Martin Luther

Talk about your uneven match-ups: ladies and gentlemen, in this corner we have Martin Luther, a self-flagellating, constipated monk/teacher--not yet 34 years old--with a beef about the way the Catholic Church does its business. And, in the other corner, we have Pope Leo X, whose morals might have been questionable for a supreme pontiff (Leo very much enjoyed having naked little boys jump out of his birthday cake), but was nevertheless the head of the most powerful institution on Earth. I know what Jimmy the Greek would have said: stake-burning in the first round, right? But that's not what happened. In this luminously filmed portrait from PBS's Empires series, writer/director Cassian Harrison limns the life of one of the most important figures in world history, Martin Luther, the early 16th century German monk who--determining that human salvation was a gift from God, requiring no intercession from the church in the form of costly papal indulgences or faux-saintly relics--nailed his pope-baiting list of 95 theses to the door of the Wittenberg Cathedral on October 31, 1517, and thereby lit the spark that eventually ushered in the Protestant Reformation. Using an effective framing device of a reflective Luther (played by Timothy West) traveling to Eisleben near the end of his days and looking back on his life, the film interweaves superb interview clips with theological and academic scholars and impressively filmed dramatic reenactments (with one or two scenes almost too-MTV-slick--a charge rarely leveled at public television documentaries) as it follows Luther's seemingly suicidal course. In the end, Luther found two strong allies that kept his feet out of the fire: 1) members of the German nobility who were frankly tired of paying exorbitant sums to Rome, and 2) the invention of a fellow German named Guttenberg, whose printing press allowed Luther's words to be rapidly disseminated across Europe. By the time Luther appeared at the Diet of Worms for his famous trial in 1521, one commentator remarks, "nine out of ten people were yelling 'long live Luther,' and lest the pope should take any satisfaction, the tenth was yelling 'death to the pope.'" An excellent biographical portrait that underscores Luther's incredible, successful stand, while also pointing out his serious flaws (Luther was not only outraged by the violent peasant uprisings across Europe--and heartily encouraged the authorities to "smite" and "slay" these "devils"--he was also a vicious anti-Semite in his later years), the DVD version includes 10 minutes of extra interview footage and a four-minute behind-the-scenes featurette. Highly recommended. Aud: H, C, P. (R. Pitman)