Stefan Zweig: Farewell to Europe

"Stefan Zweig" is only Schrader's second film as a director, but, armed with clear ideas of what she wanted to convey and how she wanted to convey it, she's made a movie that allows its actors to fully inhabit their characters in a potent but low-key way.

Much of the feature’s quietly accumulated emotional power derives from the fact that viewers have to connect some of the dots themselves. Indeed, just like in the subject’s own work, the imagination of the audience is as important an ingredient for the final result as what is actually written or suggested.

Aenne Schwarz and Barbara Sukowa give strong performances as the author’s second and first wives, respectively, but this is Hader’s movie. His is one of the great performances of recent years.

One need not admire Zweig’s writing to recognize the worth of this thoughtful treatment of one of the countless real-life tragedies of 20th-century history.

"Farewell to Europe” is a little like Zweig himself: smart, overly fastidious and remote to a fault. By avoiding Zweig’s inner life, his eventual collapse seems all the more perfunctory.

The film hovers between being a straight-up biopic of Zweig and a diagnosis of neoliberalism's recent ceding to neofascist policy and nationalistic fervor.

This articulate, formally immaculate portrait proves less compelling in practice than it does in principle: Over-burdened at the outset with extraneous ceremonial detail and starchy speechifying, the film takes a dry, acolytes-only approach before later, more domestically focused chapters raise the body temperature of proceedings.