The Debt: Some Israeli Spies played by the Royal Shakespearean Company come in from the Cold
I saw the Debt in a preview screening last night and found the chill winds of Oscar season blowing through my carefree August. You know a film is serious in American cinema when killing Nazis becomes a morally ambiguously process.
This is a movie that overall harkens back in style to the great paranoid 70s spy thrillers, which always included a love affair among righteous heroes in a compromised world.
As a thriller it is superb movie, a crackling tale of a Mossad team of three operatives plans to kidnap a Nazi war criminal in 1960s East Berlin.
As a drama the excellent acting keeps us from questioning the existence of a somewhat contrived romantic triangle among our heroes. This screenwriting desire for soap opera explains why only three agents are sent and the justification for the bizarre dispatching of the wonderful “young Helen Mirren” character on this very difficult assignment as her very first field mission. Somehow I tend to think the Mossad was more discriminating when kidnapping Nazis; certainly Eichmann never complained about such hanky panky before his show trial and hanging.
As a moral parable I find the film questionable. Since it has a Holocaust theme and great BBC actors I think of possible Oscar statutes, but I find the piece oddly naïve for a movie about espionage. This is a movie about spies who need to learn that honesty is the best policy. I kept thinking many of these characters had to be more pragmatic to simply be creditable, but the film profoundly disagreed with me. In fact, this movie firmly believes in the CIA motto.
The CIA motto is simply bizarre. The motto is John 8:32: "...Ye shall know the truth and it shall set you free." Am I the only person who finds this deeply ironic? The Debt doesn’t.
After Operation Paper Clip, Klaus Barbie and von Braun’s NASA recruitment you would think an Israeli inspired project would be little more skeptical of Langley Bible quotes.
I guess looking at the brutal cost that Israel has had to be pay for its survival was beyond the easier moral certitudes of good thriller about hunting a Nazi. In the end I do think Helen Mirren’s character represents a moral justification for both that brutality and the national mythology that cloaks it. That justification is the Holocaust. A lot of your feelings about the film may hinge on whether you agree.
Otherwise it is excellent and fucking depressing film.
Go see it and make up your own mind.
P.S. The unofficial “Company” slogan is the far better: "In God we trust, in all others we monitor."Review by our man in the balcony - Mark Tygart
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