Award-winning true-events pic of the effect on a dying Bavarian mining town in the 1980s when they’re chosen as the site for a lucrative/jobs-rich nuclear recycling facility (hurrah!), but soon have second thoughts (nuclear recycling!!). Oliver Haffner co-writes & directs this entirely acceptable conscience-raising film, and if that sounds like damning with faint praise, well, yes. Ibsen’s ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE, it ain’t. Johannes Zeiler does an honest job as a concerned town Commissioner who rather quickly (the evidence is ruthlessly clear) moves from project champion to skeptic, and then naysayer while his political pals bury their heads in the sands of denial. Surprisingly, the Commissioner alone in holding to the Party Line on the issue.* The more interesting character is Fabian Hinrichs’s smooth young bureaucrat, aware of his easily disprovable lies on atomic safety and assurances of local say in decisions, yet fully able to split any differences into self-justifying moral stances in his fast calculating mind. Even when being practical about the futility of sticking to principles, he’s actually still playing the odds. Just the sort of morally disingenuous fellow you could make a movie about. And when the center-right government in Bonn starts to play hardball, his is the reaction that might have led to real moral conflict and personal drama.
SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *Upton Sinclair put it best: It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
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