There is not just one awful dilemma confronting Salomon Sorowitsch in “The Counterfeiters.” No, like duplicate copies of a $20 bill, there are at least three dilemmas to focus on, and Salomon spends much of the movie trying to figure out which one is most important.
Salmon is Jewish. He’s also an expert currency counterfeiter whose skills can earn him life and some small privileges in the Nazi concentration camps during World War II. His expertise could also save the lives of a few fellow Jews who might be needed for a Nazi counterfeit operation.
Yet if he and his fellow prisoners successfully copy enough British currency for the Nazis, it could help their evil jailers win the war and continue their annihilation of the Jews.
And yet if Sorowitsch refuses to help the Nazis, he will be killed immediately.
And still again, if he refuses, he’ll never be able to prove to himself that he could successfully counterfeit the tricky U.S. dollar, a lifelong goal of many forgers in wartime.
All these questions make “The Counterfeiters” an engrossing, disturbing movie for you and your teenagers to watch together. It’s certainly good enough for parents — “The Counterfeiters,” from Austria, won the foreign-language Oscar at this year’s Academy Awards. And though it is gritty and full of wartime horrors, “The Counterfeiters” is an important way to introduce moral dilemmas to your children and work through some of them together.
The only drawbacks to “The Counterfeiters” as a family movie are brief bits of nudity and profanity in the subtitles, in addition to the violence of concentration camps. Save it for kids 14 or older, at least.
