WHO PAYS THE PRICE IN THE DEBT ?
During the Allied occupation of Germany, arrest warrants were served on many Nazis, including Adolf Eichmann and Josef Mengele, both of whom fled the country in the chaos. In 1960, Israelis captured Eichmann in Argentina, and flew him to Israel for trial. They knew that Mengele, the surgeon of Birkenau, was also in Argentina but deferred his capture to a later time. When word of Eichmann’s capture was splashed in headlines, Mengele fled to Paraguay and later to Brazil, where he died in 1979. The film The Debt, a remake of the Israeli film Ha-Hov (2007), imagines that three Mossad agents have tracked down Mengele, calling himself Dieter Vogel (played by Jesper Christensen), as a physician in East Germany during 1965 (though much filming is in Budapest). Their assignment is to bring him back to Israel for trial. Although that escapade is featured in The Debt, the real focus is on a time thirty years later, when one of the trio, Rachel Singer (played by Helen Mirren), is put in the spotlight at a booklaunching by her daughter, who in 1997 has published an account of the raid to much acclaim. Based on her interviews with the trio, the daughter’s book reveals that the raid was botched, Vogel escaped, but Rachel (then played by Jessica Chastain) shot him dead. But the problem is that the story in the book is false, and the real Vogel is in a hospital in Kiev about to tell all to the Ukrainian media. Who will kill Vogel to effect a cover-up of the lie? One member of the trio, Stephan Gold (played by Tom Wilkinson), is now in a wheelchair. A second, David Peretz (played by Ciarán Hinds), walks in front of a truck on the day of the booklaunching and dies. That leaves Rachel as the only one available to murder Vogel—and she cannot live the lie any more. Using flashbacks, the suspense regarding the raid has now dissipated in the film, directed by John Madden, so the question that keeps filmviewers on tenterhooks at the end what she does and why. MH
5 DAYS OF WAR IS JUST TOO LONG
Beginning with a quote from Hiram Johnson that truth is the first casualty of any war and a frame revealing that 500 war correspondents have died during the last decade, 5 Days of War reports on the five-day war in Georgia during mid-2008, which received little attention as the world focused on the Beijing Olympics and the American presidential election campaign. But the fact is that Russian military forces, including tanks, occupied Ossetian territory beyond the line of “peacekeepers” inside Georgia until European heads of state flew to the capital Tbilisi to urge an end to the war—and the Russians have remained ever since. Georgians fled their advance and today still remain in refugee camps. At the end of the film, some of them hold pictures of their loved ones who lost their lives. The focus of 5 Days of War, however, is on journalists who risked their lives to get the word out. The film implies that their efforts served to stop the war. Directed by Renny Harlin, the film is 1:53 hours, filled with redundant battle scenes and little intelligible dialog, shows that Georgian decisionmaking was less than democratic, and ends with explanatory titles that put the conflict in perspective. Filmviewers will note that the main Russian war crime is to kill innocent civilians, but Georgian war crimes are not identified. More balanced coverage of war crimes, though still condemning the Russians more than the Georgians, is in a chapter of America’s War Crimes Quagmire (2010), as the template for war crimes appears to be what Americans got away with in Iraq. Nevertheless, the Political Film Society was set up to reward filmmakers who bring important political messages to the screen, and 5 Days of War definitely does so, however maladroitly. Accordingly, the film has been nominated for best film exposé of 2011, best film on human rights, and best film on the virtues of resolving conflicts peacefully. MH