Luther in the dock
I just read Roger Ebert’s review of the film Luther. I haven’t seen the movie, so I can’t vouch for the accuracy with which it portrays Martin Luther. But as far as I can tell, Ebert has no more business assessing this than I do.
Ebert’s right when he says that “Jesus comes across in some Christian films as a Rotarian in a robe, a tall, blue-eyed athlete who showers every morning.” But he’s misinformed when he expresses “doubt [that Luther] was much like the uncertain, tremulous figure in Luther, who confesses, ‘Most days, I’m so depressed I can’t even get out of bed.’ ”
“We suspect,” Ebert writes of Joseph Fiennes’s character, “if he had it all to do over again, [Luther] would think twice.” The reformer was indeed tortured by misgivings about standing up to Church authorities. And it’s for good reason that it isn’t called the Protestant Revolution; Luther’s intent was to reform and purify the Western Church from within rather than to rend it in two. His tentative tendencies were evident at the Diet of Worms in April 1521 where he was asked if he would recant his voluminously documented objections to Church teachings. In response, he asked for 24 hours to think it over.
As I understand him, Luther was a bundle of contradictions. He was a live wire and a deep thinker; an intensely introspective man (he was known to spend six hours in the confession booth) and an extrovert; he was extremely zealous for good works (“I kept the rule of my order so strictly that I may say that if ever a monk got to heaven by his monkery it was I”) and a staunch defender of salvation by grace through faith alone; a philanthropic man and, arguably, an anti-Semite; an iconoclast and a great lover of the Church (he wrote that the Church “is the mother that begets and bears every Christian through the Word of God”).
The review’s concluding paragraph begins, “I don’t know what kind of movie I was expecting Luther to be, or what I wanted from it, but […].”
I don’t know what kind of review I was expecting Ebert to write, or what I wanted from it, but … I plan to see Luther anyway. 
Ebert says “I anticipated that Luther himself would be an inspiring figure, filled with the power of his convictions. What we get is an apologetic outsider with low self-esteem, who reasons himself into a role he has little taste for.”
Ebert seems to want a strong humanist. Instead he gets a weak Christian who reminds me of Paul, who called himself, “less than the least of all God’s people”. If Luther were strong, I might be inspired by him — but that would precisely be what he would not want. If Luther were instead weak, I would be inspired by Christ, and that’s the point.
I saw the movie and enjoyed it, even though I don’t fit into the category of one who viewed it to “seek inspiration.” I hoped to see a creative interpretation of Luther’s life that didn’t resort to stereotyped revisionism. The film exceeded my expectations.
Here’s another negative review of Luther, this time from First Things: http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft0401/opinion/oakes.html
Personally I enjoyed the film and was pleased to find that the Gospel found its way into the script. On the other hand, there is very little sense of Luther the polemicist — Erasmus doesn’t even appear in the film!