Movie : The DebtRelease Date : August 31, 2011
Studio : Focus Features
Director : John Madden
Screenwriter : Matthew Vaughn, Jane Goldman, Peter Straughan
Starring : Helen Mirren, Sam Worthington, Jessica Chastain, Jesper Christensen, Marton Csokas, Ciarán Hinds, Tom Wilkinson
Genre : Thriller
Official Website : SeeTheDebt.com
IMDB Rating : 6.8
Story : It takes a certain amount of – I can think of no better word than chutzpah – for an English production company and an American distributor to remake a celebrated Israeli film about the Holocaust. The original is from 2007. This one followed quickly after, and premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival a year ago, before its release date was pushed into limbo by the sale of Miramax.
It’s a gripping (though fictional) tale of three Mossad agents on the trail of a Josef Mengele type in 1960s Berlin. We first meet them in 1997 when David (Ciarán Hinds) commits suicide for reasons only understood by fellow agents Rachel (Helen Mirren) and Stephen (Tom Wilkinson).
The action then reels back to 1966. A cunning plan will use a West Berlin train travelling through East German territory as cover for the three agents to get their Nazi prisoner over the wall and back to Israel for trial and (one presumes) a death sentence.
But first they have to catch him. Dieter Vogel, a.k.a. “the surgeon of Birkenau,” has rebranded himself as Doktor Bernhardt, an East German OB/GYN. Getting close to him requires a plausible patient, which is where Rachel comes in.
She’s forced to submit to intimate exams and gynecological chit-chat while confirming the identity of their quarry and preparing to pounce on him – which she eventually does at a grimly perfect moment.
Young Rachel is played by the chameleonic Jessica Chastain. She recently appeared as a bubbly Southern sexpot in The Help, and caught many a critic’s eye as a beatific Texas housewife in Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life.
She couldn’t be more different in this role as a newly minted Mossad operative. Not only does she portray a complex mix of forcefulness and femininity, but she alone among the three characters seems completely connected to her older self. Chastain says she studied Mirren’s early film roles to get a sense of how she moved and held herself back in the day. It’s paid off in spades.
The other two are played by New Zealander Marton Csokas (who looks more like a young Orson Welles than a young Ciarán Hinds) and Aussie action star Sam Worthington. When their abduction doesn’t quite go as planned, the three decide to hold Vogel in their leaky Berlin flat until a new plot can be hatched to smuggle him to the West.
At this point the film – directed by John Madden (Proof, Shakespeare in Love) – switches gears. The thriller moves from Cold War to psychological footing, as the young Israelis start to suffer from cabin fever and the unrelenting, goading taunts of their captive.
Making matters worse, Rachel discovers she’s pregnant – a fact known to their prisoner before either of her colleagues, one of whom is the father. This sets up a tense if ultimately undeveloped romantic triangle, the importance of which pales in comparison of the problem of what to do with the Nazi chained up in their living room.
The Debt hinges on a superb mid-plot twist when the loose end that is Vogel manages to work himself even looser. A necessary but necessarily slower denouement brings us back to the future, as Mirren searches for a way to deal with what happened in that cramped Berlin apartment 30 years earlier.
As to recycled story material, it’s neither the fastest nor the weirdest. Death at a Funeral had a similar three-year gap between English and American versions, both of which featured Peter Dinklage. And Yimou Zhang, whose House of Flying Daggers would seem to put him beyond the need for such tricks, made a copy of the Coen brothers’ Blood Simple called A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop. The Debt may owe a debt to The Debt, but it’s still a worthy investment.
The Debt opens wide Aug. 31.
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