INVINCIBLE (2002) ***1/2

Reviewed 9/26/02

The title is an ironic one because hero Zishe Breitbart’s invincibility is only in his mind, is a notion that is long in coming to him, and proves to be a fatal flaw when it does.  About the world’s strongest man (played by Finland’s Jouko Ahola, who really has won the title of world’s strongest man), a Jewish blacksmith from Poland, the story is set in the early 1930s.  Zishe is discovered by a German talent agent and goes to Berlin displaying feats of strength in a show for the notorious Erik-Jan Hanussen (Tim Roth).  There Zishe befriends pianist Marta Farra, Hanussen’s ill-treated mistress.  Zishe gathers fame from the Jews and hatred from the Nazis slowly rising in power, and Zishe comes to think of himself as his people’s new Samson.   Writer-director Werner Herzog has never been the slickest filmmaker, and INVINCIBLE, Herzog’s return to fiction film after a decade of documentaries, has a rough, almost amateurish style to it.  Enhancing this feeling of crudeness is Ahola, who has no previous acting experience and shows it.  Yet, Herzog’s style fits the clumsy, dim protagonist, and Herzog goes on to demonstrate he hasn’t lost all of his cinematic lyricism.  He lets a scene of Marta playing the second movement from Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto (perhaps the single greatest slow movement in all of music and it really is played by Gourari) quietly carry itself.  Then there is Zishe amid thousands of red crabs on a rocky shore recalling Herzog’s past dreamscapes.  Tim Roth is frightening in his intensity, and the scene where he retrieves his cape before being led away by Nazis is funny and tragic.  Udo Kier gets in some delicious hamming in a bit part.