American Traitor: The Trial of Axis Sally

American Traitor: The Trial of Axis Sally

The only interest Michael Polish, director and co-writer of “American Traitor: The Trial of Axis Sally,” seems to have in the film’s story or characters is how it looks. Each shot is rigidly framed, with lurid lighting that emphasizes the noirish nightmare look he gives Nazi Germany and American prison cells. It doesn’t engage much with those characters, though, nor does it ever really deeply consider consent, culpability or justice.

“American Traitor” is based on the true story of Mildred Gillars (Meadow Williams), an American living in Germany during the rise of the Nazis who worked for Joseph Goebbels (Thomas Kretschmann), the propaganda minister notorious for his radio broadcasts undercutting U.S. troops’ morale. “I’m only saying these things because I care about you,” she’d say in a breathy voice that must have sounded like rubbing two bones together over AM frequencies. First she tells us to stay out of the war; Germany’s a better ally than England.

Then after Pearl Harbor she warns us about our chances against the German military: “What chance do you have?” “It’s not too late to surrender.” While you’re getting wounded over there, your girls will be falling for guys back home, she says later before visiting POWs and reporting on their treatment edited to make them seem well cared for and their messages home edited to show admiration for German doctors. The military calls her Axis Sally.

“The spoken word is the most powerful weapon in the world,” Goebbels tells Gillars. “It works best when those being manipulated are confident they are acting in their own free will.” How much of this movie was her own free will? Where was she manipulated? Carrot-and-stick stuff from Goebbels: telling her to “stay with us and learn what victory feels like” while keeping her passport so she can’t leave the country and forcing her to sign a loyalty pledge.

The film shuttles between her arrest in Germany after the war and her trial in 1948 Washington, D.C., interspersed with scenes from her experiences during the war but instead of using this structure to build toward deeper understanding through juxtaposition of past and present, it seems to just blow off the story’s momentum.

And then there’s Al Pacino. He plays James J. Laughlin, the defense counsel who tells Gillars she is the most hated person in America other than Hitler (and he notes that she’s still alive). She gets mad at him and insists that he prove she’s innocent; he says all he can do is make sure she gets a fair trial. Then he brings on an inexperienced co-counsel named Billy Owen (the likable Swen Temmel), whose decency and sympathy during his visits to Gillars’ cell eventually get her to share more of her story. Billy Owen is also the only character whose real-life counterpart appears in archival footage over closing credits so maybe Billy Owen is who we’re supposed to find sympathetic here, I don’t know.

Throughout most of the film, Williams’ face is expressionless – perhaps a character choice, but one that prevents any connection with her. Pacino’s Laughlin is a series of barks and tics, like an angry pile of dirty laundry addressing the jury. It seems that both Gillars and Laughlin believe they will get what they want from publicity that she will be a midcentury Roxie Hart and he will become a litigator who gets the cases he wants but it does not explain their actions. Thomas Kretschmann is sufficiently heartless as Goebbels, though a revealing sex scene veers closer to parody.

The crime of treason inflicts the greatest damage because it attacks a country, not an individual, the trial judge tells the jury. First, Laughlin argues it wasn’t Gillars delivering these messages; it was a fictional character reading from a script written by others. Second, her broadcasts didn’t undermine morale because nobody took them seriously, he tells the jury. Third, he says: She had no other choice. Those who didn’t do as Goebbels said were sent to concentration camps or killed. So how can she be blamed when the alternative was prison or execution?

That’s a good question one of those foundational existential ones about agency and guilt. But the movie observes without deepening or sharpening or even particularly caring; the beams of light coming through Gillars’s prison window make for some nice images but are insufficient to bring this story to life.

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