Below is the beginning of A.O. Scott’s front-of-the-arts-page review of the Mossad thriller, The Debt, a remake of an Israeli picture, in yesterday’s New York Times. How many times have I seen this film? Does the Times’ reviewer feel any obligation to mention the recent book about Hollywood’s love affair with Israel and the Mossad? What about “Munich” and the controversy over retaliatory violence– or the joke that Kate Winslet/Ricky Gervais made about winning an Oscar by doing a Holocaust flick? Are (wornout) American glands being squeezed again and to what purpose? What is the presence of Israeli film in our artistic life (an objective question)? No, can’t mention any of that, we get a purely aesthetic/conventional review in the New York Times that politely refuses to touch on any political issues. This is part of the blindness, the assumption by our greatest newspaper (and I’ve lately subscribed; it is a great newspaper) that smart Americans don’t look at this film and ask these obvious questions. A.O. Scott:
“The Debt,” John Madden’s remake of a 2007 Israeli thriller, shuttles back and forth between a dim, creaky East Berlin apartment in 1965 and the sunshine of elite Tel Aviv a little more than 30 years later. The film, written by Matthew Vaughn, Jane Goldman and Peter Straughan, is interested in the ways that the truth of the past can be shaded and illuminated by the imperatives of the present, and it probes, with perhaps more energy than clarity, the ethical and psychological complications that can lie hidden beneath a story of simple heroism.
In this case the official, heroic story has to do with what happened in cold war Berlin, where three Mossad operatives went on a secret mission to capture a Nazi fugitive named Dieter Vogel. Their daring, widely celebrated exploits become the subject of a book written in 1997 by Sarah Gold (Romi Aboulafia), the daughter of two of the agents: Rachel Singer (Helen Mirren) and her ex-husband, Stephan Gold (Tom Wilkinson). Rachel, particularly, has been lionized for the courage she displayed in her younger days. She not only had the nerve to entrap her diabolical quarry, a Mengele-like doctor whose gruesome nickname was the Surgeon of Birkenau, but she also had the presence of mind to shoot him dead when he tried to escape.All of this is shown early in the film; I’m not spoiling anything.
