The film exhibits all the traps of the kind of bourgeois biopic-cum-costume film that brings to mind Merchant-Ivory productions or, for that matter, Es war einmal in Deutschland (Bye Bye Germany, Sam Garbarski), which, like Peck's, screened in the Berlinale Special section. Both films seek to impress viewers with their sense of authenticity accomplished through set design, yet, at least to this viewer, both fall into the same intellectual trap.