writer/director actually sides with the shallow Arnold, or with his callow assitants, but he certainly gives the former the upper hand throughout the movie. When his stenographer, Fraulein Straube, resigns her post in revulsion over Arnold's Gestapo tactics, Arnold pulls her over to the movie projector to watch the Bergen-Belsen footage. One wishes she had some footage to show him, perhaps of skin falling off children with radiation sickness in the city of Hiroshima, or of mass graves operated by the major's "pals" in Siberia, pals with whom he not only shook hands, but had dinner and drank himself into a stupor with.
Rating:
Summary: Furtwangler! A Conductor of Great Magnitude
Review: I saw the play in N.Y. before I saw the movie. The late Raymond Massey Jr. played Furtwangler in the play version. With all due respect to Massey, there is no comparison to the Swedish actor Stellan Skarsgard. Skarsgard is the great Furtwangler! Am I a self-proclaimed authority on the conductor? No, not really, but I have read the three existing biographies about him. I tell you that Skarsgard, without a doubt, is as close to the conductor as possible. His portrayal is worth seeing the film alone! Harvey Keitel as the interogator, WHOA! Although there are several other fine actors in this film, Skarsgard and Keitel make seeing this film a must. If your a classical music buff, what are you waiting for? The central issue of this film was, did Furtwangler offer his artistic talents to the government and thus deemed a colaborator? Or, did he simply have a love for Germany and his art to the extent he felt he needed to stay in Germany as a symbol of his and other German citizens opposition to the Nazis. Although at times he made compromises with the government, as a whole he was clearly anti- Nazi and was about to be arrested by the SS for his support of Jewish muscians just before he left the country for Switzerland. You may think I'm too sympathetic to Furtwangler, but after reading three books, I'm both a supporter of the man and his art. So,I highly recommend you see the movie and decide for your self. Lastly, while your watching this film you will probably feel that he should have left Germany a long time ago, if he really wanted to do the "right thing". However, let me tell you something most people do not know about Furtwangler. He was told by the government at one point that if he left Germany at any time, his elderly mother would be put in jail! My source is from a book written by Yehudi Menuhin's dad. Those of you who know classical music are familiar with the close relationship between the Menuhin family and Furtwangler. See the movie, there was no one like Furtwangler!
Rating:
Summary: A Difficult Subject, A Brilliant Result
Review: TAKING SIDES achieves what so many other attempts at exploring the extremes of the human psyche under duress do not. That nether land of doubt that exists when aftermath 'truths' can only be postulated and not proved is the fodder from which writer Ronald Harwood (who also wrote 'The Pianist') has created a terse and tense examination of the investigation by the Allied Forces of Conductor Wilhelm Furtwangler. Was he a Nazi sympathizer or a protector of Jews during the Holocaust? Director Istvan Szabo maintains the format of the original play to keep the story confined to the interrogation room, straying only momentarily to develop the characters of this quasi-trial. Stellan Skarsgard is extraordiarily fine as the controversial Furtwangler, even taking on his body language and conducting moments to the realist edge. As the Allied Forces interrogator Steven Arnold, Harvey Keitel is brilliant - seethingly angry, a hell-bent Major who refuses Furtwangler any semblance of respect. Assisting Keitel are his secretary Emmi (in an astonishingly fine performance by Birgitt Minichmayr) and an Allied observer David (the equally fine Moritz Bleibtreu), a Jew who still holds the subject Furtwangler in deep respect. But the magic is in the duets by Keitel and Skarsgard, sparring with personal venom and personal despair. We are not given a decision as to the truth of Furtwangler's investigation, but we are told the results of the interviews. All of the music is Beethoven and Schubert and Bruckner (the use of the Adagio from the Bruckner Symphony No. 7 is especially eloquent and meaningful) and is played from recordings by Furtwangler and the Berlin Philharmonic as well as by Daniel Barenboim and the Staatskapelle of Berlin. This film is every bit as fine as the author's film of his THE PIANIST, but for some unknown reason it simply opened and closed in the theaters without making the impact it so justly deserves. Highly recommended on every level.
Rating:
Summary: A Difficult Subject, A Brilliant Result
Review: TAKING SIDES achieves what so many other attempts at exploring the extremes of the human psyche under duress do not. That nether land of doubt that exists when aftermath 'truths' can only be postulated and not proved is the fodder from which writer Ronald Harwood (who also wrote 'The Pianist') has created a terse and tense examination of the investigation by the Allied Forces of Conductor Wilhelm Furtwangler. Was he a Nazi sympathizer or a protector of Jews during the Holocaust? Director Istvan Szabo maintains the format of the original play to keep the story confined to the interrogation room, straying only momentarily to develop the characters of this quasi-trial. Stellan Skarsgard is extraordiarily fine as the controversial Furtwangler, even taking on his body language and conducting moments to the realist edge. As the Allied Forces interrogator Steven Arnold, Harvey Keitel is brilliant - seethingly angry, a hell-bent Major who refuses Furtwangler any semblance of respect. Assisting Keitel are his secretary Emmi (in an astonishingly fine performance by Birgitt Minichmayr) and an Allied observer David (the equally fine Moritz Bleibtreu), a Jew who still holds the subject Furtwangler in deep respect. But the magic is in the duets by Keitel and Skarsgard, sparring with personal venom and personal despair. We are not given a decision as to the truth of Furtwangler's investigation, but we are told the results of the interviews. All of the music is Beethoven and Schubert and Bruckner (the use of the Adagio from the Bruckner Symphony No. 7 is especially eloquent and meaningful) and is played from recordings by Furtwangler and the Berlin Philharmonic as well as by Daniel Barenboim and the Staatskapelle of Berlin. This film is every bit as fine as the author's film of his THE PIANIST, but for some unknown reason it simply opened and closed in the theaters without making the impact it so justly deserves. Highly recommended on every level.
Rating: 
Summary: * * * 1/2, A good film that could have been a great film...
Review: Taking Sides starts with a superb scene. We are at a concert in Berlin as the great maestro Wilhelm Furtwangler conducts Beethoven's Fifth Symphony to a rapt audience. (Ironically, the piece was also a symbol of victory of the allies, with it's da-da-da-duum motto suggesting dot-dot-dot-dash--Morse Code for "V[ictory].") At the height of the drama, there's an air raid, spotlights start shining outside, and the lights in the hall eventually go out. It really happened. Both sides played Beethoven while bombs fell. Some recordings have even been preserved, and one can hear Wanda Landowska in London, for example, performing as bombs dropped around her.
Unfortunately, the rest of the movies doesn't live up to that great opening moment, or to another moment a short while later where a crowd of post-war music lovers sits in a bombed out cathedral, umbrellas raised, listening to Schubert in the rain. It's hard to give such a high-minded and ambitious film as "Taking Sides" a less-than-great evaluation (can you imagine sitting in a room and pitching this to a production company???), but "Taking Sides" disappoints and delights in almost equal measures. I have been wishing for years that someone would make a movie about classical music in this period in history and finally someone has. Unfortuantely, the budget on this was probably very very small, and it shows. But one doesn't have to necessarily have lots of bucks to make a great film. Still, the ability to film on more locations, better CGI effects (yes, this film has CGI effects in the form of bombed out buildings) and *a better editor* would have all helped things a bit. The editor on this picture was all thumbs, filling some scenes with inexplicably quick cutaway shots lasting fractions of a section, leaving other scenes to be one-shot monologues, even when you think it would be better to see a reaction, and inserting jump cuts awkwardly. We go from closeups to extreme long shots back to closeups without any rhyme or reason I can see (for a better example of how to handle this kind of shooting and editing, watch Patton), scenes are dropped carelessly in, with no thought to entrance or exit, and a whole subplot with a Russian officer who wants to trade "five conductors for my favorite Wilhelm Furtwangler" could have been reduced to one scene, or even left on the cutting room floor. It's so insignificant that I've been reading critics' reviews of the film on line all night, and not one has even mentioned it. It's five minutes of padding and just interrupts the main dramatic line.
Harvey Keitel plays his part with a little too much bluster from the getgo, so there's never a buildup. His one-note performance wears thin, and I'm not sure why they made the representative of one side of the argument a pig-headed ignoramus who in his way is as reprehensible as the Nazi barbarians he rails against. And the big moment at the end (I won't spoil it) regarding a recordng of the Adagio of the Bruckner 7th fell flat to me, because that seems to be one of the things you really *couldn't* fault Furtwangler for. And I would really like to know a little more about *how* Furtwangler saved some of his musicians from the death camps; having Keitel brush that away as besides the point was a cop-out on the film's part.
I kept waiting for the two minor characters, the secretary and the junior officer, to find something revelatory in that library search once they seemed to turn sides, but they never did. A lot of background information was tantilizingly hinted at, but that part of the story didn't feel fleshed out to me enough. I'm a subscriber to the Henry James theory of drama: if there's a gun on page one, by the end of the story it has to go off. To me there were some guns in this script that had their triggers cocked but were never fired. Pity. For example, early on, Furtwangler points out that other conductors who were far more implicated (Herbert von Karajan, for example) had already been cleared and were back to conducting. I would like to have known more about that--why and was there "politics" involved and who ultimately made these decisions. We could have seen Furtwangler's personal affects, what he had and what sort of "trunk" he was living out of. I would like to have learned more about how the post war conditions were affected Furtangler's life--his meager living situation and his reliance on the kindness of strangers--instead of just seeing him shuffle into the interrogation room every day.
But that's not to slight Stellan Skarsgard's performance, which is remarkable--while he didn't look much like Furtwangler and they didn't even try (too much hair!), I forgot all about that after five minutes, and thought about George C. Scott's comments about portraying General George Patton: what was important was not an exact resemblance but rather giving the *impression* of the man. Skarsgard certainly does that, based on the footage I've seen of Furtwangler, though the two definitely had different conducting styles!
Some have complained of the claustrophobia of the film, because it comes from a stageplay. I am more bothered by, as I said, strange choices of editing, never really letting us move around and breathe in the environment we're in. Remember that great scene in Chinatown where Jack Nicholson goes snoooing through the desk of the water commissioner early in the film? You learn a lot about the man and the time period in that scene. And as Jack explores LA, you breathe the air of the 1930s and feel like you're "living" there with the characters, and it's all done in an effortless way. This film could have used some of that, and a little less of Keitel and Skarsgard screaming over a desk.
The best moment may be saved for last. While Furtwangler never does convince Keitel's character of his sincerity--how could he?--and we are left wondering if perhaps Furtwangler's defense was more of an excuse than a defense, we cut to archival footage of the real Furtwangler at a concert. Nazi officers, including Joseph Goebbels, Heinrich Himmler and Hermann Goering, are present. After the event, Goebbles walks to the podium to shake Furtwangler's hand. (The movie talks a lot about a handshake with Hitler and seems to imply this is it, but in truth the famous photo is of Furtwangler *bowing* to Hitler as Hitler remains seated.) After touching the hand of the propaganda minister, Furtwangler discreetly does something that says more about his true feelings than all the fighting across a desk ever could.
The DVD image is sharp, and the sound is excellent. There are some talking head interviews about the production, and a puzzling six minute "Making of" short that has no narration, no structure, and very little sound, and just appears to be randomly strung-together bits of behind-the-scenes footage. It's totally pointless.
Rating:
Summary: Art against politics : the eternal fight
Review: The disturbing question around the inquirer Arnold is are you i nvolved or not with the Nazis? . He doesn't understand how you can face the enemie without being outside the country as others did it. Toscanini, Klemperer, Schoenberg or Bruno Walter.
Wilhelm Furtwangler holds his reasoning of keeping inside, holding the struggle face to face.
There have always been these two points of view about how deal with that. Is really the politics more important than the art? It depends on you; and how you face the life; the ancient greeks used call idiot to this kind of people who just care about his personal business; forgetting perhaps the meaning of what citizenship means.
That's why Furtwangler develops his art of cobducting. The art will always survive far beyond the politics ; due his goals are timeless ; the politics turns around another level , a minor level obviously , because the material needs of the human being concern to a major number of people than the art ; whose purpose is by its own nature more reduced, less popular , more aristocratic.
And we are then before a democratic choice ; the art has been always in a less proportion than politics. The Reinassance fact concerned juist about a few minds and men ; and it's hard to think about if the achievements made by all this reborn spiritual could have been understood by the whole population.
This film show both positions ; the trascendence against the present moment ; the aristos facing the vulgarity .
Keitel and Sanksgard sre flamboyant in every role . Szabo with his camera and enlighting are fisrt rate.
The issues delaed in this movie are timeless discussion , tht's why this picture is an important document about the awful facts after the WW2 about Wilhelm Furtwangler the greatest conductor in any age.
Watch this film and please don'nt forget that the little K inscribed himself twice with the Nazis.
Pitifully Ferenc Fricsay , the conductor designed by Furtwangler as the future conductor would die in 1962 , a fact that allowed to the little K conduct the Berlin Philarmonic till his death in 1986.
Rating:
Summary: Art vs. Morality?
Review: This film, which concerns the behavior of the great conductor Willem Furtwangler under Hitler's regime, is only secondarily about whether Furtwangler did or did not sympathize with the Nazis. The underlying subject is the relationship between art (specifically, music) and morality: should a great artist be expected to abandon his country in order to make a moral choice? or is his duty to keep art alive in society even if it means tolerating evil to do it? And if he chooses the latter course, how can we distinguish this from craven self-interest or even complicity? These are the questions posed to the characters and to us as viewers. A terrific and unusual film, but it will bother you if you are uncomfortable with the ambiguity at its center.
Rating:
Summary: Art vs. Morality?
Review: This film, which concerns the behavior of the great conductor Willem Furtwangler under Hitler's regime, is only secondarily about whether Furtwangler did or did not sympathize with the Nazis. The underlying subject is the relationship between art (specifically, music) and morality: should a great artist be expected to abandon his country in order to make a moral choice? or is his duty to keep art alive in society even if it means tolerating evil to do it? And if he chooses the latter course, how can we distinguish this from craven self-interest or even complicity? These are the questions posed to the characters and to us as viewers. A terrific and unusual film, but it will bother you if you are uncomfortable with the ambiguity at its center.
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