Tags:
Journalism of Courage
8220;Please,8221; Simon Wiesenthal begged as he neared the end of his life, 8220;do not turn me into a hero.8221; His face fallen, the eyes of a supposedly hard man now overflowing with tears, the legendary Nazi hunter asked to be remembered only as a survivor.
In the new documentary, I Have Never Forgotten You: The Life 038; Legacy of Simon Wiesenthal, the subject is portrayed exactly as he hoped not to be8212;as an almost impossibly good and devoted hero.
Produced by an arm of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles and co-written by Rabbi Marvin Hier, the center8217;s founder and director, the documentary is anything but evenhanded or probing. A densely packed 105 minutes contain riveting clips of Wiesenthal in TV interviews, fleeting synopses of the captures that made his reputation, and glimpses into his own pain and deep sense that he had no choice but to force victims, perpetrators and bystanders alike to confront what happened.
But the story is forced to compete with the sappiest of manipulative musical scores, a cheesy overemphasis on the Wiesenthal Center and its director, and, worst of all, a Hollywood mentality in which history is deemed palatable if it is blessed by the touch of celebrity.
But Wiesenthal knew that if he devoted his life to confronting the world with the face of evil, he could help create a record that would survive all quests for forgiveness. He knew that what would matter in the end was only the truth.
Marc FisherLAT-WP
