Good Evening, Mr. Wallenberg

A 1991 Swedish feature written and directed by Kjell Grede, starring Stellan Skarsgard as Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish businessman who saved the lives of many thousands of Hungarian Jews during World War II and wound up being taken prisoner by the Russians. Well-intentioned in its desire to honor its factual basis and in its grimness about the Holocaust, the film inadvertently illustrates better than most the futility of trying to make such a subject imaginable or believable by conventional means (the enduring lesson of Shoah). Even when this film disturbs, it seldom has much of the sting of reality; it’s a sad irony that even some conventional entertainments render deaths more convincingly. (JR)

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