Take on ‘The Debt’

In theaters Friday: Bucky Larson: Born to Be a Star, Contagion, Warrior

New on DVD/Blu-ray: Everything Must Go, Hanna

Like the Oscar-winning The Reader before it, heady action flick The Debt addresses the Holocaust in a way creative enough to almost make a new film about the subject feel fresh and unique. Following alternate timelines in the 1960s and 1990s, the film centers on a trio of skilled Mossad agents sent to locate and extradite from Communist-controlled Berlin a ruthless Nazi War criminal for public and sentencing back trial in Israel. Their target, based on an amalgamation of real-life Nazis, is known as the “butcher of Berkinow” for the hideous medical experiments and torture he inflicted on concentration camp Jews. Hiding out as an OB/GYN, the Mossad operatives place Jessica Chastain as an infertile patient to infiltrate the doctor’s world.

In some of the film’s most uncomfortable moments, Chastain puts herself in the most vulnerable of positions under examination of the devil. He sees inside her. He violates her like he and others violated her relatives and countless innocents of the war.

Successful in finding and subduing their target, things go horribly wrong when they attempt to flee Berlin by train. Forced to keep him as a prisoner in their Berlin home until a new escape plan can be devised, the “butcher” manages to escape. Instead of admitting failure, the three agents swear an oath to claim they killed the Nazi while he attempted to flee and dumped the body. Their lie will lift the hopes and spirits of Jews still suffering the loss of loved ones during WWII, they rationalize. Truthfully, it is more about saving face, and thinking of the “greater good” does no such thing for the agents.

Flashforward 30 years, and we see the terrible fall-out of their deceptive decision. Chastain’s character is portrayed by Helen Mirren in the 1990s scenes, and her daughter has just published a book about the now-famous Mossad mission. But when news that an elderly man in a Ukranian asylum is claiming to be “The Butcher of Berkinow,” their 30 years of lies and her daughter’s reputation as an author are on the line. Is the “Butcher” still alive? Should the agents track him down and finish the job or finally admit their long-ago lie? Both tracks rumble the character ahead for more chilling thrills.

An espionage thriller more attracted to meditating on the weight of a lie than the flash of bullets and blood—though the film, in sudden spikes of violence has startling doses of those as well—The Debt is an engaging piece of cinema.

Helen Mirren is riveting as usual, and infinitely emotive, even with her hollowed face hidden behind icy sunglasses and a mean scar dog-legging down her cheek. Portraying the youngest agent, David, Sam Worthington shines in a more subtle role that pales in comparison to Chastain, who’s given the most meat to chew on here.

With the right material, relative newcomer Jessica Chastain (she broke out last spring in Terrence Malick’s lauded but little-seen Tree of Life) could be a remarkable talent, the kind that could star in silent movies because her eyes, alternately pained, dreamy and determined, tell us everything.

The Debt has the fault of eliciting questions it does not give answers to by the end, and the manner in which this doctor death escapes house arrest is too contrived for the clinically serious tone the film sets. He is able to flee because two of the Mossad agents make a questionable decision, but what is worse for the film is that they have to break character in order to do so. It just doesn’t make sense.

The Debt wants to be a thinking man’s action film, and it nearly gets there. What it lacks in narrative focus, it gains in a cross-cutting prism of a script that keeps viewers engaged in the particular dramas of each time period, both interlocked by one fateful lie that proves living with deception can easily outweigh living with shame.