Oscar Winner ‘Character’: Tragedy Without the Pain

Both here and in its home country of the Netherlands, “Character” has created considerable interest, taking film festival honors and even winning this year’s Oscar for best foreign language film. Determining what the fuss is about is not difficult, but wholeheartedly sharing in it is another matter.

“Character” is made with an assurance and visual flair that belies the first-time status of director Mike van Diem, who also adapted the popular 1938 Dutch novel of the same name. Set in a convincingly re-created Rotterdam of the 1920s, “Character” is more than anything intent on telling its tale at breakneck speed, determined to operatically heighten every situation for maximum effect and exhibiting the same force Van Diem showed at the Oscar ceremony Monday night. While that makes the film instantaneously melodramatic and involving, it doesn’t serve its long-term interests equally well.

The film opens with a furious young man named Jacob Willem Katadreuffe hurtling down the streets of Rotterdam. He storms into the office of an aged troll and screams that despite the troll’s best efforts he’s succeeded in becoming a lawyer. How do you know I wasn’t working for, not against you?, the troll asks. Katadreuffe leaves in a huff, changes his mind, storms back into the office even more furious and literally hurls himself at the older man as the scene fades out.

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Soon enough there is a large group of police at Katadreuffe’s door. Dreverhaven, for that is the old man’s name, has been found dead in his office, and this morose young man is the main suspect. Interrogated in a prison cell by a sympathetic official, Katadreuffe reveals the story behind the confrontation we’ve witnessed.

Dreverhaven (played with great presence by Jan Decleir) is no ordinary man. Called “the law without compassion” by understandably terrified citizens, he’s a court bailiff who specializes in evicting the poor. Wearing an impressive medallion and a large black hat like the one the Shadow favors, Dreverhaven is heartless and implacable, capable of tossing dying people into the street and even, if need be, “evicting the devil from hell.”

Dreverhaven is allowed one quasi-human moment, a night of dalliance with his silent, grim-faced servant Joba (Betty Schuurman). Naturally the child Jacob Willem is born of that episode, but though Dreverhaven offers marriage, the independent Joba is determined to turn him down.

The refusal leads to a miserable childhood for our protagonist, who’s taunted for being a bastard. Only two things even momentarily lighten his torment: a love of books and the friendship of an earnest young radical named Jan Maan (Hans Kesting), whom Joba takes in as a boarder.

Jacob Willem grows into a young man (played by Fedja van Huet, an actor who looks uncannily like Robert Downey Jr.) and takes his mother’s name because Dreverhaven absolutely refuses to acknowledge his paternity. Katadreuffe attempts to make his way in the world but finds that every step he takes, even his flirtation with the pretty Lorna Te George (Tamar van den Dop) locks him deeper and deeper into a battle of wills with a father who appears to be a monster pure and simple.

Director Van Diem, aided by cinematographer Rogier Stoffers and an ominous symphonic score from Het Paleis van Boem, brings considerable verve and style to this story, but the film is not without problems. The most obvious is that being the son of two such grim automatons has not done much for Katadreuffe’s personality. He’s deadly serious and something of a pill, and we don’t particularly care for him any more than we do his father.

More of a problem is Van Diem’s attempt to tell this bleak story in a highly stylized way. The film does have energy, but it’s so much the energy of a soap opera that none of the terrible things that happen to Katadreuffe seems real enough to involve us to any measurable extent.

That, finally, is probably the reason for “Character’s” success. It provides all the trappings of a tragic story without any of the pain that real tragedy involves. What we get instead is a fun-house version of a serious film, made in a style that lets us ooh and aah at the characters’ troubles without having to take them too seriously. There’s some genuine filmmaking involved in “Character,” but the darkness it so proudly evokes is strictly bogus.

* MPAA rating: R, for violence. Times guidelines: a gloomy tone and some acts of violence.

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‘Character’

Fedja van Huet: Katadreuffe

Jan Decleir: Dreverhaven

Betty Schuurman: Joba

Victor Low: De Gankelaar

Tamar van den Dop: Lorna Te George

Hans Kesting: Jan Maan

Released by Sony Pictures Classics. Director Mike van Diem. Producer Laurens Geels. Screenplay Mike van Diem, in cooperation with Laurens Geels and Ruud van Megen, based on the novel by Ferdinand Bordewijk. Cinematographer Rogier Stoffers. Editor Jessica de Koning. Costumes Jany Temime. Music Het Paleis van Boem. Art director Jelier & Schief. Running time: 1 hour, 54 minutes.

* In limited release.