Butler's Cinema Scene

Oscar Isaac, Ben Kingsley

“OPERATION FINALE” My rating: B

122 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

Israel’s 1961 show trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann has spawned several documentaries, a hit stage play (Robert Shaw’s “The Man in the Glass Booth,” later filmed) and numerous other movies. Particularly noteworthy was 2012’s “Hannah Arendt,” about the political philosopher who covered the trial for The New Yorker and was so unimpressed by Eichmann’s demeanor that she coined the phrase “the banality of evil.”

With “Operation Finale” first-time screenwriter Matthew Orton and director Chris Weitz (“About a Boy,” “A Better Life”) have tackled the Eichmann saga and in effect given us two films.

The first is a suspenseful procedural about Mossad agents who track down the “architect of the Final Solution” in Argentina, risking life and limb to spirit their kidnapped prey back to Israel and a final judgment.

But wrapped in the middle of that thriller is an equally absorbing drama, a psychological duel between Eichmann (Ben Kingsley) and the Jewish agent (Oscar Isaac) who must somehow bend the will of this egocentric anti-Semite.

Much of the film’s first half is devoted to planning the mission. Like many of his fellows, the first inclination of agent Peter Malkin (Isaac) is to simply pop a bullet into Eichmann, who under an assumed identity has been working as a foreman at a Buenos Aires auto plant and devoting his spare time to nurturing an underground Nazi movement. (Under Juan Peron’s fascist leadership Argentina was already halfway Nazi; Eichmann and his goose-stepping pals had plenty of friends in politics and law enforcement.)

But Israeli bigwigs very much want Eichmann alive.

The skillfully depicted abduction goes as planned — but there’s a hiccup.  The El Al plane that is supposed to whisk the agents and their captive to Israel is delayed by red tape.  Eichmann and his guards must spend a week in a safe house, keeping a low profile as outraged Argentine law enforcement launch a citywide manhunt. (Here’s a bit of irony…15 years after the war we have a houseful of Jews still hiding from right-wing thugs).

Oscar Isaac

It’s during this long sojourn, with the possibility of discovery at any time, that “Operation Finale” becomes an acting brawl.

Israeli officials have decreed that Eichmann must sign a paper that he is coming to Israel willingly;  it’s up to the Mossad agents to somehow make this happen.

The cat-and-mouse game played by Malkin (who lost his beloved sister to the Nazis) and Eichmann (who asserts that he was a mere pencil pusher, “a cog in a machine digging its way to hell”) is the film’s dramatic heart, and these two fine actors make the most of Orton’s literate, psychologically acute dialogue. When’s the last time a feature film devoted so much time just to scintillating talk?

“Operation Finale” has been brilliantly cast, with a startlingly effective array of mostly-unknown faces that look like they stepped out of a period newsreel.

One aspect of the film seems superfluous. Melanie Laurent portrays the Israeli physician whose job is to sedate Eichmann, and the script has seen fit to emphasize that she and Malkin were once an item.  It plays like a lame attempt to inject a bit of romance into an otherwise gritty depiction of real-world events.

Quite aside from the film’s merits as art and entertainment, “Operation Finale” — like Spike Lee’s “BlackkKlansman” — comes along at an auspicious moment. At a time when our president calls fascists “good people” and neo-Nazis hold public demonstrations in Germany, it’s good to be reminded that the fight against evil is never over. Complacency is death.

| Robert W. Butler