‘Triumph Of The Heart’ Wins Big At Showing Faith In Suffering
(REVIEW) Faith-based films are often accused — sometimes even by me — of being so family-friendly that they don’t show the really hard stuff in life. This is ironic because a major part of Christian history is one of martyrs. From the earliest of Jesus’ disciples who died for their faith to the 21 Coptic Christians killed by Islamic extremists. Christians grow up in a heritage of people who died for their faith, but very rarely do we see films that showcase them.
So it feels very overdue that we finally have a movie about St. Maximilian Kolbe, a Catholic priest who died a martyr during the Holocaust. Even better is it's one that, while not perfect, does convey much of what made him, and Christian heroes like him, so admired to this day.
“Triumph of the Heart” tells the story of St. Maximillian Kolbe, who took the place of another prisoner in a concentration camp during World War II when the Nazi commander demanded that 10 prisoners be put into a cell to starve until they found one who had escaped. Kolbe and the other prisoners survived for weeks until he and the few others were killed by the Nazis with carbolic acid and cremated. In 1982, Pope John Paul II canonized Kolbe, proclaiming also that he was to be venerated as a martyr.
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The film’s title is an obvious play on the Nazi propaganda film “Triumph of the Will” and there’s more than a little thematic resonance in contrasting the words “will” with “heart.” The film’s antagonist, Commandant Karl Fritzsch, is engaging Kolbe in a battle of wills, explicitly to break him and the other prisoners through sheer force. But it’s the hearts of Kolbe and the others — their kindness, their compassion, their values and their hope — that eventually are too powerful for Fritzsche. Their hearts, in the end, are more powerful than the Nazis’ wills.
I first watched the movie at the Hard Faith Film Festival in Los Angeles. The annual event is put on by Spencer Folmar of Hard Faith Films. Spencer is a filmmaker famous for making R-rated Christian films like “Generational Sins” and “Shooting Heroin.” The festival existed to give more Christians a space to make films that showed more darkness in the world that their faith co-existed with. “Triumph of the Heart,” deservedly, won best feature at the festival this year.
One of the film’s greatest strengths is its willingness to put us through the unrelenting suffering of its heroes under the Nazi’s boots. We watch Kolbe and the others get beaten, grow hungry, get beaten again, fall into despair, hallucinate, eat rats and turn on each other and still pull through to die with dignity. While so many faith-based films acknowledge life’s sufferings but insist on skipping over them, this film spends the entire film in the middle of the shadow of death.
This makes the film’s moments of redemption feel far more earned than the average Christian movie. When one prisoner tries to kill himself and another encourages him, but then saves him, we feel what a big deal that is. Moreover, we experience for ourselves — rather than are simply told — how inspirational it is that Kolbe and the others were able to endure this oppression with their faith and dignity intact. We can see why, if real men were able to do this, that it would be a resounding rebuttal against the argument that the Nazis worldview was the strongest reality. Clearly, these men knew a different, better reality.
It also gets to the heart of the Christian idea of suffering and martyrdom that these things are glorious if they are done in the service of Christ. In many ways, the film is very similar to “The Passion of the Christ,” which also followed Jesus himself throughout his suffering, unrelentingly. The film doesn’t quite reach those heights, but just the fact that it was willing to go to similar places for a sustained amount of time was refreshing.
Another standout of the film is the jaw-dropping cinematography. Whether it's each haunting shot of a prisoner dying, looking like a Christian martyr on their way to heaven, the Terrence Malick-esque flashbacks to a happier time and place or the bleak lights and darks of the cell where the prisoners slowly die. Frame after frame of the film looks like a painting, evoking the ancient Christian saints of the past. At the same time, they constantly bring you close to these people to make you intimate with them, to make you feel their humanity.
The main weakness of the film, however, is that it eventually starts getting pretty repetitive. The prisoners experience a new level to their suffering, one or more of them will express despair, and Kolbe will bring them back from the brink somehow. As it goes on, one starts getting numb to the suffering rather than plunging further into its depths.
Part of the problem is that the characters are pretty static, and their emotional arcs happen abruptly rather than over the course of the film. Kolbe has a dramatic change from someone who cares about fighting to caring about the individual people who need his love and care. But that transition happens off-screen, with his “before and after” expressed through brief flashbacks. Of course, Jesus in “The Passion of the Christ” was a static character, too. But the variety of characters and their arcs in reacting to him throughout the film — as well as injecting humor through flashbacks — provides enough contrast that you can fully experience the horrors, and therefore Christ’s glory, throughout.
This repetitiveness makes the film feel a tad patronizing at times, as Kolbe comes off less as a full-bodied character and more as someone who has an answer to every objection someone throws at him. In this way, despite being so different from the typical faith-based industry film in how explicitly it shows sin and suffering, its framing device is pretty much the same: Cynical non-believer has doubts; righteous Christian gives answers.
This is, of course, in keeping with the tradition of hagiography, traditional Christian biographies of the saints from the second century onward to edify church members by inspiring them with the great deeds of past great saints. Eventually, the term hagiography grew negative connotations and began to refer to any biography that overlooks the bad qualities of the subject for the purposes of glorifying them. There are times that “Triumph of the Heart” does acknowledge Kolbe’s flaws, the film’s focus on him merely at his best removes some of his humanity, sometimes reducing him to a didactic mouthpiece for the film’s (obviously laudable) message.
“Triumph of the Heart” is a rare movie that leans into the parts of the Christian walk we often like to talk about but not experience. In doing so, it shows us the beauty of standing up against evil — even if the only thing we do is suffer for it. If one can take the constant drumbeat of pain and look past some of its repetitiveness and hagiographical weaknesses, one will be rewarded by having one’s heart drawn closer, in a small way, to God. And that’s a triumph worth celebrating.
“Triumph of the Heart” is playing now select U.S. theaters.
Joseph Holmes is an award-nominated filmmaker and culture critic living in New York. He is co-host of the podcast “The Overthinkers” and its companion website theoverthinkersjournal.world, where he discusses art, culture and faith with his fellow overthinkers. His other work and contact info can be found at josephholmesstudios.com.