Bonhoeffer: Pastor. Spy. Assassin.

Rated PG-13 • Theaters

World War II created a host of heroes, and German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer is one of the most renowned. The pacifist pastor achieved the status of martyr when the Nazis executed him in the final days of the war for his resistance to the regime. It’s a remarkable life, and Bonhoeffer: Pastor. Spy. Assassin. attempts the ambitious task of summing it up.

The film begins with Bonhoeffer as a child, playing hide-and-seek with his older brother Walter: a scene that foreshadows the future theologian’s life on the run. The narrative then shifts forward, where we find Bonhoeffer in a Nazi prison. We move back and forth between the formative moments in Bonhoeffer’s life and the last days leading up to his execution for treason.

One of those formative moments comes when he travels to America to study theology. He’s not impressed with the arid seminary lectures, but he’s changed nonetheless. Bonhoeffer befriends an African American student who introduces him to the vibrancies of jazz and the black church. Bonhoeffer learns about spirit-filled joy and the need to “meet Jesus.” The young German says he didn’t know church could be like this. He also learns about the realities of living with racial injustice, a lesson he’ll carry back to Germany.

Upon returning home, Bonhoeffer discovers things have changed in his absence. Fascism is on the rise, and he’s concerned about the compromises he sees the German church making with the Nazis. Using his pulpit, Bonhoeffer denounces religious leaders who fawn over the Führer. We see him take the lead in forming the Confessing Church, which comprised Christians who rejected Nazi accommodations, and we see him surreptitiously save Jews after taking a position within the Abwehr, Germany’s military intelligence agency. As a member of the Abwehr, Bonhoeffer plots to assassinate Hitler.

Hollywood veteran Todd Komarnicki writes and directs Bonhoeffer, creating a film with high production values. The sets, costuming, cinematography, and lighting capture the beauty and the horror of the 1930s and ’40s. There’s a melancholy undertone, since we know how things will end for the pastor/spy. Komarnicki uses German actors to play the principal characters. Jonas Dassler plays Bonhoeffer with a guileless demeanor despite the pastor’s double dealings, and August Diehl makes for a convincing Martin Niemöller—Bonhoeffer’s mentor who originated the famous words, “First they came for the socialists …”

The film nails the atmospherics, so it’s a shame the script fails to do justice to this complicated hero. With just a two-hour-and-fifteen-minute runtime, it’s impossible to cover so many slices of Bonhoeffer’s eventful life in anything other than a cursory manner. And while a biopic will necessarily rely on some imaginative scenes, the bare facts of chronology ought to be respected.

Komarnicki attempts to heighten the film’s dramatic tension by overemphasizing Bonhoeffer’s role in the attempt on Hitler’s life. After the plot’s failure, the Gestapo arrests Bonhoeffer, commenting how shameful it is for a pastor to become an assassin. In reality, Bonhoeffer was arrested more than a year before the assassination attempt even took place. He spent two years in prison, and during that time he ministered to guards and fellow prisoners alike. He also wrote some of his most important theological works from prison. It isn’t until the final days of the war that he became associated with the men behind the plot.

Partially due to the scope, we never get a sense of what drives Bonhoeffer. Komarnicki gestures at the theologian’s influences with those scenes in America, but once he returns to Germany, we lose sight of him as a person. Yes, he stands up to Nazism, but what does he think of the church beyond the fact that it belongs to God rather than Hitler?

Where’s the Bonhoeffer who wrote The Cost of Discipleship? He pays a cost for his actions, but somehow it feels disconnected from the pastor who taught that grace shouldn’t come cheap. Where’s the Bonhoeffer who wrote Life Together? He helps form the Confessing Church, but the film doesn’t show his theology about the Body of Christ.

This biopic has its inspiring moments, and it might capture the extraordinary busyness of Bonhoeffer’s fight against Nazism. But it feels rushed when depicting his primary calling to minister to God’s church.