Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. told a crowd gathered at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., in 1968 that, “. . . the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”  This quote has been on my mind a lot lately with the upheaval in the United States and around the world.  I hope we are currently bending in the right direction, and it is a daily prayer.  It is a fervent one, too, motivated by my knowledge of history and seeing patterns between then and now.  It is why movies like The Man with the Iron Heart (2017) move me.  It is not the perfect film, essentially being two stories converging on one event.  Nonetheless, its value lies in the knowledge that there are causes for which it is worth dying.  Jesus believed that, as did Dr. King.  Sometimes, people give their lives for the wrong reasons, too.  You will know the difference as you read this review.

What is about to happen is the assassination of The Man with the Iron Heart.  Because this is about the death of high-ranking Schutzstaffel (SS) officer Reinhard Heydrich (Jason Clarke) in Prague during World War II, I do not feel I am spoiling anything.  Go read a book.  The path that gets him into the seat of the car that is attacked that day in 1942 begins in 1929.  At that time, he is an officer in the German Navy, but he has an illicit affair with a woman in Berlin.  Not long after his interlude, he meets Lina (Rosamund Pike), an aristocratic German woman that catches his eye at a ball.  They plan to get married, but before they go further, she makes it clear that she is a member of the Nazi party.  He is going to need such connections because he is soon court martialed when his philandering comes to light, and he is dismissed from the service.  Reinhard rages against the perceived slight to his character, but Lina essentially demands that he grow up and start acting like a German Aryan.  Once he comes to his senses, he meets Heinrich Himmler (Stephen Graham), the man who will go on to start the SS.  Heinrich invites Reinhard to his chicken farm to offer the former Naval serviceman a position as the head of the intelligence branch of the SS.  Reinhard proves himself by going after so-called enemies of Germany, which really means anyone that gets in the way of Heinrich and the SS.  Their first target is the Sturmabteilung (SA), also known as the Brown Shirts, who were Hitler’s (not pictured) original thugs.  From there, it becomes anyone else deemed subversive to the Reich, particularly Jews.  The more Reinhard is involved, the more he earns the eponymous title from the Führer, and the more distant he becomes from his wife.  The growing divide between them becomes apparent when he is appointed as the Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia and they move to Prague.  Lina is not happy about the promotion, wishing to remain in her childhood home.  Regardless, Reinhard travels to the Czech capital and announces to its citizens that he intends to make it one of the few Jew-free cities under German control.  This and a number of other reprisals do not go over well with the populace.  It also does not help that he is one of the architects of the Final Solution, the Nazi plan to murder all the Jews in Europe.  Thus, we get the two men, one with a sub-machine gun that malfunctions, the other tossing a grenade, that try to kill Reinhard.  They are Jozef Gabčík (Jack Reynor) and Jan Kubiš (Jack O’Connell).  The former is a Slovak soldier, the latter Czech, but they escaped mainland Europe shortly after the war began and ended up in England.  There they continued receiving military training with the hopes of reinserting them behind German lines to fight with the resistance.  Their opportunity comes in 1942, and they are airdropped near Prague.  Unfortunately, one of their parachutes is hung up in a tree, and they have to leave it to be found by the Germans. The discovery puts the occupiers, including Reinhard, on high alert.  He is already carrying out a brutal campaign against the Czech underground, looking for its leaders known as the Three Kings.  It is them that have the network set up to hide Jan and Jozef as they get situated in Prague.  As they gather information on Reinhard, they are split into different houses.  The one Jan stays in is where he meets Anna Novak (Mia Wasikowska), and they fall in love.  As such, she is worried that he will not come back when they eventually carry out their plan to assassinate Reinhard.  The appointed day comes, and despite their target being fifteen minutes late and the sub-machine gun jamming, the grenade mortally wounds Reinhard. He dies a little while later in the hospital with Lina and Heinrich at his bedside.  While Germany mourns, their troops in what was then Czechoslovakia begin murdering civilians en masse.  Meanwhile, Jan, Jozef, and four other conspirators go into hiding in a Catholic Church.  A resistance member who knew of the plans and did not take part decides to reveal the location of the assassins in order to stop the killing.  As such, the Germans go after the rest of the network, but most of them take cyanide pills in order to avoid capture and torture.  In case you are wondering, Anna and her family escape.  One who does not is a little boy who is forced to give up where Jan and company are stashed.  It results in a gun battle that ends with Jan and Jozef in the crypt, shooting themselves instead of being captured as the Nazis flood the area.

The final scene in The Man with the Iron Heart is of the first time the two friends Jan and Jozef met as they were fleeing their home country.  It does not seem to jive with the title, but it shows what strong bonds family, country, and Faith can do for a person.  To the last of those three causes, it warms my Catholic heart to see the role the Church played in these events.  There is a lot of misinformation about the relationship between Catholicism and Nazi Germany.  The main complaint is that the Roman prelate at the time, Pope Pius XII, did not do enough to stand up to the kinds of atrocities you see in the movie.  There may be a small kernel of truth to that on a public level, but in private he did things to help save lives.  The sad part is that during these years, it seemed like nobody could do enough to end the destruction.  Germany quickly overran so much of Europe and seemed invincible early on, which had a psychological impact on his enemies. This attitude is displayed when the conspirators begin wondering what difference the death of Reinhard would make.  It is a fair concern.  They correctly guessed that the Germans would seek bloody vengeance should they succeed.  Further, it would be another few years until they were liberated.  Until then, the Germans maintained strict control over the country.  Hence, what does the death of such a man mean?  Is killing such a person justified for Catholics?  It is possible that they thought about this last question since you see Jan praying the Rosary on the eve of the attack.  I also noted that they committed suicide in the end, something which is against Catholic teaching.  Still, the Church teaches that sometimes violence is warranted given the right cause.  As for killing themselves, they would have died anyway, so I prefer to think of them as martyrs.  I pray that is the case, anyway.

I will also have to pray for forgiveness after watching The Man with the Iron Heart because there is a bit of nudity in it.  Such moments are unnecessary.  Reinhard’s voyeuristic nature, gathering information on political opponents at brothels, for example, could have been established without the gratuitousness.  None of that, though, should diminish from Jan and Jozef’s heroism.  That part is worthy because, to reiterate Dr. King’s words, they died trying to bend history back in the right direction.