Director Heinrich Breloer has throughout his career shown interest in classic German literature. This is one of the more ambitious efforts by Breloer, an adaptation of Thomas Mann's massive family saga from 1901. It's not Breloer's first stab at the Nobel-winning writer, since he previously made a miniseries about his life (2001), with actor Armin Mueller-Stahl in the lead role. They re-team in "Buddenbrooks" (2008), with Mueller-Stahl playing the family patriarch. He gives the only memorable performance in the film.
Thomas Mann is near-impossible to adapt, not just because of the great length of his finest novels, but the psychological depth in them, the detailed depiction of the present moment and the philosophical nature of the dialogue. The bar has been set pretty low, with efforts such as Hans W. Geissendörfer's "The Magic Mountain" (1982), which turned the existential mystery of life into something resembling Kubrick's "The Shining" (1980). The worst offense you can commit against a writer like Mann in an adaptation, is to be in a hurry. And unfortunately, by choosing the format of a feature film instead of a television series, you are forced to do just that.
I personally prefer "The Magic Mountain" to "Buddenbrooks" as a novel. They have a quarter of a century between them, and Mann has clearly developed as a psychological narrator by "The Magic Mountain". Still, the earlier work is great as well, though it is more enjoyable near the beginning than near its end. This adaptation is two and a half hours long, so it doesn't feel like too much time has elapsed by the end of it. Yet, the super-fast tempo makes the whole very uninteresting. The characters aren't fleshed out to have personalities, and the financial decline of the family starts way too abruptly.
Breloer is clearly working with a considerable budget, as the outdoor scenes looked nice and fitting for the historical period. Yet every single scene in this film goes over too fast. You don't get to enjoy the epoch. Together with the rushed pace of the screenplay, the polished visuals make the characters look unrealistically clean, and empty in spirit.
Had he chosen to do this as an eight hour miniseries, this might be a pretty watchable adaptation. Yet I fear to say that even then Breloer would not have been a unique enough film-maker, and the end product would have been a visual re-telling of the novel, instead of a well-thought-out, personal art work of its own. If this makes you interested about Thomas Mann, it's good, but that's unlikely.
Read the book instead, it wins you over really fast.
