The Observer
Sunday November 2, 2003
By Luke Harding in Berlin

He is famous for his refusal to bow to Rome - and, of course, for the 95 Theses he allegedly nailed to the door of a church in Wittenberg during a possibly wet and windy evening in 1517. But the German theologian Martin Luther is at the centre of a fresh controversy following the release of a new blockbusting film about his life, starring Joseph Fiennes in the title role. Luther, which opened in Germany last Thursday with a glitzy premiere in Berlin, has been given a drubbing by German critics.

They have complained the British screen version of the monk's life bears little resemblance to the facts about the man who defied Pope Leo X and set off Europe's Protestant Reformation. Several reviewers have also pointed out that Fiennes is not, well, fat enough for the role. All contemporary portraits of Luther show a corpulent German who clearly enjoyed his food and drink.

'The film tidies up once and for all the unkempt tubbiness of the great Reformer. There is no red wine and no belching. Instead, we have Joseph Fiennes with his ascetic look and his tormented gaze,' the film critic of the German weekly Die Zeit said. Der Spiegel accused the director, Eric Till, of producing a 'politically correct' version of the monk's life. Luther's anti-Semitic tirades are airbrushed out of the script, he noted, and his attitude to peasants cleaned up.

Reviewers in the US, where the film opened two weeks ago, have been scarcely more generous. It had the 'aura of the old Euro-pudding brand of production hanging over it,' Variety's critic sneered, describing the love scenes between Luther and his wife as amazingly 'inert'.

Last night, however, one of Luther's descendants said the biopic showed Luther's human side. 'It was very well done. The film was historically accurate,' Dr Peter Luther, who is directly descended from Luther's brother Jakob, told The Observer.

Speaking from his home in Berlin, Dr Luther, a 61-year-old immunologist, said that, while most contemporary portraits depicted Luther as 'corpulent', these were painted only after he had become famous. 'It's probable that, as a young man, Luther was much thinner,' Dr Luther said. 'The only thing I'm disappointed about is that the film wasn't made by Germans. Ever since the Holocaust, Germans are scared of doing anything which could be construed as nationalistic.'

Luther was shot in Germany, Italy and the Czech Republic, but has an almost entirely British cast. It includes 82-year-old Sir Peter Ustinov, who plays Luther's aristocratic benefactor, Prince Ferdinand the Wise. Ustinov is generally agreed to be one of the few good things in the movie. The German production team, meanwhile, last week shrugged off the claim that Luther is historically inaccurate. 'We are making cinema. We want to create a believable story. It's not a question of judging whether a story is true or not true, but of whether it might have happened in that way,' set designer Rolf Zehetbauer said.

Other experts agree. More than 500 years after Luther's birth in 1483, scholars and theologians fail to concur on the truth of his life story. In the film's dramatic opening, Luther is caught in a thunderstorm, and decides to abandon law to become a monk. Inevitably, the film also shows him nailing his 95 Theses to the door of Wittenberg's castle church, something academics now believe didn't happen. Luther's decision to marry Katharina von Bora, a former nun with whom he had six children, was unlikely to have been the love match shown in the film, but something much colder.