Four stars. Rated PG-13, for dramatic intensity, violence, highly disturbing content and occasional profanity
By Derrick Bang
The scariest monsters are the ones who look and act completely normal.
Say, like the kindly retired gentleman who lives next door, and often can be found in his garage, putting the finishing touches on a wood-working project. When it turns out that he’s a serial killer living under an alias, wanted in seven other states for the murders of at least 15 people, his neighbors shake their heads and — if interviewed for the local news — say “We had no idea.”
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| Peter Malkin (Oscar Isaac, left) believes that he can manipulate Adolf Eichmann (Ben Kingsley) into cooperating with the Mossad abduction team ... but they're likely underestimating their captive's guile. |
And then lie awake at night, eyes wide open, shivering over the possibility that he might have come in their window.
Ben Kingsley plays just such an individual in Operation Finale, and his performance is just as chilling — just as rationally, seductively evil — as Anthony Hopkins’ Dr. Hannibal Lecter, in 1991’s The Silence of the Lambs.
The difference — which makes Kingsley’s performance even more frightening — is that he plays an actual historical figure: Adolf Eichmann, one of the chief architects of the Holocaust.
Operation Finale is director Chris Weitz’s thoroughly absorbing depiction of the clandestine 1960 Mossad mission that tracked Eichmann to an industrial community in Buenos Aires, where he had been living under the alias “Ricardo Klement” since 1950. Because Argentina had a well-established history of refusing extradition requests for Nazi war criminals — which had enabled a sizable community of expat Nazis to continue espousing their genocidal Aryan philosophies — the decision was made to kidnap Eichmann, in order to bring him to trial in Israel.
Scripter Matthew Orton’s narrative focuses on Peter Malkin (Oscar Isaac), one of the eight operatives sent to snatch Eichmann, under the supervision of Mossad director Isser Harel (Lior Raz). Thanks to the Mossad’s 2012 decision to finally reveal details of the operation — and with access to Malkin’s 1990 memoir, Eichmann in My Hands — Orton’s script is able to depict details accurately, while also identifying many of the actual Israeli participants.
The result is a riveting espionage drama with the immediacy of a documentary, and the edge-of-the-seat suspense of a Hollywood thriller.
Isaac’s Peter, in his early 30s and already a veteran Mossad agent, is an outwardly affable individual who’s quick with a wry quip. But the ready smile on Peter’s face does not rise to his eyes, which often are dark with grief. He suffers frequent nightmares — we view them as flashbacks, each revealing a bit more than its predecessor — of precisely how his beloved sister Fruma and her three children perished during the Holocaust. Not knowing is almost worse than the loss itself.
He therefore protests, at least initially, when he’s asked to join the Argentinean assignment by good friend and fellow Mossad agent Rafi Eitan (Nick Kroll). Peter would rather execute the man and be done with it; Harel and Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion (Simon Russell Beale) insist that putting Eichmann through a very public trial would be far, far better.
Peter therefore spends most of the film in a deeply troubled state, Isaac deftly conveying the turmoil that digs at the man’s soul. It’s a persuasive performance, given the degree to which Isaac is able to put us into Peter’s head, and allow us to understand his motivations. And fears.
Peter also has “history” with Hanna Elian (Mélanie Laurent), a doctor and former lover loathe to participate in the abduction plot, due to her involvement with a previous mission that went awry. Peter argues that her medical ethics are essential to their chances of success, and so she relents; the subsequent wary dynamic between these two is captivating. Isaac and Laurent feel just right as former intimates who never stopped loving each other.
(It must be mentioned that Laurent’s Hanna is one of this film’s few fictitious characters: a composite whose attachment to Peter therefore is dramatic license.)
Haley Lu Richardson delivers an equally credible performance during this story’s prologue; she plays Sylvia Hermann, a young woman living in Buenos Aires with her father, Lothar (Peter Strauss). She begins dating a young man she meets at a local movie theater — which, in an ironic nod, is showing the 1959 melodrama Imitation of Life — and soon learns that his name is Klaus Eichmann (Joe Alwyn).
Proud boasts of his father’s Nazi activities alert Lothar, who relays the could-it-be-true details to Israel, resulting in the subsequent mission.
Sylvia’s involvement doesn’t conclude with this passing of information; once Eitan’s team arrives, she also plays a key role in the determination that “Ricardo Klement” is, indeed, Adolf Eichmann. That sequence — Sylvia’s own “secret mission” — is incredibly suspenseful, and Richardson’s depiction of the young woman’s terror, which she tries so hard to conceal, is palpable.
The physical abduction and subsequent stashing of Eichmann in a nearby Mossad safe house occurs mostly without incident; the bulk of Weitz and Orton’s film focuses on what happens next, when the plan to fly the man out of Argentina suffers an unexpected hitch. The Mossad team therefore is stuck with the monster for many days, and this is where the subtle horror of Kingsley’s performance truly shines: Once Eichmann realizes that he’s not to be executed outright, he gains leverage.
Meanwhile, Klaus and his fellow expat Germans, along with sympathetic right-wing Argentinean security forces, begin a massive neighborhood-by-neighborhood hunt for his father.
The cat-and-mouse games Eichmann subsequently plays with interrogator Zvi Aharoni (Michael Aronov) leave no doubt who’s actually in control. Kingsley’s Eichmann is bland, playful, shrewdly manipulative and ferociously insightful: a master of psychological profiling. He also never sheds the “kindly grandfather” mien, which makes his objections — why should he alone be forced to take the blame for Germany’s behavior? — sound increasingly rational.
Hannah Arendt, who profiled Eichmann and meticulously details his trial in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem, referred to him as “the banality of evil.” Kingsley nails that description.
Until, suddenly, the moment comes when Eichmann no longer is banal. The shift is shockingly horrific.
The behind-the-camera attention to detail is terrific, with strong praise going to production designer David Brisbin and costume designer Connie Balduzzi; both give us a vivid sense of time and place, with respect to the 1960 Argentinean surroundings. Weitz and cinematographer Javier Aguirresarobe also know when to shift from establishing distance shots to tight close-ups, for maximum impact.
Designer Michael Riley’s title credits are superb — both informative and unsettling in their own right — and Alexandre Desplat’s orchestral score skillfully augments the on-screen drama at every turn.
It’s understandable, but disappointing, that this film succumbs to the last-minute, everything-going-wrong, Hollywood-style suspense that puts their climactic third act at odds with the authenticity that has been maintained up to this point (a problem that also compromised the conclusion of 2012’s Argo). Yes, it’s more exciting this way, but Weitz and Orton should have trusted actual events all the way.
And there’s no denying the still-sickening intensity of the archive Holocaust footage briefly glimpsed during the epilog, which depicts the opening day of the subsequent trial. The poetic montage that takes place outside the courtroom is equally powerful.
I rather doubt any film will ever surpass Steven Spielberg’s handling of Schindler’s List, but Operation Finale certainly deserves to stand in its immediate shadow, as another crucial reminder of events we must never forget … particularly at a time when like-minded nationalistic lunatics once again are encouraged to come out of the shadows.
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