Chris Weitz (2018)

Alexandre Desplat’s score for Operation Finale comprises lots of action-thriller bits and a smaller helping of plaintive melody.  The ethereal voices accompanying the latter give it a vague otherworldly quality. Chris Weitz’s movie dramatises the capture of Adolf Eichmann by Mossad agents in Argentina in 1960 and their attempts to fly him out of the country to stand trial in Israel.  The thriller parts of Desplat’s music reflect the high-pressure, suspenseful nature of the operation.  The soft, sad refrain is intended as a reminder of the human tragedy of the Holocaust in which Eichmann played such a major role.  Although the two aspects of the score aren’t integrated, the film as a whole is a conscientious, though only intermittently successful, attempt to balance its commercial requirements (the production budget was north of $20m) with a sense of moral responsibility.

The prologue is startling and, before Operation Finale is much older, puzzling.  In 1954, on Christmas Eve, somewhere in Austria, a husband, wife and their two children gather around the candle-lit tree.  A knock on the door interrupts the happy family Christmas scene.  When the husband answers, a stranger orders then hustles him outside.  This man next enters the house, telling the wife he knows her husband was a high-ranking SS officer, which the woman denies.  The visitor realises he’s made a mistake when he mentions the family’s two sons and registers the presence in the room of a young boy and a young girl.  At the same moment, a gunshot is heard outside.  The man who came to the door is an Israeli agent called Peter Malkin (Oscar Isaac).  His Mossad colleagues have murdered the unfortunate householder.  Malkin is initially shocked but soon makes light of the fatal error:  ‘So what, he was still a Nazi’.

This episode could illustrate either that Mossad in its early days had a scattershot approach to Nazi hunting or that Malkin in particular is a hothead novice – or both.  In any case, the implications of the prologue hardly connect with what follows.  After a very brief interlude that describes Malkin’s further training in Tel Aviv, he’s assigned to the Mossad team charged with the top-priority mission of tracking down and retrieving Eichmann (Ben Kingsley) from Buenos Aires.  From this point on, Malkin is characterised in the ways you’d expect for a leading man in material of this kind.  Born in Germany, he is still traumatised by the death of his sister in a concentration camp.  There’s a mutual attraction between him and Hanna (Mélanie Laurent), the only female member of the team sent to Argentina.  While Eichmann is being held prisoner in a safe house, as the flight to Israel is unavoidably delayed, it’s Malkin who engages in pivotal conversations with him:  the canny Eichmann (Hannibal Lecter-style) perceives and probes his captor’s vulnerabilities.

Give or take an occasional significant pause and over-deliberate eye contact, the scenes between Oscar Isaac and Ben Kingsley are very well played.  (They’re an apt pairing:  within his generation, each actor has proved to be well equipped to play characters across an unusually wide ethnic range.)  These exchanges do become the centre of the film:  although Malkin and Eichmann both eventually show their true colours, Chris Weitz and his two main actors do a good job of building uncertainty as to how much each is pretending in order to gain psychological advantage.  Oscar Isaac gives another strong and nuanced performance.  He also has the advantage that few in the audience will have a picture of Peter Malkin (1927-2005) in their mind’s eye.

Ben Kingsley’s job is harder:  the news-film image of the man in the glass booth on trial in Jerusalem is close to indelible.  Kingsley gives the impression of having carefully studied the trial footage and his portrait of Eichmann is skilfully structured.  His impersonation is accurate enough to seem to correspond to the real thing (particularly the facial muscle movements).  As the dialogues with Malkin grow more intense, Kingsley suggests more candidly vicious and contemptuous facets of Eichmann, their impact retrospectively reinforced by the actor’s later reversion to the personality that came through in the earlier stages.  The film explicitly picks up the irony that Eichmann could pass for Jewish when he tells Malkin, with a degree of amusement, that his Nazi colleagues ‘used to call me the little Jew’.  Although the acting is competent throughout, only Simon Russell Beale as David Ben-Gurion, Greta Scacchi as Eichmann’s wife and Joe Alwyn as their son register in the smaller parts.  The subsidiary Mossad agent roles are sketchily written.  The other baddies in evidence in South America are cardboard.

When things go wrong in the storytelling, it’s sometimes hard to know if the fault lies in the screenplay by Matthew Orton (whose sources include Peter Malkin’s memoir Eichmann in My Hands) or in the direction.  Perhaps the kidnapped Eichmann really was tricked into revealing himself by the Israelis repeatedly quoting an incorrect military ID number that goaded him into blurting out the correct number and admitting his identity – but this plays out as too pat a demonstration of his notorious preoccupation with bureaucratic detail.  The narrative skates over the difficulty for Malkin of negotiating with his Mossad colleagues to honour the assurance he gives Eichmann that his wife will be allowed to visit him in Israel (although she does visit him there).  The build-up to the El-Al flight out of Buenos Aires with the team’s precious cargo on board is excitingly staged but the emphasis Chris Weitz gives to the apparent self-sacrifice of Rafi Eitan (Nick Kroll) and Malkin in staying behind to allow the plane to leave isn’t followed through.  The movie simply fast-forwards to Jerusalem a year later, where crowds are queuing to get into Eichmann’s trial.  Malkin and Eitan are both there and it’s evident that Hanna’s romantic attachment has switched from the former to the latter.  A much bigger problem is that Weitz occasionally works in Holocaust reconstructions as well as actual footage of Nazi atrocities.  These reconstructions are offensively weak and clichéd.  Operation Finale’s shortcomings are far from minor, then, but at least they’re not an expression of cynical calculation.  In more ways than one, this is a decent film.

9 October 2018