Margarethe von Trotta (2012)
The film’s certificate warns of ‘scenes of smoking’. This got a well-deserved derisive laugh in the Renoir but in fact smoking is a very significant element of Hannah Arendt. As she listens in the press room to evidence at Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem in 1961, Hannah Arendt (Barbara Sukowa) inhales pensively (whenever the defendant’s words make a particular impression, the camera closes in on her intent face). Back in America, as she digests her thoughts before turning them into the New Yorker articles she’s been commissioned to write, Arendt smokes some more. After the firestorm that the articles cause, she gives a public defence of what she’s written – answering charges of being sympathetic towards Eichmann and of accusing the Jews (Arendt herself was Jewish) of being complicit in their own destruction: unusually, she craves the indulgence of the students in the packed lecture theatre to smoke throughout. (Arendt was teaching at the time at the New School for Social Research in New York: when she’s giving a two-hour lecture she normally allows herself a single cigarette, halfway through.) The smoking is significant less because of its frequency than because it’s one of the very few things that Margarethe von Trotta gives Barbara Sukowa to do. Hannah Arendt might have worked on stage, where dialectic is an easily accepted form and where the artificiality of placing it in real-world settings wouldn’t grate so much, but it’s an exasperating film. On the one hand, von Trotta has the arguments around Eichmann articulated plainly, not to say crudely – this on the spurious pretext that lofty debate is what occurs whenever two or three academics are gathered together. On the other hand, the director deprives her lead actress of opportunities to express or voice her private thoughts. When she’s chewing over the material she’s gathered in Jerusalem, it’s not clear whether Arendt is wrestling with the nature of evil – a closing legend indicates this preoccupied her until her death in 1975 – or with the potential controversy her New Yorker pieces is going to cause.
The film may have remarkable subject matter but there’s stale cake under von Trotta’s intellectual icing: Hannah Arendt is a conventional and highly unimaginative melodrama about a moral dilemma. Arendt’s opponents on campus are shifty, nasty pieces of work, fuming impotently whenever she or her pal Mary McCarthy (Janet McTeer) delivers a put down – needless to say, they have most of the good lines. There are laughable flashbacks to the young Hannah (Friederike Becht) being screwed, mentally and we assume physically, by Martin Heidegger (Klaus Pohl) when she was a student at the University of Marburg. With the New Yorker scandal at its height, the janitor in her Manhattan apartment block delivers a note to Arendt from ‘that nice old man upstairs’ – ‘Nazi whore’, the note reads. At the end of her climactic self-defence, Arendt receives unanimous acclaim from the fresh-faced students: it’s only her envious contemporaries who scowl and slink off, tails between their legs – except one, who remains to deliver a verbal coup de grâce in the deserted lecture theatre. In other words, one cliché after another. Margarethe von Trotta and Pam Katz, with whom she wrote the screenplay, are under the misapprehension that the intellectual substance of the issues under discussion automatically lends substance to Hannah Arendt as a piece of cinema. The New Yorker editorial conferences are appallingly written – and badly played, at least by the two of the three actors concerned, neither of whom I remember seeing before. The third actor is Nicholas Woodeson, the screen’s latest William Shawn (after Bob Balaban and Frank G Curcio in the two Capote films), whom I know to be capable of much more than he shows here. Janet McTeer is entertaining as Mary McCarthy – her size and stylish wit dominate every scene she’s in – but she’s too emphatic, perhaps through anxiety about the thinness of what she has to work with.
The only bits of the film that are compelling are when Hannah’s husband Heinrich Blücher (Axel Milberg), in a startlingly realistic sequence, suffers an aneurysm and, of course, the footage of the actual Eichmann trial. I had no idea that so much footage existed (there are many hours of the trial available on YouTube). As so often happens when dramatic filmmakers make use of newsreel, it obliterates the fictional drama before and after. Eichmann is mesmerising – not, I found, because he comes over as an unthinking bureaucrat but because he defends his only-obeying-orders position with something approaching passion. The way that he moves his face suggests impatient dissatisfaction with, almost contempt for, the proceedings. One of the criticisms levelled at Arendt in the course of the movie is that she’s wedded herself to German intellectualism at the expense of moral values. Margarethe von Trotta’s admiration for the life of the mind is equally clear but a film doesn’t become a work of art by asserting respect for something important or by holding a view which you happen to share. Hannah Arendt rather illustrates the banality of biopic.
1 October 2013
