Two films about two revolutionaries. While sympathetic to both, neither lacks problems -- both neither film and neither person.
How sympathetic? I've been called a communist -- though these days the belief that everyone deserves a roof under which to sleep, food to eat, an education, and health-care, all regardless of means, makes one a communist. Does that make me Che's compatriot? I doubt it. And while I am a proverbial card-carrying-ACLU-er, they'd hardly think Luther is a poster-child.
Perhaps the biggest problem with Diaries is the truncated nature of the narrative: We don't get to see the consequences of the consciousness-raising we have witnessed. It's the drunkenness without the morning after. A less significant defect: as Dannette notes, perhaps the most moving passages from the real diaries are omitted because they are not dramatic, just horrible.
Luther gives us consequences measured in blood and limbs and the bodies from which they came. This is (gasp) refreshing -- though, of course, the bloodshed would escalate after Luther departed the scene, and we miss that. What troubles one about this inspiring film is the notion that it was an intellectual exercise, and a matter of conscience, of a single man -- though even the film's script alludes to the gestalt from which the real reformation sprang. Yes, Luther nailed the theses to the church door, but it was the general disgust at what the Church had become, and the political awakening of northern Europe, that fashioned the movement. The film is rich enough we need not kowtow to the message its sponsors (the Lutherans) paid for.
