The Debt

The Debt (2011)

Director: John Madden

Cast: Jessica Chastain, Helen Mirren, Tom Wilkinson, Sam Worthington 

Watching an espionage film is only enjoyable if we can relish in the indomitable, super-human nature of covert agents hopping from one enticing location to another. One of the most enjoyable experiences I have had in the theaters this past year has been watching Bryan Bird's spectacular Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, basking in Tom Cruise's Ethan Hunt escaping from high security Russian prisons and soaring off skyscraper rooftops in Dubai. Thankfully, we also have Daniel Craig's James Bond owning it at a high stakes poker game in Montenegro in Casino Royale, and more recently, Steven Soderbergh's largely under- appreciated Haywire, when hired agent/assassin Mallory Kane pummels Michael Fassbender into pieces in a Dublin hotel room. 

My point is, everyone should love a good spy movie. What they should not love is a spy movie where agents sulk about in their weakness and self-pity in a "psychological drama" like The Debt. 

The Debt is about three Israeli agents on mission to capture and bring to justice a Mengele-esque Nazi war criminal residing in East Berlin in 1965. The film jumps back and forth in time, from the East Berlin mission to 1997 (why?) as the three agents are now retired and publicly revered for having captured the Nazi way back then, when in fact they actually shot him dead, no wait, he actually escaped, and now they all hide some seriously shady secret that continues to haunt them all...and I'm already asleep.

The movie starts out well enough. Helen Mirren and Tom Wilkinson are always enjoyable to watch,  of course, even though their performances are passionless and static. Their young counterparts do not resemble them in any capacity, a huge credibility problem. However, Jessica Chastain dominates the movie and works arduously with her character. When the narrative transitions to 1965, the action builds as the trio comes closer and closer to their subject, curiously in the Nazi gynecologist's room, where Chastain's Rachel poses undercover as a married woman trying to improve her fertility by being inspected by the doctor. The choice of the patient/doctor set-up is a strange one, and there are a series of scenes where Rachel, legs spread on the table, is examined by the "Surgeon of Birkenau", and it remains a mystery whether the story writers intend this to be suspenseful, or simply a plot-device (Spoilers ahead!) to foreshadow Rachel's accidental pregnancy from a love affair with her partner. Which begs the question: what kind of secret agent gets pregnant while on the mission? And why are these agents so terrible at their jobs?

Unfortunately, the audience is never granted the level of suspense this story requires. Once they capture the Surgeon, a long, claustrophobic period ensues where they are cooped up for weeks in an apartment with the madman, gradually defeated by the pressure and stress of the mission.  In one scene, the cunning Nazi provokes them into screwing up the mission by delivering a "Jews are weak and deserve to be destroyed" monologue that results in our agents losing their cool and botching everything up, allowing the war-criminal to escape forever. 

The biggest problem with The Debt is that the Jewish agents prove to be weak, just as our villain predicted, which is a terribly irresponsible premise for a movie. Moreover, in the final scene, which takes place in 1997, Rachel decides to finally finish the job and kill the geriatric Nazi who alluded them many years before. Great, finally! Kill the old bastard! No such luck. Once again, this 90 year old man stabs Mirren to shreds and nearly escapes again. Will Rachel live or die? Did she do the right thing in revealing her decades-long lie? What are we left with after watching this shallow blather? War criminals, what are they good for? Absolutely nothing.

D