The Debt Reviews (2011)

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Guilt is an intensely personal thing. It can be buried or denied or shoved to the back of the mind, but it's rarely gone for good, especially the epic, life-defining kind of guilt that's on display in The Debt. It's the kind of emotion that can inspire great art, but unfortunately The Debt mostly pulls its punches, emphasizing some of the least interesting aspects of the story it's attempting to tell and letting the bigger questions linger in the background, out of sight and mostly out of mind.

The Nazi-hunting genre has been a small but steady genre over the decades since the end of World War II, lending itself to the varied likes of The Odessa File, Judgment At Nuremberg, or even parts of Inglourious Basterds and X-Men: First Class. The Debt aims for the higher dramatic end of that spectrum, as it relates a fictional account of the tracking and capture of the "Butcher of Buchenwald," here named Dieter Vogel. (There was a real Butcher of Buchenwald, one Hans Eisele, whose crimes were similar to those of Vogel in the film, but whom managed to escape the worst of his punishment and died a free man in Egypt.)

Although The Debt is curiously ambivalent in its own way, that's not the sort of ambivalence it's aiming for. Instead, its Butcher is tracked down to East Berlin in the mid-'60s, where a trio of young Mossad agents are assigned to confirm his identity, abduct him, then squirrel him away to a military airport and an eventual trial in Israel. As far as spycraft films go, The Debt eschews the outlandish and sticks with the realistic, with a few scenes of genuine tension, courtesy of director John Madden. The abduction goes as planned, but things quickly fall apart afterwards, leaving the trio of agents with a madman chained to the radiator and little to do but wait for someone else to figure out how to extract them from the situation.

These scenes could potentially form the basis of a great stage play, with four characters cooped up in a small apartment with little to do but talk to each other. Vogel (Jesper Christensen) plays up his Nazi character with a few dialogue scenes that come across as conscious echoes of Hannibal Lecter, while the Mossad trio of Rachel (Jessica Chastain), David (Sam Worthington), and Stefan (Marton Csokas) have to deal with the disintegration of their personal bonds in the face of, what else, a romantic triangle.

It's a bit hard to call it a "love triangle," because there's only so much time for any of these characters to convey emotions towards each other given the relatively limited amount of screen time that can be spent on their romantic entanglements. Not only does the search for Vogel rightly take up a decent amount of running time, but the film continually flashes forward to 1997, where the same trio mulls over the lives that they've lived since the events in the apartment complex played out for themselves. Rachel's daughter has written a book about her mother's exploits in the Mossad, which Rachel herself seems mostly ambiguous about outside of a vague pride in her daughter's success. Each of the characters carries the weight of events around with them, in different ways. Needless to say that their stories about what happened in the apartment, stories that have made them heroes of Israel and the Mossad, don't entirely jibe with reality, in ways that come back to haunt them, as such things must in fictional film.

Madden is a capable director of actors, and most of his cast gives fine performances, especially Chastain as the rookie agent who has to submit herself to being a patient of Vogel's at his gynecological clinic before the Mossad can confirm his identity and give their operation a go. Worthington is given little to do but smolder and look good, while the older cast members (including Tom Wilkinson and Ciaran Hinds) give reliably solid performances, with Helen Mirren as the older Rachel having the brunt of the film's extended ending placed on her shoulders. It's a curious way to resolve a film, as it reverts back into thriller mode just when it seems on the cusp of digging deeper into the issues that it mostly elides.

This is all, in its way, interesting--it's a shame that the film emphasizes the personal relationships of the characters in such a way that makes them vary between unlikable and capricious; the relationships themselves are given just enough time in the script to be present, but not enough to be believable, and they ultimately wind up seeming like a liability, something that weakens the rest of the film. There's a lot of material to mine that might've wound up interesting had it been given space to breathe, such as the pre-film hunt to find Vogel, or what the trio's tale meant to an Israel still living in the immediate shadow of the Holocaust. As it is, The Debt feels a tad unwilling to stand by its strengths, instead accepting a fair amount of weaknesses into its mix.