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At the beginning of the film, an armored peasant (Julian Glover) enters Luther's church, pushing a cart with a dead body, and accuses Luther of causing chaos in Europe while living in comfort with his wife, a former nun (Judi Dench). The peasant then smears blood over Luther's white vestments and says, smugly, "Now you even look like a butcher." Much of the rest of the film is then narrated in flashback from this peasant's point of view.

Osborne's play does not take sides in the dispute between Luther and the Pope, so much as it presents two evils and lets us decide which is the lesser of the two. As seen here, the Catholic Church represents unity and order, but at the cost of complacency and corruption, whereas Luther's Reformation represents intellectual freedom and the right to follow one's conscience, but at the cost of chaos and bloodshed. And right to the very end, Luther is not sure whether he has been doing God's will or only what seemed right to himself.

Luther (2003)
directed by Eric Till

Fast-forward to the present day, and yet another cinematic take on the monk who changed the course of western civilization.

The latest version of Luther is perhaps the most ecumenical of the films, coming as it does four decades after Vatican II and just a few years after the Catholic Church and the Lutheran World Federation signed a "Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification." It is the only film to make any reference at all to the Greek Orthodox, and thus to those Christians who were entirely uninvolved in the Reformation; and it goes out of its way to present Catholic characters who are at least somewhat sympathetic.

For example, when Johann von Staupitz (Wings of Desire's Bruno Ganz) releases Luther from the Augustinian order to which they belong, he frantically explains that he is doing this to save Luther's life; if Luther had remained under his authority, von Staupitz says he would have been obliged to turn him over. In contrast, when von Staupitz expels Luther in the 1953 film, he gives Luther a stern reprimand for disgracing their order.

Similarly, Cardinal Cajetan (Mathieu Carrière) gives Luther an impassioned defense of the need for Christian unity, and after Leo X dies, he privately confides to a fellow church hierarch that he wishes the Pope had been the sort of "spiritual giant" that Luther was; this is quite different from the equivalent figure in the 1973 film, who seems all too ready to accept the immorality, sexual and otherwise, that flourishes among the bishops.

The 2003 film is also more entertaining, for lack of a better word, than the other Luther films produced so far. Directed by Eric Till (whose resume includes everything from Bonhoeffer: Agent of Grace to the Canadian TV spin-off Red Green's Duct Tape Forever) from a script by Camille Thomasson and Bart Gavigan, this film emphasizes action, action, action—characters often run to and fro, Pope Julius II is seen riding a horse through Rome in gilded armor, and Pope Leo X takes part in a conspicuously metaphorical boar hunt.

The constant movement spills over into the film's portrayal of Luther himself. The film begins with Luther's panicked promise to become a monk if he survives a lightning storm, and Luther's paranoia and possible epileptic seizures are intensified by Till's use of tight close-ups and restless camerawork. In addition, in one of the DVD bonus features, Joseph Fiennes (Shakespeare in Love) says he tried to emphasize Luther's doubts.

Despite all this, the new film does go out of its way to protect Luther's heroic stature; he may have his demons, but he never does anything particularly bad. Tellingly, the film alludes to the coarseness of German culture but puts the vulgar or scatological comments in the mouths of others, not Luther; and while the film admits that Luther played a part in the Peasants War, it softens his role in that conflict, as he mourns the bloodshed and wishes that both sides were not so prone to misunderstanding his message.

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Related Elsewhere:

Turning Point: Luther's Lost Opportunity	Printer view
At Marburg, the last hope of a united Protestantism ran aground on the Last Supper.

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What Luther Said	Printer view
When Martin Luther stood up for his ideas at the Diet of Worms, did he really say, "Here I stand"?