Taking Sides.

Taking Sides Directed by Istvan Szabo As Major Steve Arnold, a postwar Nazi hunter assigned to nail Hitler's favorite conductor in Taking Sides, Harvey Keitel is a sandblasted palooka?battered and weary but still game for a fight. His bull neck, broad back and thick midsection suggest a former athlete whose only exercise comes from hoisting pints of lager. It's been a long time since Arnold cared what others thought of him; you can see it in his less-than-ramrod posture, in the distrustful and mischievous way he looks at witnesses and colleagues and in the good-enough-for-government-work salutes Arnold gives to other soldiers. His detachment isn't intellectual; it's practical. He's a hardass who gets the job done and doesn't have time for bullshit. Everything he thinks and believes comes from actual experience?from life in the here and now. Keitel's performance as Arnold is the best reason to see Taking Sides. Adapted by Ronald Harwood from his play, and directed by Istvan Szabo (Sunshine), it's one of those dramas about Big Questions that's too theoretical and polite; like an SAT question, its details vanish from the mind almost instantly. (Leaving my apartment to see this movie, I remarked to my wife that I wished I'd seen the play when it was on Broadway, and she reminded me that we had.) Onstage, the Arnold character was a salty-mouthed proletariat foil to the play's suffering, sensitive, passionate subject, the privileged conductor Wilhelm Furtwangler (played in the film by Stellan Skarsgard), who held on to his position while secretly helping fugitive Jews.

The play seemed to be idealizing Furtwangler the Great Artist while implying that Arnold was not sophisticated enough to appreciate his complexity. Sometimes the play seemed to be making fun of him, in the crafty way that All in the Family used to make fun of Archie Bunker while pretending to celebrate his life force. But onscreen, Arnold is no longer a cipher. He's a human being?at once basic and complicated. I found him so interesting, that whenever director Istvan Szabo let Furtwangler go on at length in closeup about the transformative power of art and the seductive toxin of politics, I kept hoping the director would cut to Arnold's reactions.

As play or film, Taking Sides still feels like a play. Cinematographer Lajos Koltai's master shots are a bit too pretty and too lit, and the whole thing has that bottom-of-a-whiskey-glass color, a shortcut that says "period piece." Both the sets and the costumes struck me as too stagey; the clothes don't look worn enough, and the principal set is Arnold's makeshift office, the windows of which reveal rundown Berlin buildings (depending on the angle, these look like either photographs or miniatures). It's the kind of drama where the conductor lets you know he's torn between artistic privilege and conscientious guilt because he says things like, "In times like these, we need spiritual nourishment," and "Politics and art must be kept separate."

Sometimes Szabo and Harwood digress for a straight-out-of-Eisenhower love story between two supporting characters, Arnold's young secretary (Birgitt Minichmayr) and his music-loving junior officer (Moritz Bleibtreu). Their relationship is built around thematically important details?her dad was executed for plotting against Hitler; he's a Jewish intellectual who lost relatives in the war but still idealizes Furtwangler?but it still feels as unnecessary as the romantic subplot in The Caine Mutiny. Throughout, Keitel's red meat realism holds the movie together. Just having him in the same room with the other characters deepens their believability. When Keitel is onscreen, Taking Sides no longer a play about art and conscience. It's a movie about right and wrong, built around an obsessive and somewhat arrogant American man who prizes certain values (honesty, consistency, decency) even though he doesn't always embody them.

Taking Sides is a Stanley Kramer movie, only fuzzier?an old-school drama about Issues. It needed an old-school movie actor, and amazingly, that's exactly what Keitel has become. Early in his career, Keitel's association with De Niro and Scorsese and James Toback typed him as an heir to Marlon Brando?a New York method man, an intellectual primitive. But the more parts Keitel plays, the more he reminds me of Richard Widmark, Lee Marvin or Spencer Tracy?a cut-to-the-chase actor lucky enough to live in a time when he can do things that Marvin, Widmark and Tracy weren't allowed to do (including curse and get naked).

Even when he's cutting loose or showing off, he serves the story. Think of the grandfatherly delight he takes in announcing, "Just because you are a character doesn't mean you have character" in Pulp Fiction, or his brief, raw breakdown scene in City of Industry, the only emotionally naked moment in a performance that's otherwise as closed-off as a fist. As flamboyant as Keitel can be, he acts within the movie as opposed to having fun with it or commenting on it (the method intellectual's favorite pastime).

In Taking Sides, his actions are small, even when the scene is big. He probably yells more than he should, and there's a drunken imprecision to his swagger (except in an actual drunk scene opposite a Russian Army officer and a classical music lover that's as fine and real as drunk scenes get). But what Keitel lacks in finesse, he makes up for with truth. When Arnold says he doesn't understand how average Germans could claim they didn't know the Jews were in trouble (if the Jews' fate were a mystery, why did certain Germans keep trying to save them?), he isn't just some lump-headed Yank who fails to understand the moral tangles of life. He's a man whose core values haven't been educated out of him?an ideal American. Late in the picture comes a scene in a bar between Arnold and his junior officer, who distrusts Furtwangler because of his anti-Semitic remarks but forgives him because of his wonderful music. Its climax is a single line that underscores the thinking behind Keitel's performance: "Grow the fuck up."