The Debt review
John Madden's Mossad agent thriller starring Helen Mirren fails to find its balance between past and present, despite a strong cast and an interesting premise
The Debt is a period thriller told in two chunks. We open in Tel Aviv in 1997, where the daughter of two ex-Mossad agents (Helen Mirren and Tom Wilkinson) is launching a book venerating the mission on which her parents met: the celebrated capture of a Nazi war criminal in 1960s Berlin.
Director John Madden (Shakespeare in Love, Killshot) then moves the action back to 1966 to tell the story of the agents’ pursuit and capture of “the surgeon of Birkenau” in Cold War Germany. It’s this 1966 slice where the film sparks with an engaging premise, an atmospheric
period setting and a strong performance from Jessica Chastain as the young Rachel Singer.
When we return to the nineties for the film’s overlong coda however, even the stately presence of Helen Mirren can’t save The Debt from turning into a frivolous revenge thriller of the kind that might grace a Sunday night ITV schedule.
Before that ending, and before the misjudged action sequence which Mirren has taken to calling “the geriatric fight” in view of its aged combatants, The Debt tells an interesting story which meditates on the nature of guilt, conscience and punishment. Such mediatation is cut short, however, in favour of a revenge plot which undermines the more complex moral questions its story poses.
Rachel, Stephan and David, three young Israeli spies, are tasked with the capture and rendition of Dieter Vogel [Jesper Christiansen], now a practising gynaecologist working under an assumed name, once a Birkenau doctor responsible for horrific crimes against humanity. Christiansen is very good as Vogel, remaining an unrepentant and dangerous force decades after his inhuman crimes were committed.
The Debt’s initial shuttling between the two periods is messy and difficult-to-pin down, not helped by an obtuse decision to cast Marton Csokas as a young Tom Wilkinson, and Sam Worthington as a young Ciarán Hinds, despite each bearing a much stronger resemblance to the other actor.
Once you’ve worked out who is who, there’s actually a very good thriller in the middle of The Debt, full of palpable tension, genuine shock and very watchable performances. The cast is strong, particularly Chastain and Mirren, who manage to blend themselves into a believable composite character. Sam Worthington too, best known for Avatar, shows his mettle, as does Marton Csokas, while Ciarán Hinds and Tom Wilkinson are ever-reliable.
The real revelation though, is Chastain, whose scenes with Vogel before the kidnap achieve incredible tension, made all the more unbearably uncomfortable by the actress’ almost translucent vulnerability on screen. Posing as a gynaecological patient, the moments of Rachel enduring examination by Vogel are horribly tense and end in startling violence as Rachel’s Mossad training proves vulnerability to be much more a question of appearance than ability.
The presence of Vogel lends itself to a meditation on humanity and monstrosity, but it’s one The Debt chooses to take an unambiguous and unchallenging view on. Nazi experimenter Dieter Vogel is depicted as a monster in the film, not a human being who made monstrous choices, but simply a monster. Christiansen plays him with arrogance and intelligence, rendering the character something of a Hannibal Lecter villain who cruelly taunts his captors, pressing their sensitivities and exploiting their fragile love triangle.
Stephen Daldry’s The Reader dealt with questions of guilt, conscience and the horrific inhumanity committed by human beings while keeping its Nazi protagonist a character rather than a personification of evil, and as such is a more powerful film than The Debt.
It should be said that The Reader’s Hanna Schmitz did not carry out the atrocities of Dieter Vogel (a fictional version of Josef Mengle) but in failing to explore Vogel as a perverted and atrocious man rather than a monster, The Debt falls short of being more than a glossy generic thriller. When you realise that’s what it is, the use of a Nazi bogeyman seems like a cheap way to deal with the film’s historical subject matter.
The Debt attempts to balance two weights of such dramatically different size that it’s little wonder the film struggles to remain upright. Tipping the balance on one side is the ungraspable evil committed during the Holocaust (here distilled into the lightening rod character of Vogel), and on the other is the light-weight stuff of a caper-y action thriller, complete with near-misses, planning sessions crouched over maps and sneaky getaways.
The film's screenplay, written by Jane Goldman and Matthew Vaughan (who was originally primed to direct), then worked over by Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy’s Peter Straughan is solid work, but being forced to share a screen as well as a writer with the other Cold War spy thriller everybody’s talking about won’t do The Debt any favours. It might almost have the cast, but it has nothing like the atmosphere or the gravitas needed to rise above the status of expensive-looking Sunday night telly.
Director John Madden (Shakespeare in Love, Killshot) then moves the action back to 1966 to tell the story of the agents’ pursuit and capture of “the surgeon of Birkenau” in Cold War Germany. It’s this 1966 slice where the film sparks with an engaging premise, an atmospheric
period setting and a strong performance from Jessica Chastain as the young Rachel Singer.
When we return to the nineties for the film’s overlong coda however, even the stately presence of Helen Mirren can’t save The Debt from turning into a frivolous revenge thriller of the kind that might grace a Sunday night ITV schedule.
Before that ending, and before the misjudged action sequence which Mirren has taken to calling “the geriatric fight” in view of its aged combatants, The Debt tells an interesting story which meditates on the nature of guilt, conscience and punishment. Such mediatation is cut short, however, in favour of a revenge plot which undermines the more complex moral questions its story poses.
Rachel, Stephan and David, three young Israeli spies, are tasked with the capture and rendition of Dieter Vogel [Jesper Christiansen], now a practising gynaecologist working under an assumed name, once a Birkenau doctor responsible for horrific crimes against humanity. Christiansen is very good as Vogel, remaining an unrepentant and dangerous force decades after his inhuman crimes were committed.
The Debt’s initial shuttling between the two periods is messy and difficult-to-pin down, not helped by an obtuse decision to cast Marton Csokas as a young Tom Wilkinson, and Sam Worthington as a young Ciarán Hinds, despite each bearing a much stronger resemblance to the other actor.
Once you’ve worked out who is who, there’s actually a very good thriller in the middle of The Debt, full of palpable tension, genuine shock and very watchable performances. The cast is strong, particularly Chastain and Mirren, who manage to blend themselves into a believable composite character. Sam Worthington too, best known for Avatar, shows his mettle, as does Marton Csokas, while Ciarán Hinds and Tom Wilkinson are ever-reliable.
The real revelation though, is Chastain, whose scenes with Vogel before the kidnap achieve incredible tension, made all the more unbearably uncomfortable by the actress’ almost translucent vulnerability on screen. Posing as a gynaecological patient, the moments of Rachel enduring examination by Vogel are horribly tense and end in startling violence as Rachel’s Mossad training proves vulnerability to be much more a question of appearance than ability.
The presence of Vogel lends itself to a meditation on humanity and monstrosity, but it’s one The Debt chooses to take an unambiguous and unchallenging view on. Nazi experimenter Dieter Vogel is depicted as a monster in the film, not a human being who made monstrous choices, but simply a monster. Christiansen plays him with arrogance and intelligence, rendering the character something of a Hannibal Lecter villain who cruelly taunts his captors, pressing their sensitivities and exploiting their fragile love triangle.
Stephen Daldry’s The Reader dealt with questions of guilt, conscience and the horrific inhumanity committed by human beings while keeping its Nazi protagonist a character rather than a personification of evil, and as such is a more powerful film than The Debt.
It should be said that The Reader’s Hanna Schmitz did not carry out the atrocities of Dieter Vogel (a fictional version of Josef Mengle) but in failing to explore Vogel as a perverted and atrocious man rather than a monster, The Debt falls short of being more than a glossy generic thriller. When you realise that’s what it is, the use of a Nazi bogeyman seems like a cheap way to deal with the film’s historical subject matter.
The Debt attempts to balance two weights of such dramatically different size that it’s little wonder the film struggles to remain upright. Tipping the balance on one side is the ungraspable evil committed during the Holocaust (here distilled into the lightening rod character of Vogel), and on the other is the light-weight stuff of a caper-y action thriller, complete with near-misses, planning sessions crouched over maps and sneaky getaways.
The film's screenplay, written by Jane Goldman and Matthew Vaughan (who was originally primed to direct), then worked over by Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy’s Peter Straughan is solid work, but being forced to share a screen as well as a writer with the other Cold War spy thriller everybody’s talking about won’t do The Debt any favours. It might almost have the cast, but it has nothing like the atmosphere or the gravitas needed to rise above the status of expensive-looking Sunday night telly.
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