John Madden's "The Debt' (2nd review)

Israel might or might not have come into being without the Holocaust, but it's certainly inseparable from it. Israel has advertised itself as a secure haven for Jews anywhere since its inception, and it offers citizenship to all Jews who wish to settle in it. It is, specifically, a Jewish state, the only one outside the Muslim world that defines itself in theocratic terms.

Israel's national character has been stamped by its determination to survive at any cost, and its culture is thoroughly imbued with a survivalist ethos. The single act that most affirmed its existence was the trial and execution in 1962 of Adolf Eichmann, the man responsible for the extermination of Hungarian Jewry. At Yad Vashem, the memory of the Holocaust is sustained both by the world's largest collection of Holocaust documents and a perpetual flame. Many Israeli Jews of the World War II generation need look no farther than their left arms to see their own personal documentation.

For Israel, then, the truth of the Holocaust is the Truth. But anything that acquires the status of truth with the capital T is also a myth that must be tended at all costs, and this requirement presents an insoluble paradox. That paradox lies at the heart of The Debt, an Israeli film that has now been remade in an English-language version with an international cast.

I haven't seen the Israeli original, so I can't say how the second take may differ. On its own terms, it's presented as an action thriller with a twist, although the moral conundrum is clear.

Quest for a Nazi

A Mossad team is dispatched to apprehend Dieter Vogel, the notorious "Surgeon of Birkenau," who has taken on a new identity as an obstetrician in Cold War Berlin. It's a somewhat unlikely trio. Stephan (Marion Csokas) is a bluff commander, but David (Sam Worthington) is a traumatized and unstable Holocaust survivor whom the real Mossad would weed out in a second, while Rachel (Jessica Chastain), although schooled in the lethal arts, seems too delicate for the assignment.

Her specific job is to entrap Vogel by posing as a patient and setting up the kidnapping at the hospital where he works. But why such a high-risk snatch would be attempted is unexplained. In any case, the job is blown, and the trio winds up guarding the captive Vogel in a leaky, cold-water flat while trying to figure out how to smuggle him out of East Germany.

When Vogel escapes, Stephan persuades his colleagues to report that he has been killed in the attempt, and his body disposed of. By doing so, he argues, they will not only protect themselves but Israel itself, which would be humiliated by the mission's failure. As for Vogel, Stephan assures them, he will disappear as truly as if he were dead, since that will now be the only way for him to survive.

Holes in the logic

The logic here is hardly impeccable. Since the mission is secret to begin with, Israel has no public embarrassment to fear, and the trio has no proof of death to offer, which any intelligence agency would surely demand.

Nor is it plausible that the truth will die with them, since Vogel— what's he doing in Berlin anyway, for goodness sake, let alone practicing his old profession in a public hospital?— would presumably have contacts with the Nazi underground, whence his survival would sooner or later surface.

It's a movie, though, so the lie is accepted, and the three agents become national heroes. David, unable to cope with the reality of the failure, drifts into anonymity and eventual suicide. Stephan parlays his story into a successful political career that leads to a ministerial position. Rachel, now Stephan's estranged wife, steers a middle course, but when her proud daughter Sarah writes the story of her mother's exploit 30 years later, she is once again cast into the spotlight.

Fit for the job?

At this point however, Stephan— himself wheelchair-bound by a suicide bomb explosion— hears of an elderly patient in a Ukrainian hospital who boasts of being Vogel. As the only ambulant survivor, Rachel agrees to investigate the claim and, if it's verified, kill Vogel for real.

At the same time, she is deeply conflicted by the lie she's had to live, and that has now terribly ensnared her child. Wouldn't the truth be better after all?

Credulity is strained here once again: Surely someone in Stephan's position could arrange to have an assassination carried out and no unnecessary questions asked? Surely he wouldn't even need to consult Rachel, let alone send her out on the kind of job for which she's no longer fit?

Again, though, it's a movie, so off she goes, settling scores with her old adversary and her own conscience at the same time.

Evil, bound and gagged

As the elder Rachel, Helen Mirren is persuasively conflicted, and Tom Wilkinson's elder Stephan is a study in the consequences of moral corruption. Both of them are such accomplished performers that they make it hard to think about anyone else.

But as Vogel, the Danish actor Jesper Christensen is so chillingly evil that he reduces questions of truth, scruple and justice to the play-acting of children. Bound, gagged and force-fed, he remains nonetheless the master of his captors, and his escape from them seems in retrospect inevitable. The master race is after all the killer race, and when Vogel taunts the amateurs sent after him with the passivity of Holocaust victims going meekly to their slaughter, he touches the rawest of Jewish fears: that, confronted again with extermination, they would again submit.

This is the crux not only of the film, but also of post-Holocaust Jewish consciousness. The Nazis, in their Darwinian vision of the world, proved their supreme fitness to survive by identifying and extirpating those who were least fit— "life unworthy of life," in the classic Nazi formula.

Another kind of ghetto

Yes, the Nazis lost their war; but the 6 million died. The Israeli state, surrounded by neighbors overtly or covertly wishing to destroy it and self-ghettoized behind its massive security wall, anxiously re-enacts the pre-Holocaust condition of European Jewry, waiting to see when the fatal blow will fall and whether, as in 1967, it will be able to preemptively ward it off.

Vogel, lone and hunted as he is, knows himself more powerful than his adversaries, because he knows something about them that they refuse to admit to themselves: that those too weak to defend themselves against death are too weak to kill, and vice versa. A bullet in the brain— vengeance, clean and crisp— Vogel could understand; but no, the Jews want to prove they are superior to mere killing. They need a trial first, followed by a judicial execution, as with the pathetic bureaucrat Eichmann.

But Vogel is no Eichmann; he won't evade, deny or palliate. Better yet, he will simply escape.

Is this, then, the deeper concern behind Stephan's lie: that morality is simply weakness, and that Vogel's contempt for him is therefore justified? In any event, having told the lie, Stephan is left with no choice but to make good on it when it stands to be uncovered.

Strength in mythology

Of course, there is an alternative, as Rachel suggests: that the truth be told at last. Stephan wearily responds that "truth is a luxury." What he means is that it's a confession of weakness, for only the lie— the myth— can strengthen. The die is Rachel's to cast, and she herself doesn't know what she will do until she does it.

A Bergman (or a Billy Wilder) would have handled this material quite differently. By giving it the conventions of a spy thriller, director John Madden and his slick crew— cinematographer Ben Davis and editor Alexander Berner— undermine the moral issues it deploys.

It's chiefly thanks to Jesper Christensen that they come through nonetheless. His Vogel is a masterpiece, a reminder that we have known supreme evil, and that it still lives among us.♦


To read another review by Reed Stevens, click here.