Family sagas do not usually adapt well to the screen. With their profusion of characters and incidents, the two-hour plus format of the conventional feature film does not give them time to develop and they often seem like a race, with the director working frantically to cram in all the main elements. Thomas Mann’s novel Buddenbrooks, which was published in 1901 and contributed to his winning of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1929, covers the decline of a mercantile dynasty over four generations. Central themes include the emotional price paid by various family members to maintain the family’s prosperity, and the conflict between the disciplined life of commerce and the expressive life of art.
The complexities of the narrative are deftly handled by director Heinrich Breloer, whose experience directing a major German television docudrama on the Mann family, Die Manns — Ein Jahrhundertroman, has clearly helped in priming him to key elements of Mann’s ideas and style. Buddenbrooks certainly falls into the category of worthy film adaptations, and has a strongly literary quality, but as a cinematic experience it is sometimes rather flaccid. This is made up for by strong performances from an excellent ensemble cast, particularly Armin Mueller-Stahl as Johann Buddenbrook, a man whose life is totally dedicated to maintaining the position and wealth of the Buddenbrook family. Mueller-Stahl, one of a small number of German actors to have broken into the international mainstream (he was brilliant in David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises and was on the cast of The West Wing, The International and Demons and Angels), exudes a palpable aura of menace from beneath an avuncular exterior, and is captivating to watch — when the family business is taken over by his son Christian (August Diehl), his presence is sorely missed by the audience.
August Diehl does a perfectly fine job in portraying Christian, a young man who sacrifices everything to continue the success of the Buddenbrook enterprise. Christian doesn’t possess his father’s steely assurance, and Diehl hasn’t quite got Mueller-Stahl’s charisma to fully flesh out this complex character who finds himself suffocated by a Faustian pact through which he becomes totally subsumed by the family business.
While Christian’s fate is imposed on him, his two siblings find themselves drifting on uncertain currents. Thomas (Mark Waschke) becomes a drunken man-about-town, totally dependent on his brother’s generosity, and Tony (Jessica Schwarz) makes a series of disastrous marriages that contribute to the family’s woes.
With the birth of Hanno, heir to the dwindling Buddenbrook fortune, the struggle between self-fulfillment and family responsibility reaches a new level, as the young man dedicates himself to music, and finds himself unable to take an interest in the hurly-burly of commercial life. That tragedy awaits is patently clear, and despite the fine settings and solid acting, by this time it really can’t come soon enough.
Hanno is never fully realized as a character, and this diminishes the human aspect of the family’s disintegration, and contributes to the feeling that the director is struggling to tie off the story as quickly as possible. Breloer manages to maintain a sense of structure, which has the virtues of discipline, but doesn’t have the space to truly immerse the audience in the Buddenbrook’s world.
Despite these shortcomings, Buddenbrooks is a perfectly adequate film, but like many such sagas, it would probably have been much better as a six or eight-hour made-for-television miniseries.
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