“Starring Helen Mirren” is not really true, as Ms. Mirren is barely more than a supporting actor in this movie that should be immediately removed from your “Things To Watch To Supplement My Already Extensive Knowledge About the War” list.
The “Surgeon of Birkenau” has been located in East Germany in 1966 (yes, Virginia, there was an East Germany). Mossad—Israeli intelligence—sends three young agents to abduct him to Israel to face justice, a la Eichmann.
Something goes wrong, so the young Israelis sweep it under the rug, get out of East Germany no one knows how, and then skedaddle on home to Tel Aviv.
Undisciplined is not a word that one thinks of in connection with Mossad agents, especially agents in the 1960s avenging the brutal death-camp murders of their relatives. Here, however, the lack of self-control, at least as to sex, is astonishing. Both male agents are in love with the female agent, who has sex with one and wants to have sex with the other. A baby is conceived during the weeks the trio is confined to the safe house, and I’m thinking that wasn’t on Golda’s agenda.
Oddly, the baby would not have been conceived had we not met up with the Surgeon of Birkenau, who happens to be an infertility doctor now that the war is over and there’s not much call for a guy who blinds children to see if he can change their eye color. Young Rachel (Helen Mirren is older Rachel) visits him for a gynecological exam—“this is my hand, this is the speculum”—so she can scope out the office and come back and knock him out cold, midcycle.
The torturer-cum-OB/GYN diagnoses immature egg follicles, so he gives Rachel an injection of who knows what, and ba-bam, she conceives.
(What I want to know is how a Nazi doc can give a woman one injection and have success when I spent thousands of dollars and went through fourteen years of stupid treatments, temperature-taking, and innumerable speculi before giving up, adopting three children, moving to Hawaii, and having a baby at 43?)
(Yes, I wrote all that just to say “innumerable speculi.”)
Rachel, sans panties, but under a sheet, incapacitates the Bad Doctor by grabbing him with her legs (they were set and ready in the cold, evil stirrups, no footies here), and plunging a hypodermic needle into his neck (see picture above). Things fall and bang, but no one notices, perhaps because internal exams of this type are traumatic by nature. An ambulance is called because the doctor has had “a heart attack,” Mossad shows up in a faux ambulance to whisk away the unconscious doctor and—I’ll spare you the long, horribly convoluted disaster of how they don’t get him to West Germany on the train that isn’t supposed to stop, but then does, but then has to go on because there’s nothing on the track after all and they didn’t get the doctor in the traincar on time because he wakes up and honks the horn—then they’re stuck in the East German apartment.
He escapes (I’ll give you a clue: Harrison Ford in Air Force One), but the young agents don’t want anyone to know that they failed in their mission. Stretching credulity beyond any reasonable limit (now the undisciplined Mossad agents conspire to lie to the Israeli military/government to cover their failure—in what world is this believable?), they lie and say they killed him. Decades later, this will return to haunt them, but for now, they take the applause, give speeches, train recruits, and live their happy lives.
Rachel marries Stephan. David tries to lure her away, but she stays with Stephan, even though they obviously don’t love each other, and even though Stephan obviously is not faithful to her. The marriage disintegrates, but Sarah—the daughter conceived on the mission with the help of Dr. Nazi’s injection—writes a book about her heroic parents and how they hunted down and killed the Surgeon of Birkenau. Somewhere along the line, Stephan, the unfaithful husband, encounters a car bomb and is now using a wheelchair. We don’t know what his job is, but he is some high muckety-muck and the words “cabinet meeting” are used.
There are so many ways in which this movie is all wrong, but I’ll limit my comments to the most distracting of those ways, the worst of which is the casting. Perhaps the filmmakers wanted Helen Mirren to play the older Rachel specifically. No doubt they thought this would be a great way to lure in the older folks. This was a mistake. First of all, older folks don’t have to be lured to movies about WW2 and the Cold War–they go for the nostalgia of it. It’s the young people they should have considered in this casting-as-marketing decision.
They should have cast three 30-something actors who could have played both the young agents and the older agents.
We know this can be done successfully, because we have just now seen Ron, Harry, and Hermione as 17-year-olds and as 40-year-olds, played by the same actors. We have seen Matt Damon and Angelina Jolie together at Harvard and then years later at their son’s almost-wedding to the lovely African woman who didn’t make the nuptials because she was thrown out of an airplane. We have seen Leonardo DiCaprio and Ken Watanabe as young men and as old men, waiting to die alone.
Heads up to the makers of The Debt: it’s called makeup, and everyone can be taught how to use it successfully, except perhaps me. I keep trying. Anyway, it should have been used here. Then I wouldn’t have been confused about who was who. The young David (Sam Worthington) and the older David (Ciaran Hinds, may he live forever) don’t look at all alike. Ditto for young and older Stephan. I kept mixing the people up.
Other major distractions: the back-and-forthing between the decades/casts; the lack of emotional and/or sexual tension between the agents who are supposed to be in aching lust for one another; the nonsensical, wholly gratuitous, non plot-advancing sex scene (fully clothed) in the newspaper office; the apparent level of lucidity and physical fitness of the confined-to-a-home Nazi doctor at the end; and the fact that I came to this movie to see Helen Mirren, and turns out she’s not in most of it. The young cast has way most of the time, and although they are lovely people, they’re not the people I came to see.
This movie is made up of a neat little idea—Mossad Mission Gone South, Time To Tidy It Up So The Kids Won’t Be Embarrassed That We Failed—that spun out of control. At some point, someone must have thought, “You know what, let’s start over with a different cast and a different screenwriter,” but it was too late.
On a happy note: they need to start giving out Academy Awards for movie previews. The trailer for Mission Impossible was so astonishing and exciting, I wanted to jump up and down on the couch—I mean the theater seat—and I hate Tom Cruise. Which goes to show that it is possible to make an exciting theatrical presentation, and while the makers of the MI trailer were able to pull it off, the people who brought us The Debt were not.