Review: 'American Traitor' is a misguided bore, a sad mingling of courtroom drama and melodramatic weepie

I’m not sure what happened to Michael Polish — but whatever led him from making offbeat and daring films like “Twin Falls Idaho” and “The Astronaut Farmer” to helming schlocky nonsense like “American Traitor: The Trial of Axis Sally” is a tragedy worthy of its own movie.

The title character in this “based on a true story” courtroom drama is Mildred Gillars (played by Meadow Williams), an American living in Germany in the 1930s, working as a lounge singer and sometime radio host. Her lover, radio producer Max Otto Koischwitz (Carsten Norgaard) is close to Joseph Goebbels (Thomas Kretschmann), Hitler’s propaganda chief — and Goebbels thinks Mildred has what it takes to be the Third Reich’s secret weapon.

Soon, Mildred is reading scripts, in English, extolling the might of the German army, and suggesting to American GI’s that Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill are putting troops in harm’s way for their own greed purposes. As Mildred tells it, Goebbels forced her to say those lines — holding Mildred’s passport, forcing her to sign a loyalty oath, and raping her and threatening to kill her.

The script — by Wayne Owen (based on a book he co-wrote and Darryl Hicks, with a rewrite by Polish — jumps from these scenes to an American courtroom in 1948, where Mildred is on trial for treason. Her only hope is a gruff and sometimes theatrical lawyer, James Laughlin, played by Al Pacino, who apparently jumped at the chance to ham it up in a courtroom drama.

Where to begin on where “American Traitor” fails? Maybe with the idea of trying to wring tears out of Gillars’ claims of being a cog in someone else’s propaganda machine — or painting herself as a subversive satirist, pitching Goebbels’ propaganda message in a way no one could take seriously.

It might be possible to buy either of Gillars’ lines if a decent actor was performing the role. Instead, we get Williams, a B-movie queen who apparently watched too many ‘40s noir thrillers and couldn’t decide between playing the damsel in distress or the femme fatale.

Pacino manages to tone down his usual scenery chewing, but he doesn’t give much to replace the histrionics. It says something about a movie when Lala Kent, the Utah native and one-time “Vanderpump Rules” reality star, gives a mediocre performance as assistant to the prosecutor (Mitch Pileggi) and isn’t the worst thing in the movie.

Polish seems torn between making a courtroom procedural and a ridiculously melodramatic biopic. He ends up shortchanging both ends of the narrative spectrum, and completing the circle of incompetence that hangs on “American Traitor” like a noose.

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‘American Traitor: The Trial of Axis Sally’

★

Opens Friday, May 28, in select theaters and streaming on demand. Rated R for sexual assault. Running time: 109 minutes; in English and in German with subtitles.