MOVIE REVIEW : A Crisis of Conscience in Costa-Gavras’ ‘Music Box’

Perhaps, in our movies, we’ve grown too accustomed to the slick, the violent and the ersatz. When great pure dramatic subjects come up--evil in our century, brutality versus conscience--do we know how to handle them anymore?

Costa-Gavras’ “Music Box” (throughout San Diego County) focuses on a crisis of conscience within a young Chicago lawyer (Jessica Lange) defending her father (Armin Mueller-Stahl) at a deportation hearing where he is accused of Holocaust-era crimes. It’s an intelligent, ambitious work, with a deep, resonant political subject.

Costa-Gavras, who can be a master film maker, directs with his usual fluid yet steely expertise. Whether he’s staging shocking revelations in a courtroom, the jockeying between lawyers outside in hallways or bars, or the draining confrontations of the defendant and his family, he never over-tips into bathos or hysteria. His rhythms are inexorable, his mood alert and intense.

There are flashes of brilliance throughout the entire cast, in the minor roles of the courtroom witnesses (Elzbieta Cyzewska, Magda Szekely Marburg, Felix Shulman, Michael Cillo, and particularly in the lead performances of Lange as lawyer Ann Talbot and Mueller-Stahl as her father, Mike Laszlo.

Yet there’s something missing in the movie, a spark that would ignite that conscience into a blaze of outrage, a jolt that would plunge us more viscerally into the plight of the characters: the father who sees his world crumbling into Kafkaesque persecution, the daughter who suspects he may be a monster.

“Music Box” isn’t muddy or irresolute. It certainly isn’t cheap or oversensational. But it may oscillate too much between the urge to present complex material fairly and to resolve everything in a movie form as mechanically perfect and repetitive as the film’s music box itself--where, as it runs out, all the secrets are hidden.

As in “Betrayed,” the strategy of Costa-Gavras and writer Joe Eszterhas is to show fascistic excess from a conservative perspective. Ann’s blue-collar family and her stalwart, lumpen brother (Michael Rooker) are juxtaposed with the silken North Shore world of her ex-husband’s father, a corporate lawyer (Donald Moffat) who tells his grandson that the Holocaust is a myth. From outside comes the threat, the man goading her conscience--Frederic Forrest as prosecutor Jack Burke--who has such a sour, badgering demeanor that he’s almost like an unsuccessful nuisance suitor.

As Ann faces the victims who accuse her father, each one shatters her sense of certitude. Eszterhas, who also wrote “Jagged Edge,” may be at his best with impassioned polemic and courtroom scenes like these. Here, he obviously wants to persuade everyone that the Holocaust and its revelation of mass evil reverberates within our souls still. He’s not

universally eloquent. There’s not much spontaneity in his dialogue, and his characters talk as though they’re giving testimony even when they’re outside the court. But that’s not necessarily a drawback; most of them are lawyers, judges or paralegals.

But though Costa-Gavras and his writer share this gutsy, tell-it-all-and-damn-the-consequences approach, “Music Box” is, at bottom, a conventional trial melodrama with revelations that come too easily and glibly--and a final confrontation that lacks the high pain, horror and grief the actors seem more than ready to give it.

It’s a disappointment. It was Costa-Gavras--in movies like “Z,” “The Confession” and “State of Siege”--who, two decades ago, redefined the world’s conception of political melodrama. In these hellishly exciting or punishingly intense movies--as in Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 “Battle of Algiers”--truth seemed to emerge with battering force.

But in recent years, it’s Oliver Stone, obviously influenced by Costa-Gavras’ classics, who seems to have seized more surely those old qualities of muckraking fury, bravura action pyrotechnics and passionate attack. Costa-Gavras may be making the mistake of keeping his voice too muted, too reasonable. “Music Box” is ultimately too slow, too measured, too careful a film. It needs more imbalance and recklessness.

What does triumph here are the actors. As Laszlo, Mueller-Stahl--the East German emigre actor who became famous in his work for Fassbinder and Agniezka Holland--has an unforgettably swallowed-in look. His Laszlo speaks with a gravelly whisper that suggests a soul drying up inside him, an extreme reticence that could belong to a dutiful immigrant steelworker or perhaps a cunning man of violent temper carefully disguising himself. It’s part of the film’s strategy, and Mueller-Stahl’s, to keep us constantly swinging between these two possibilities.

As Ann, Lange has a marvelously open, healthy gaze. Costa-Gavras, a master of melodrama, locks her into tight compositions and long takes and surrounds her with a collection of mildly hot-headed or self-convinced characters that throw that healthiness into relief. He makes the atmosphere around her thrum with an understated menace. In the icy, overcast Chicago cityscapes, Lange’s face is like a Midwestern blossom, grainy and sweet. Costa-Gavras uses it as a kind of emblem of American idealism, American courage. Amazingly, she’s always able to suggest both.

“Music Box” (rated R for language and mature themes) doesn’t excite the senses, as even the most vacuous big studio products sometimes do. It also doesn’t excite the audience in deeper ways: It doesn’t imbue the drama with passion, doesn’t expose the psychological or political issues in any but the most obvious ways.

Given its ground rules, could we expect it to? Costa-Gavras may be playing a doomed game, trying to squeeze truth and idealism into the new super-melodramatic forms of the ‘80’s. Still, even if “Music Box” doesn’t work on every level, it’s an honorable attempt. We should never undervalue idealism and courage. In movies, as in life, we will always need them.

‘MUSIC BOX’

A Tri-Star Puctures release of a Carolco Pictures presentation. Producer Irwin Winkler. Director Costa-Gavras. Script Joe Eszterhas. Camera Patrick Blossier. Production design Jeannine Claudia Oppewall. Editor Joele Van Effenterre. Art direction Bill Arnold. Music Philippe Sarde. Executive producers Eszterhas, Hal W. Polaire. With Jessica Lange, Armin Mueller-Stahl, Frederic Forrest, Donald Moffat, Lukas Haas, Cheryl Lynn Bruce.

Running time: 2 hours, 3 minutes.

MPAA rating: R (under 17 requires an accompanying parent or adult guardian).