After all the foreign intrigue, fisticuffs and bang-bang, The Debt is a good old-fashioned morality tale. A Hollywood staple, in other words. (video)
The Debt stars Jessica Chastain, Sam Worthington and Marton Csokas.
Screened at the Toronto International Film Festival last week and adapted from an eponymous Israeli movie, The Debt is a political thriller turning on vengeance and justice and set in Israel, Germany and Ukraine over a 30-year period.
Shifting easily between the 1960s and 1990s, John Madden’s picture is ostensibly about a Mossad team tasked with the mission of capturing a Nazi war criminal, known as the Surgeon of Treblinka, in his lair in East Berlin.
Subliminally, however, The Debt addresses an important philosophical issue: How important is truth compared to country? This is the question that permeates the film, which stars the accomplished British actress Helen Mirren as Rachel Singer, one of the Mossad agents.
Unfolding to Thomas Newman’s alternately pulsating and eerie musical score, The Debt opens at an airport in Israel in the mid-1960s as the three members of the Mossad team disembark from the belly of an airplane to a hero’s welcome.
The young Rachel (Jessica Chastain), David (Sam Worthington) and Stefan (Marton Csokas) have just completed their mission with astonishing success.
The film fast-forwards to Tel Aviv, circa 1997, as the older Rachel (Mirren) attends a glittering book launching party. Written by her daughter Sarah (Romi Aboulafia), it celebrates her mother’s central role in the capture of Dieter Vogel, a German physician accused of carrying out gruesome, inhumane medical experiments on Jews in the Treblinka death camp.
At this point, The Debt seamlessly fades back to 1965. Arriving in East Berlin, Rachel links up with the blustery Stefan and the reclusive David. She studies horrific photographs of the Holocaust, while she and Stefan practise hand-to-hand combat.
Vogel (Jesper Christensen), the object of their mission, works in a fertility clinic. Rachel visits him in the guise of a patient. As he examines her, he contemptuously refers to a Jewish colleague as an “old Jew,” thereby confirming his ingrained anti-Semitism.
Having established Vogel’s whereabouts, the Mossad squad hatches a daring scheme to apprehend him. But the plan goes awry and the agents are forced to watch over Vogel in a safe house until he can be flown to Israel to stand trial.
These scenes, shot in a grimy flat and a dark railway station, add to the mounting tension.
No pushover, Vogel refuses to co-operate. He initially refuses to eat and plays malicious mind games with them. While professing to admire the attachment of Jews to their roots, he spits out a series of taunts: Jews only know how to die and have no right to live. Rachel and her co-agents must exercise enormous self-restraint in the face of these gratuitous insults.
Much to their anger and embarrassment, Vogel manages to escape. Concocting a lie for the consumption of their superiors in Jerusalem, since failure is not an option, the agents return to Israel, covered in glory.
But three decades later, the case is reopened when a man in Kiev claims to be Vogel. Stefan (Tom Wilkinson), now a senior official in the Mossad, orders Rachel to finish the job. She reluctantly agrees, haunted by the spectre of her failure to capture Vogel in the first place.
As she homes in on her quarry, Rachel is torn by the moral qualm that her false cover story unjustly transformed her into a heroine. With ease, Mirren conveys the range of Rachel’s emotions.
The Debt, cleanly and efficiently directed by Madden, works on two different levels. As a thriller, it jangles the nerves nicely. As a morality tale, it is suitably thought-provoking.
