Escape to Life: The Erika and Klaus Mann Story

Hitting on possibly the two most popular subjects for contemporary documentaries -- homosexuality and Holocaust -- this look at the lives of the two gay eldest children of German writer Thomas Mann, focusing especially on their anti-fascist works during World War II, includes interviews with some of their still-living contemporaries, re-creations of their lives and writings and narration in the protagonists' voices by Vanessa and Corin Redgrave. It's a scattershot approach that doesn't work as well as it should: Watching the reenactments, it appears as though directors Wieland Speck and Andrea Weiss should've done an all-out drama, and perhaps tried to do so before running out of money and going with a documentary instead. And if you don't already know the significance of Thomas Mann, forget it -- the movie assumes you do. It's a bad sign when you're rooting for the film to hurry up and get to its subjects' deaths just so the documentary will be over, but it's indicative of how uncompelling the movie is unless it happens to cover your particular area of interest.