The Exception [Bluray] [Blu-ray]

First off, you most likely don't care whether or not I enjoyed this film so I'll skip the standard film review everyone likes to do here and leave that to those more suited. This is a historical comment so don't bother with it if you aren't interested in history.To abbreviate, for those who wish to avoid the long winded discussion of unpleasant history, what made this a five star film for me, personally, was the dedication of the team behind the film to clear and accurate exploration of some of the most uncomfortable and difficult parts of the history surrounding the beginning of World War Two. This film, simply put, tells the fictionalized, dramatized stories of three archetypes, as a method of exploring the endless stories of what happened to those groups of people in Germany from the late 1930s into the 1940s.First, the aristocracy, brought down by the system of reparations that crippled Germany following World War One, is represented by the wounded soldier. Second, the financiers, stripped of rights, first to property and wealth, second to their very lives, are represented by a Jewish woman whose father and husband were stripped of wealth and then executed. Third, the old government, perceived as too conservative, uncaring about the inequities plaguing their population, standing as a monarchy in an age when democracy was taking over, is embodied in the story of the Kaiser himself, the last monarch of what became modern Germany.In order to understand the genius of this film, you have to know the history of the period and of what actually happened in Germany prior to the war, a history not covered in classrooms. Rather than bore you with that, I will post it below, in grossly oversimplified form, and, here, I will simply convey that a historically accurate film is impossible, as such an endeavor would be boring and have a difficult narrative structure. However, in the telling of the invented stories of a son of a former aristocratic family, the daughter of a wealthy Jewish family, and the fictionalized account of the time Kaiser Wilhelm II, the great Prussian King, spent in exile as his nation crumbled, this film somehow manages to accurately portray the misguided motivations of the average German, the ideologies that led Germany to follow a man like Adolf Hitler, the propaganda that gripped over a nation and led men to terrible deeds, and, ultimately, the root of what, originally, set the stage for allowing such atrocities to occur.In a quiet fashion, without beating the issue, the director sets simple stories of the disenfranchised. The soldier from a wealthy family that had been stripped and left with nothing in an age of runaway inflation meets the Jewish girl from a murdered family, a girl with "soft hands" who seeks to change the course of history, for her people. Their story plays out in the home of the exiled king, a man who believed in all the things Germans under Hitler were taught to hate, capitalism, competition, disparity, a man who disliked Jews but who believed that every man has a right to his property and the property of the Jews must not be taken. These characters move through their personal stories, their individual and combined arcs, all while the filmmaker displays, absent fanfare or grand discourse, the simple truth of the National Socialist Democratic Workers' Party, later called the National Socialist German Workers' Party by Roosevelt and, still later, by Hitler himself, for reasons I will post below, for any who care about such things.Who the German people were, what they believed, what they did, the good intentions of the average German leading the nation to Hell under a system designed to force equity by stealing from one group to give to the other, everything that happened to produce NAZI Germany from the people who made it, while the new elected government worked through the decade of the 1930s to convince the nation that their wealthy, their elites, their Jews, were evil, were deviant, and were the root of all their ills, while their monarch sat at a desk in his estate prison, far removed from the reality of what his nation was becoming, simply put, the issues most films ignore, are played before your eyes in the microcosm of a single household over days, to upsetting effect, with a fantasy ending, because the truth is too hard and too devastating.The timing of the release of this film was perfect, given how many people I knew who had begun espousing socialist ideology without any knowledge of what it truly means to take from one group to give to another, even with the best of intentions. I encouraged two self-proclaimed socialist friends to see it and eagerly awaited their response. One understood and said he didn't think that would happen again, that limiting the rights of the wealthy, people he calls hoarders, in order to take their wealth, would never result in the nation hating the wealthy enough to kill them, a response that stimulated in his wife an exclamation that Americans already hate the wealthy and a query as to how deeply that hatred would have to run for us to allow another Holocaust. Neither was able to make the leap to an understanding that socialism can't happen without taking rights from a subgroup of people, the wealthy people, limiting their rights to wealth and ownership but both walked away wondering whether the path we're on, espousing hatred of our makers, those who create and employ, is any different from the path Hitler set for Germany when he claimed the bankers were responsible for everything, the Jewish bankers. Even so, the historically accurate perspective is presented here for anyone to view and to analyze, if they care to do so, and for that reason, it should get ten stars.On to a brief historical discussion that you shouldn't read, unless you are genuinely interested....I'd love to post a history of how Germany got to such a place but, the truth is, most people wouldn't bother reading it. What I can say is that this film, unlike most, actually went to the trouble of telling the truth about the NAZIs, about what they started out believing, before they changed into the murderers we now talk about. To cover all the effort they put into telling that part of the story accurately would take pages and pages, and that would bore you to tears. So, I'll give you one example. They actually used the correct name of the NAZI party at the end of the 1930s. What I know, I know from books but also from my grandparents. One specific bit of information came from my Grandfather, a codebreaker and high level US Naval operative during the war, who spoke to me about this specific topic, when I was very young and confused about why my school called it the National Socialist German Workers' Party when he called it something else.To be clear, the NAZI party was actually called the National Socialist Democratic Workers Party, in Germany, prior to WWII. It was also, at points, called the National Socialist German Workers Party, after a time, due to interesting intervening events. My Grandfather and, later, several professors, explained that the shift in publicized or, rather, officially acknowledged nomenclature, changing Democratic to German, in the American discourse, was due to the fact that FDR was a Democrat with Socialist leanings. It was painfully clear to both the President and to his administration, in seeing NAZI propaganda popping up around the country, our country, propaganda that was being confiscated and evaluated by dedicated government officials and which likened Socialist Democratic ideology to our American Democratic ideology, that this propaganda was confusing the issues for the Americans who were exposed to it and, sadly, it was making converts. The decision to change the word Democratic to German, to increase the sense of "otherness" in talking about the party, such as it existed in Germany at that time, was, ultimately, a very successful marketing strategy, as it did aid in increasing support for our nation's eventual decision to intervene in the second world war but, more than that, it gave our government time to shift their own ideology more to the center in direct response to what they saw as the worst possible result of the socialist ideology taken to the logical conclusion.For a modern day PR example, during the Obama administration, the choice was made to use ISIL instead of ISIS, even when referring to Syria and not Iraq and the Levant, when the correct term for the Syrian organization is ISIS and for the Iraq/Levant segment is ISIL. This decision was made due to the opinion of some in the administration that the name of an Egyptian Goddess would confuse the issues at hand. I doubt this made much of a difference, certainly not like changing Democratic to German, but the point is clear: administrations make decisions to change names in order to change narratives. In America, the National Socialist Democratic Workers Party was referred to as the National Socialist German Workers Party to avoid making the party sound less threatening by using a term we applied to ourselves at that time, Democratic, but also to lessen the likelihood of correct association based on, as yet, uncorrected philosophy.The nationalist doctrine of Germany, starting with the idea that all Germans should exist to serve Germany and that a high level of national (governmental) control over the means of production would somehow protect national interests as well as the interests of the worker, was an ideology that was being circulated here in the 1930s. In America, the version espoused was, essentially, that Americans should serve the greater needs of America, pay higher taxes, help thy neighbor, build the strength of a superior nation, all the while being controlled as much as possible by an ever expanding system of governmental regulations to control our means of production, to force fairness on our population, in effect and in direct response to the horror of the Wall Street crash, enforcing fairness and equality where it was perceived none could exist without such strict controls. It is a fascinating history by itself but, here, is only important in the discussion of why we changed the name. A nationalistic impulse, combined with the socialist ideology, specifically reclassifying a hated population of elites or so-called wealthy or privileged people as having fewer rights than before, labeling them as existing outside of standard laws, allowing the nation to steal from those people in an altruistic redistribution scheme, sacrifice the few for the good of the many as it were, joined together in Germany to lead to horrors but, in America, were combining to the effect of ever increasing taxation and regulation. That similarity in ideology, however, with German philosophy dangerously close to the Roosevelt-led movement in America in the late 1930s, again, born of our attempt to recover from the Great Depression via a system of confiscation from those we saw as responsible, the wealthy, Wall Street, and an immediate redistribution of those funds via social welfare programs, to benefit the many, was too great at a time when Churchill was warning war may be coming. And, to his endless credit, Roosevelt had a stroke of genius and changed the name of the NAZI party, began circulating the new name, the German name, designed to increase the sense of them as "the other" while giving his administration the time they needed to rework their terminology, some of their proposals, some of their more socialist ideas, in favor of a more moderate system.My Grandfather believed that Roosevelt's efforts to change that narrative, the story of our own, American, National Socialism, were what allowed him to gather support from the American people and, ultimately, to win the war. Changing one word, giving the average American the ability to see the NAZI party as "other", as different, as dangerous, while allowing our own government to re-tool some of the socialist ideology of the day in order to alter course, stopping the mass confiscations that had been proposed and, ultimately leading us down a different path, was a brilliant move, but, more importantly here, was a single point among many in this film that was conveyed accurately. I always wondered if Churchill had a hand in changing the name but, for the sake of this already too long review, it doesn't matter. The fact of the original name, before we changed it, being used in a context of Germans talking about their own party, at the outset of the war, was a wonderful way for the filmmakers to say they aren't going to to lie about who the Germans were, no matter how uncomfortable it is to be confronted with the socialist roots of Germany under Hitler.In this film, the ideology, beyond just the name, is explored fairly accurately. The workers taking from the aristocrats, in an era of reparations when there was virtually no money left, meant taking from bankers. The bankers were Jewish. The fact that Hitler was what he was, that his hate was so deep and so profound, only made for the killing. The Socialism was what made for the stripping of rights, for the stealing, for the organized rejection of the formerly wealthy members of German society, most of whom, at that point, were Jewish. The comfort of the population at this horror, mass theft, mass confiscation, was what brought them to the next level of horror, taking people off the streets, imprisoning them, and to the next, taking all people who were deemed to be of little to no use, the disabled, the foreign, the weak.Films all too often neglect this issue, that socialism, sounding so beautiful in the vision of a Utopian society, is, most unfortunately, a system of inequity, as it is now and was then impossible to redistribute wealth without redefining the rights of some in order to allow for the taking from the wealthy. If you can't steal from a sub-population without first stripping their rights, the rights that protect that population from that kind of theft, how can you achieve redistribution? This film asks this most difficult and heartbreaking question. Born of the German people's desire for equality, a system of inequality was forced upon them by a leader who hated the population who just happened to be the wealthiest population in Germany at that time, with the landed aristocracy having lost their wealth at the end of the first world war. The willingness to address this most difficult issue is what makes this is a rare and wonderful film, a film which seeks, in an age of socialist resurgence, to remind us all of just what happened the last time someone had that idea, held it and espoused it and carried it to the last logical step.It is important to remember that the NAZIs themselves later adopted the American-coined term, German instead of Democratic, when a nationalistic boost was needed in the waning years of the war, when the socialist component had already been achieved and when national control over the means of production was failing to provide all it had promised to the German people. The original name, the National Socialist Democratic Workers' Party, sets the stage beautifully, telling you precisely when this film takes place. In the year prior to the death of the Kaiser in 1941, at a time when Hitler espoused nationalism, of two kinds, support of the nation above the self or sub-group and national control but not ownership over the means of production, when he espoused socialism, stealing from the rich to give to the poor, when he espoused democracy, as an unelected leader, claiming legitimacy via having been appointed by the elected leader and claiming that, from that legitimate base, he stood against the supposed tyranny of the unelected monarchy, embodied in the exiled Kaiser, espousing that the workers should be those who benefit from the means of production and not some over-class, espousing, essentially, unity through shared hatred of the wealthy, hatred of the elites and, in short order, hatred of the Jews. This, the most horrible history, is laid out, simply, purely, starting with the use of the original name of the NAZI party and building on that base of honesty, beautifully.I highly recommend this film, even if you don't know the history, even if you don't care about how the NAZIs evolved into what they became, because it is excellent on the merits of storytelling, the visuals and dialog, the settings, and all of that. However, if you are interested in this time in our world history, I can't recommend any better film from the last decade of war-centered cinema. It is such a rarity for a film to dare to address the roots of Nazism, to venture into discussion of socialism and the democratic ideal used to sway the German population to mass murder. You won't get this history anywhere else, except a graduate level course on the roots of the war.

Fantastic film with a great cast. Christopher Plummer is superb in portraying a complex historical figure. Lilly James and Jai Courtney are also excellent. This is outstanding filmmaking.

It is spring of 1940 and Germany has conquered Holland and Belgium with the ultimate aim of a French surrender. Mieke, a young Dutch Jew, is working as a servant girl in the in-exile manor of the Kaiser in Holland. A spy, she plans to assassinate the Kaiser even though he is now little more than a figurehead of a dead tradition. Meanwhile, Stefan, a captain in the German Army is ordered to take over the armed guard at the manor to better protect the Kaiser. Having returned from the field in disgrace after assaulting an SS guard, he is apparently fortunate to get any assignment at all. In any case, he settles in awfully quickly (in more ways than one) when he arrives at the manor and meets Mieke. The two begin a torrid and forbidden love affair and their pillow talk soon turns to matters of life and death and the perpetual question of allegiance.The acting is quite nicely done, particularly Christopher Plummer’s role of the Kaiser. He manages to fully flesh out the role of a man defiantly in charge even though he certainly is not. A character near madness, he is hard not to watch. The direction and cinematography are on par with what you’d see in other quality films representing this era. But it is the writing that is the most interesting. The events in the film did not happen at all in reality. Historical fiction, though, is a bona fide genre that has been explored by writers and filmmakers for decades, at least. The problem here, though, is that the movie revises certain facts about WW2 that probably shouldn’t be touched. Stefan, for instance, mentions how one terrible SS guard made the entire SS look bad. That remark makes him seem almost infantile – the SS were the worst that Nazi Germany could produce. They were recruited for their savagery, violence and anti-Semitism and the Army, as a whole, looked down on them. There is more whitewashing that occurs throughout (the final disposition of the film being another example) that makes me pause. I suppose I am just leery of people learning “history” through film. It’s one thing for Tarantino to do it in “Inglorious Basterds”, where the outlandishness of the characters and the plot is so great that it is clear that it is fantasy. It’s also fine in “Saving Private Ryan” because the characters would be considered minor in historical terms. But this film is essentially believable and features prominent figures of the time (the Kaiser, Himmler). Call me overly cautious. I just wonder how much can be squeezed safely from history in this “fake news” era.

An accurate depiction of the world of Nazi Germany.

Based around the true story of Kaiser Wilhelm, who was left living after WW I. The Actors were all superb.Had all of the right elements- history, intrigue, plot, scenery, action, and love. Good one!

La film est perfect, superb

Again Christopher Plummer has given a performance that was absolutely spectacular. The plot is a little bit cheesy but overlooking Jai Courtney's terrible German accent, the movie is worth the watch.

Was soll man sagen .. ein großartiger Film mit spannender Story und durchweg guten Schauspielern. Gerade seine Majestät wusste durch Charme und Witz zu überzeugen. Von mir gibt es eine klare Kaufempfehlung.

Film poco conosciuto ma molto bello, certo bisogna amare il genere film romantico ma non è al tempo stesso non è un film melenso. La recitazione degli attori è da apprezzare..a cominciare dal Premio Oscar Christopher Plummer, l'alchimia che il regista ha saputo rendere tra i due protagonisti Lily James e Jay Courtney. Magnifico anche Eddie Marsan. Attenzione perché il dvd è in inglese..anche se può essere l'occasione per un po' di scuola.

Good product good service