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).
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