Chastain and Worthington, washed out in The Debt.
* * 1/2 (out of five) The Debt. Written by Matthew Vaughn, Jane Goldman & Peter Straughan. Directed by John Madden.
You can feel the taboo emanating from the tight knot of memes comprising “genocide,” “Nazis”, “Jews” “terrorism”. and “Israel”. But like any taboo object, handling it is perfectly safe when done according to the proper procedures. At the movies, Stephen Spielberg did it quite effectively in Schindler’s List (1993), but this bought him no credit against the howls of outrage that greeted Munich (2005), when he dared suggest a degree of moral ambiguity in Israel’s campaign for vengeance against Palestinian terrorists. (To my mind, Munich is the more courageous work.) For the most part, the sanctimoniousness surrounding these issues just forces everyone to put the whole mess in a special category of non-polite conversation, which has the ironic effect of making it easier to forget.
I wouldn’t call John Madden’s The Debt a particularly courageous work. I wouldn’t necessarily call it “good” either, at least in any consistent sense. Its quality, like its courage, comes intermittently. Based on a 2007 Israeli film of the same name, it is the story of three Mossad agents who, in 1965, attempted to kidnap a former SS concentration camp doctor, a certain Dr. Bernhardt (Jesper Christensen), from Soviet-occupied East Berlin. By all public accounts, the mission resulted in Bernhardt’s death, elevating the agents, Rachel, Stephan and David (Helen Mirren, Tim Wilkinson and Ciarán Hinds) to the status of national heroes. But thirty years later, disturbing stories that things might not have gone as reported have surfaced. David steps in front of a moving truck rather than face the possibility that Bernardt is not dead after all, and Rachel finds she must go into the field again to redeem a decades’ old lie. Though Mirren is biggest star, the film spends most of its time in a long flashback to 1965, following the travails of the agents’ younger selves (Jessica Chastain, Marton Czokas and Sam Worthington, respectively). The flashback has the appropriate feel to it, with the cold, perpetually gray atmosphere of an old-time Cold War espionage thriller. The flame-haired Chastain (The Tree of Life) is literally the only splash of color, and it is she, not Mirren, who becomes the heart of the movie. As Bernhardt has gone into practice as a gynecologist (alas, ex-Nazis never become something neutral and boring, like ear, nose and throat men) Rachel must pose as a patient in his office. Her visceral, barely-concealed disgust at putting her feet in the stirrups for him, and the way Christensen ups the creepiness factor by playing the scenes with pure bland geniality, is The Debt’s one notable horror.
When dealing with this kind of thing, dispensing justice to Nazis, there is indeed some courage in suggesting the truths behind Israel’s formative myths—like America’s—are not as simple as we’d all like to believe. But The Debt throws it all away with a final encounter between the nonagenarian Bernhardt and the septuagenarian Rachel whose preposterousness is exceeded only by its clumsiness. Think of your grandmother in a blood-soaked brawl with a department store mannequin. Or, if you prefer, don’t.
Director Madden, responsible for such middle-brow favorites as Shakespeare in Love and Mrs. Brown, isn’t exactly known for edgy drama. To get away with a truly subversive portrayal of Nazi-hunting takes a braver talent, someone like John le Carré. But not even le Carré would necessarily get away with it unscathed.
© 2011 Nicholas Nicastro
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