A 'STATEMENT' OF FACT THAT'S FASCINATING, TEDIOUS.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Critic

ALTHOUGH it's based on a novel by the late, great, Irish-Canadian writer Brian Moore, ``The Statement'' closely resembles the real-life case of a French Nazi collaborator named Paul Touvier.

Here called Pierre Brossard and played in his hunted, terrible twilight by a pitch-perfect Michael Caine, the Vichy functionary was directly responsible for the murder of seven Jews during the occupation. There were much worse war crimes, of course, but the Touvier/Brossard situation was fairly unique in that the perpetrator, many decades later, was charged with crimes against humanity - apparently a rare thing in the amnesia-prone Neverland of French collaboration history.

``The Statement,'' which was directed by the not-quite-great Canadian correct thinker Norman Jewison (``In the Heat of the Night,'' ``And Justice for All,'' ``The Hurricane''), should therefore be an engrossing moral detective story. But it isn't. Despite Caine's excellent, alternately haunted and frightening central performance and what should be a blistering subplot about Catholic culpability in this monster's survival, the film almost entirely lacks tension and grows irritatingly repetitive.

Himself a devout believer, Brossard has convinced many ultra-conservative factions of the French Church that his wartime transgressions were the actions of a patriot. He's therefore gotten them - along with a bewildering variety of ex-Vichy support groups that seem to inhabit every Provencal city and village - to support him with money drops and refuge in monasteries whenever the heat's gotten turned up over the years.

But sometime in the early 1990s, Brossard becomes too hot for even his reactionary pals. It seems like an Israeli hit squad is after him. But wait - Brossard gets the better of some of the gunmen, and no highly trained Israeli assassin is likely to fall before a sick and increasingly nervous old man.

This implausibility catches the attention of an investigative judge, Anne Marie Livi (Tilda Swinton, uncharacteristically and disappointingly all self-righteous business). Since she (probably rightly) reckons that half the Parisian legal establishment is protecting ex-Nazis anyway, she teams up with a military detective, Col. Roux (Jeremy Northam), to try to catch Brossard before whoever's really after him does - and then make him lead her to said bigger fish.

Unfortunately for her, and ultimately for us, Brossard is a sly and ruthless old dog who, though he loses more self-control with each tentative move, can very effectively stay one step ahead of his pursuers. That means that Livi and Roux are always interrogating addled old abbots and dissembling bureaucrats just after Brossard has left the area. And I do mean always; I eventually lost count of how many of these repetitive, near-miss conversations the movie piles on before finally lumbering to its pretty predictable conclusion.

Much better are the scenes of Caine's Brossard wrestling with his shriveled fig of a conscience, his misunderstood but truly adored God, or the few people unlucky enough to actually have to interact with him for any extended period of time (Charlotte Rampling's few minutes as his estranged wife - of course, this guy would never consider putting her out of her misery with a divorce - are deeply sad). But even Caine's superbly persuasive mood swings, from craven vulnerability to unconscionable abusiveness and all the key points in between, get old after too much reprise.

Adapted by ``The Pianist's'' Ronald Harwood, ``The Statement'' makes the fatal movie mistake of allowing its justifiable moral outrage and controversial Catholic-bashing to substitute for the tighter craftsmanship demands of a good, involving thriller. A film like this one's ethical concerns are much better revealed via plot drive than just smugly, well, stating them. See Clint Eastwood's ``Mystic River'' for how such things are done right.

Bob Strauss, [phone]

bob.strauss(at)dailynews.com

THE STATEMENT - Two and one half stars

(R: violence, nudity, racism, language)

Starring: Michael Caine, Tilda Swinton, Jeremy Northam, Alan Bates, Charlotte Rampling, John Neville, Ciaran Hinds, Frank Finlay.

Director: Norman Jewison.

Running time: 2 hrs.

Playing: The Grove, Farmers Market; Westside Pavilion, West L.A.

In a nutshell: An aged French Nazi collaborator, long protected by conservative elements in the Catholic Church, is finally hunted down. Fascinating material, tediously told.