Nayman on Zehrfeld: Moral ambiguity is this superb actor's sweet spot

“Blame Game” was a commercial star vehicle for Zehrfeld, who broke through in Dominik Graf’s 10-part 2010 television series “In the Face of Crime” (which GOETHE FILMS showed in its entirety at the TIFF Lightbox in 2012). There he plays a former Stasi agent turned police officer in Berlin investigating the Russian mafia. The character’s principled idealism about law enforcement gets juxtaposed against his former authoritarian loyalties and some bad romantic habits.

Then in 2012 Zehrfeld starred for Christian Petzold in “Barbara”, playing a rural physician whose tragic backstory belies his new role as a Stasi informant, which in turn complicates his relationship with Nina Hoss’ eponymous heroine, who wants to leave East Germany. Zehrfeld’s Dr. Reiser is a precise and compassionate professional whose medical ethics are flawless even as he’s been compromised on a deeper level; while Petzold’s film unfolds from the point of view of its embattled heroine, her shifting feelings towards the man simultaneously romancing and surveilling her serve as its dramatic fulcrum, and Zehrfeld’s nuanced acting lives up to the script’s complexity.

Petzold used Zehrfeld again in “Phoenix” (2014), a Hitchockian thriller which contains his finest performance — and one of the best male performances in 21st century German cinema so far. Where in “Barbara” he convincingly inhabited the part of a good man struggling against circumstance, in “Phoenix” his Johnny is rotten from the inside-out; prior to the film’s opening scene, he’d secretly divorced his Jewish wife Nelly (Hoss) before her arrest by German authorities, abandoning her to imprisonment (and likely death) in a concentration camp. Petzold’s script resurrects the injured Nelly with a new, surgically disguised face, and returns her to Berlin after the war where she seeks out Johnny despite suspicions —at first only subliminal, and then gradually confirmed— of his evil; her desire to resume their relationship under her new identity dovetails with her need to confirm his betrayal.

Like “Barbara”, “Phoenix” is a tour-de-force for Hoss, playing a woman navigating the world behind the face of another. But what makes the film work as well as it does —and it works brilliantly— is Zehrfeld’s thrillingly ambiguous acting. We’re made to suspend disbelief that Johnny wouldn’t recognize Nelly with her altered features, and yet he thinks this apparent stranger is enough like his former wife that he invites her to become a stand-in —not to rekindle love but to get at Nelly’s inheritance. Is Johnny oblivious or calculating? Is this cruelty, or a coping mechanism? Is there a possibility that he’s more innocent than he seems —as much a victim of the moment as Nelly?

As the movie goes on Zehrfeld lets us see why Nelly was and is drawn to Johnny while signalling the character’s moral decrepitude and opportunism. In an interview I did with Petzold for Cinema Scope, Petzold talked about the film’s relationship to genre and specifically horror, with Nelly as a figure out of a zombie movie —a resurrected heroine, back from the dead. He said that this was just as true of Johnny, however, and that this idea of guilt and same as a form of living-dead purgatory informed Zehrfeld’s performance:

“It was hard for Ronald. He was like a child. He worked so hard. He looked at 25 movies from the time. He always had cigarettes and dollars in his pockets, because he wanted Johnny to be a real person. But Johnny is dead. From the first moment on the set, I said to him that the tragedy for him as an actor is the same as the tragedy for Johnny as a person—that he’s dead. The end of the movie is not him coming back to life; it’s that he knows that he’s dead.”

With this in mind, Zehrfeld’s final scene in “Phoenix” is especially affecting: in the same moment that Nelly affirms her identity —and with it, her life, rising from assumed death like the film’s titular bird— Johnny realizes that his life, for all intents and purposes, is over. Zehrfeld’s expression as a man seemingly too selfish to be haunted looks and sees a flesh-and-blood ghost standing in front of him is not easily forgotten — stricken, devastated, diminished. It’s a testament to his acting within Petzold’s brilliant conception that we despise Johnny for “Phoenix”’s duration but feel something at the moment that his worldview is finally, completely obliterated.

In 2016, Zehrfeld won the German Film Award as a crusading but conflicted lawyer in "The People vs. Fritz Bauer", playing a character who ultimately reckons with his transgressions. That same ambivalence informs "Blame Game", which solidifies Zehrfeld’s emergence as a leading man who doesn’t lean into easy heroism and is all the more compelling for it.

Toronto film critic Adam Nayman is a contributing editor for Cinema Scope and writes on film for The Ringer, Sight and Sound, Reverse Shot, and Little White Lies. He has written books on the Coen Brothers, Showgirls and the films of Ben Wheatley, and lectures on cinema and journalism at the University of Toronto and Ryerson University.

If you're interested to read on, also see our "Blame Game" image gallery and director Philipp Leinemann's outspoken statements on the real-world inspiration for his spy thriller.

image: still "Blame Game" c Bernd Schuller