TV Reviews : ‘Max and Helen’: Holocaust Survivors’ Odyssey of Love

“Max and Helen” (tonight at 5 and 7 on TNT cable) is a suspenseful and textured production with a burnished performance by Martin Landau as Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal pursuing the only case against a barbaric Nazi that Wiesenthal felt compelled to close--to destroy the evidence--in order to protect the living.

Adapted from Wiesenthal’s 1982 book of the same title, this true World War II story and its numbing aftermath expertly uses flashbacks to peel away a 20-year odyssey of love, despair and rebirth with Treat Williams and Alice Krige dramatizing the concentration camp survivors and separated lovers.

Shot in Budapest and Paris and directed by Philip Saville, the teleplay by Corey Blechman is at once an intrigue, a tragedy and an undaunted love story. Williams’ haggard, haunted doctor Max Rosenberg searching for his fiancee in post-World War II Europe, and Krige’s compassion as the enduring Helen are affecting portrayals alongside Landau’s fierce composure as Wiesenthal.

“All of us who are alive have a responsibility to the dead!” the Nazi-hunter says. But this case is different, and at the end, you understand why Wiesenthal has never to this day revealed the true identities of Max and Helen. And the brutal German camp commandant, a respected German factory owner in the present time-frame of the story, becomes, in Wiesenthal’s shattering words, “a hopeless case.” Better, Wiesenthal bitterly concludes, to give the lovers a second chance.

And better to leave that explanation to the story’s devastating twist.

The scenes in the concentration camp Zalesie in Poland are spare visual incisions. They are illuminated like a pocket lighter by the blond Nordic chill of Jonathan Phillips as the war criminal who drunkenly beats Jews with a whip in his private quarters every night and whom Wiesenthal must painfully allow to escape the net.

This is a powerful story, its horrible ambiguities festering like weeds.