Interview. Paul Verhoeven.

Just up at the main site, David D'Arcy talks with Paul Verhoeven about Black Book, US politics, his Crusades movie that was to have starred Arnold Schwarzenegger and a possible project set in the McCarthy era. But as for Black Book, it's been quite a while since I've gathered such a wide-ranging collection of conflicting opinions. Here we go...

"Six years after he disappeared with the whimper that was Hollow Man, Paul Verhoeven has returned with what may be his best film," writes Lawrence Levi for Stop Smiling. "Though it's critical, Black Book is no message movie. It's a first-rate thriller. And, like most of Verhoeven's films, it's erotic, outrageously violent and deeply twisted."

"A masterly synthesis, Black Book blurs the line between early and late Verhoeven," writes Howard Feinstein, introducing indieWIRE's interview. "Combining the gutsy openness of his Dutch films with the sophisticated technique he learned in Hollywood, the 68-year-old director exposes the skeletons in Holland's wartime closet."

Updated through 4/12.

"Verhoeven has insisted that Black Book, which he and his screenwriter Gerard Soeteman began working on 20 years ago, is based on historical cases," notes J Hoberman in the Voice. "No specific sources are given, but the movie is underscored by two discomfiting facts. First is the relatively late and weak Dutch resistance to the Germans; second is the dramatically low percentage of Dutch Jews who survived the war." And further: "'I never thought I'd dread liberation,' she says. That's the movie's melancholy moral."

On a somewhat similar note, Anthony Lane in the New Yorker: "[T]he winter of 1944 and the succeeding months (the time frame of Black Book) saw the Netherlands besieged by famine, with people grating tulip bulbs to make soup. None of that desperation pinches Verhoeven's film. Resisters and collaborators alike are elegantly dressed, with plenty of flesh on the bones, and some of Rachel's escapades have the casual air of a spree."

"Black Book, which did big business in Holland and arrives here with the cachet of an acclaimed foreign film about the Holocaust, would be plain-old kitsch if it didn't cash in on the suffering of millions to get its low-brow action-adventure kicks," writes Jürgen Fauth. "The word for this is Shoahxploitation."

At Reverse Shot, Nicolas Rapold dwells on a comparison with Spielberg's Holocaust movie: "[I]nstead of restaging Schindleresque public debates about problems of representation and moral propriety, I wanted to recall another defining feature of Spielberg's landmark: a German protagonist tailored to American sympathies."

For the LA Weekly's Ella Taylor, "a viscerally effective thriller ends up a repugnant exercise in moral relativism, delivered with the grandstanding swagger of the self-styled provocateur." For one thing, among many other points she makes, Verhoeven's "jubilant rip-off of a climactic scene from the Dutch thriller The Vanishing to ratify an act of revenge near the end of the movie reeks of exploitation."

But for the New York Press's Armond White, "Its success must be measured in how it enables viewers to think about war and survival in new ways - without shopworn, Oscar-endorsed sentiments. Imagine a Fassbinder movie, deliberately self-conscious for the new century." Also: How did Verhoeven end up in the US in the first place? He tells Eric Kohn that he owes his immigration to Steven Spielberg.

"Verhoeven has never so successfully put together a piece of serious entertainment, strong in pacing, thrills, and eroticism, but also one so slickly produced that it is difficult to see into the depths of the film," finds Daniel Kasman.

"Verhoeven is perhaps something of a split personality: a man who cannot unlearn the headlong American way of making movies that he learned comparatively late in life (he was 48 when he came here) and a man who may also have an aging eye angled at his eventual place in cinema history," suggests Richard Schickel in Time. "Black Book is, I think, an attempt to satisfy both these impulses. Such mixtures of motives rarely work in the movies. But this time it does." Also, a talk with the director.

"Paul Verhoeven tries to go respectable with the WWII drama Black Book," writes Nick Schager, "and the question that persists is: Who wants a respectable Paul Verhoeven?"

"Black Book encompasses the best and very worst of its director's signature pulp brutalism, which means it's pretty much a hoot," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times.

"Verhoeven's ability to thrive in the blockbuster economy has made critics wary; during the flush years of his American work, he showed an uncanny understanding of how to tickle the imagination of 14-year-old boys," writes Nick Pinkerton at indieWIRE. "But if his sensibility is adolescent, it is in the best sense: his anarchic entertainments exist somewhere between Alfred Jarry and Terry and the Pirates."

Aaron Hillis has a good talk with Verhoeven and then pops his last question:

Early last year, a group of film bloggers from around the world each re-evaluated Showgirls on the exact same day. Have you heard of the "Showgirls Blog Orgy?"

Yes, I read an article on the internet about this, and I heard there were many different opinions. Where do I find this? I'll write it down.

Also at IFC News, Matt Singer calls Black Book Verhoeven's "most accomplished, entertaining and truly 'Verhoevian' work since Basic Instinct.... [T]he material is as old as World War II, if not time itself, but Verhoeven makes it sing."

"As a Verhoeven heroine, Rachel is atypical, and yet in her indomitable will to survive, game sexual maneuvering, sometimes quizzically emotionless adaptability and frequently exposed breasts, she finds some common ground with her predecessors," notes Michelle Orange at the Reeler, where ST VanAirsdale interviews the woman who plays her, Carice van Houten, and Verhoeven.

"I think Verhoeven is an underappreciated cinematic master, but the reasons for his lack of stature are partly of his own creation," writes Salon's Andrew O'Hehir. "Even his best pictures (I would nominate Basic Instinct, Starship Troopers and probably The Fourth Man) are always conflicted, at war with themselves, undermining their own integrity and coherence as they go along. Black Book is like that too." Also, a long talk with Verhoeven.

For the AV Club, Scott Tobias talks with Verhoeven "about his World War II experiences, his battles with the MPAA, and how Starship Troopers was made and misinterpreted."

"As epic as its two-hours-and-25-minute running time indicates, Black Book is as subversive as it is traditional, both enamored of conventional notions of heroism and frankly contemptuous of them," writes Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times.

"Verhoeven is a master action director, and Black Book contains several breathtakingly expert sequences," notes Annie Frisbie at Zoom In Online.

Steve Erickson interviews Verhoeven for Nerve.

Online viewing tips. David Poland lunches with Verhoeven. Earlier: Jamie Stuart's Trim Chat.

Update, 4/9: "At the start, I couldn't believe that the floridly cynical Verhoeven could make a movie this romantic, this thrillingly old-fashioned, this straight; I thought he must have had surgery to get his tongue out of his cheek," writes David Edelstein in New York. "The Verhoevenisms that do creep in recall Hitchcock's emotionally labyrinthine double-agent melodrama Notorious. But before you can yell, 'Auteur! Auteur!' Verhoeven reasserts himself with a vengeance."

Update, 4/10: Matt Singer at IFC News: "The Ballsy Cinema of Paul Verhoeven: A Selected Filmography."

Updates, 4/11: Patrick Goldstein talks with Verhoeven for the LAT.

Black Book's "145 minutes are by turns ridiculous, offensive, and irrelevant. They're also more exciting than various recent cinematic expressions of feigned historical truth telling," writes Dennis Harvey in the San Francisco Bay Guardian. "They are tasteless yet arguably less so than Roberto Benigni's Life Is Beautiful (1997), which turns sad-clown sentimentality into something pornographic."

Update, 4/12: "Paul Verhoeven has made a brilliant study of the origins and consequences of Fascism. That film, of course, is Starship Troopers (1997)," writes Peter Keough in the Boston Phoenix. "Black Book... is something else entirely. It's a bit of a romantic comedy, with the traditional mistaken identity and pairing of opposites of that genre. It's a hyper-emotional melodrama sparked with treacheries, illusions, revenge, and obsessive love. It's a Hitchcockian suspense thriller without suspense. It's a trash heap of enjoyable but absurd contrivances and mismatched conventions with glimmers of political and psychological insight. In short, it's a Paul Verhoeven film, of the kind that's been missed for a decade."

Posted by dwhudson at April 7, 2007 2:18 AM