Nazis Lurk in Stephen King's Suburbs

In a scene midway through Apt Pupil, Kurt Dussander (Ian McKellen) tosses a stray cat into an oven. The cat, of course, escapes, to wild cheers from the audience. This scene, while not profound or even endurable, epitomizes Apt Pupil. As in almost any drama, the villain is far more interesting than the "hero," who is likely asleep while our villain is drinking Old Crow, listening to opera and amusing himself by throwing cats into ovens or something. Of course, as in any Hollywood film, the one inviolable taboo is that no matter how many humans are gruesomly murdered, an adorable pet cannot die. As in any film based on a work by Stephen King, there are scenes like this one, whose horror is edged with an absurdity that seems almost humorous.

As such, Apt Pupil would seem to be a thriller that hovers somewhere between tolerable and entertaining. What's troubling, though, is that Dussander is a former S.S. officer, and this cat in an oven acts as an obvious metaphor for the six million Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust, the reference here being a blatant and almost nauseating one to Nazi gas chambers. If far more carefully done, a movie could perhaps have succeeded in making people understand the horrors of the Holocaust in visceral terms, for it is certainly a shockingly emotional event that is all too easily intellectualized into statistics and stock phrases. Apt Pupil, however, doesn't succeed in this; in fact, it doesn't it even try, and its failure to try is what makes this movie reprehensible in a way far deeper than any torture inflicted on cats could be.

Scenes in the style of Mr. King, normally complex and intriguing, are here sickening. Certainly the convention that spares cute animals in Hollywood movies, normally annoying, is here unforgivable: a movie that seems to pride itself on confronting its audience with the fact of the Holocaust nonetheless stops short of this triviality, which makes one consider how real the Holocaust is for this movie, and so for its audience. The ethics of making Dussander the interesting character and his strident accusers the bland and vapid ones are, of course, also questionable. Perhaps if he were a man at once horrified at what he did and yet still partly indoctrinated into Nazi ways, the character would be interesting, but he is not. He rather remembers and repeats his deeds with a relish.

This said, Mr. McKellan may be given credit for giving the masterful performance one expects of him. McKellan takes a character whom the audience almost instinctively rejects and makes him immensely intriguing, even appealing. Of course, Dussander also becomes appealing to his counterpart, Todd Bowden (Brad Renfro), a high school student who begins the movie diligently researching the Holocaust. Todd in fact is the one who discovers that old Mr. Dussander is a former S.S. guard, the discovery that sets the movie off on its course of alternating revelation and deceit. Renfro's acting is generally bland and flat, more appropriate to a sitcom, or an after-school special, than the thriller that is being attempted here.

In fact, much of the movie, with its uninspired cinematography and the dullness of its supporting cast, reeks faintly of television. The intermittent high school scenes, little more than filler here, seem more like "Dawson's Creek" with 4-letter words than anything else, a situation not helped by casting Joshua Jackson (also known as Pacey) in the role of Smith's best friend. The horror scenes, too, are filmed in a style that seems little more than a lackluster imitation of "The X-Files." Those same scenes are given their undeniable force not by the perfunctory work of the technicians but by the imaginative prowess of the man who, along with McKellan, is the only artist behind this project. The film is based on the novella of the same name by Stephen King, whose fiction, which can feel somewhat pulpy on the page, seems to come into its own via the overpoweringly visceral medium of the big screen.

King is also responsible for the psychosexual themes that run underneath what is, in its way, a sort of "coming of age" tale. Our hero, however, does not go from foolishness to wisdom but from good to evil, and this is perhaps the most problematic aspect of Apt Pupil. The key line in the movie perhaps comes when Dussander, at a dinner party and unflappably suave, says, "Speaking the truth is a privilege of young boys; it is one, however, that men must regrettably relinquish," raising his glass knowingly to the other men at the table. Lying, suggests Apt Pupil, is a sign of maturity, as is, it would seem, cruelty and slaughter.

There's certainly nothing inherently wrong with a movie that suggests that the world is an evil and corrupt place where the men who realize this play dirty and survive while all the others are naive babies: Chinatown, The Godfather and a number of other fine movies create this kind of world. The problem with Apt Pupil, of course, is not its structure but its subject, suggesting that a former S.S. agent is knowing and mature while the Todd Bowdens of the world, striving after justice, are hopelessly naive. Toward the end of the movie, a Holocaust survivor spots Dussander, who, it turns out, killed his wife and his two daughters. The man hurries away and falls to his knees crying. The near-silent dignity of the man's role is undercut by the way the movie seems to want to characterize him. While Dussander, with a grey beard and wire-rimmed glasses, is a picture a masculine restraint, this man, with bald head and flabby features, sobbing hopelessly at the horror of it all, is portrayed as a mere child by comparison. It is this sort of portrayal that makes Apt Pupil a movie unforgettable and unforgivable.