Dir. John Madden, USA, 2010, 113 mins, in English plus German/Ukrainian with subtitles
Cast: Helen Mirren, Jessica Chastain, Tom Wilkinson, Marton Csokas, Sam Worthington, Ciaran Hinds
Review by Carol Allen
This is an efficient and largely engrossing thriller with a first class cast, which moves between two time zones, exploring the effect of their past actions on three now middle aged people.
In 1997 Rachel (Mirren), her now divorced husband Stephan (Wilkinson) and David (Hinds) are former Mossad agents, regarded as heroes for the operation they carried out in mid sixties East Berlin to capture a former Nazi war criminal Dieter Vogel (Jesper Christensen), known as the Surgeon of Birkenau, because of his experiments on human beings in the concentration camps. The operation went wrong – the object was to bring Vogel to trial but the trio ended up holding him hostage and when he tried to escape Rachel, who still carries the scar on her cheek from the incident, was forced to shoot him. The events of the past come back to haunt them when Rachel’s daughter Sarah (Romi Aboulafia) writes a book celebrating her mother’s heroism, while at the same time Rachel and Stephan learn of David’s death under disturbing circumstances. The narrative then moves back and forth between the past and the present, revealing that perhaps the historical record of the incident is not actually the whole truth and that the three of them have a debt to the past, which must be repaid.
It’s a well structured story and the lure for us of finding out what really happened in that seedy apartment in Berlin in 1966 keeps us hooked into the story. Mirren is predictably excellent – a strong and world weary woman who bears her secret stoically – though it’s difficult to believe that the more delicate Chastain, as her younger self, is the same woman. In fact one of the weaknesses of the film is that little effort has been made to match the younger and older actors, good though they all are. Worthington plays the younger David, who falls for Rachel in the course of the operation, and Csokas gives the younger Stephan a dangerous charisma and sexiness, which Wilkinson isn’t given the opportunity to pick up on, although the ruthlessness of the character is successfully carried through. Christenson as Vogel is suitably disturbing, both as the young agents’ prisoner, trying to establish a relationship with his captors and in an earlier sequence, when Rachel poses as a patient at his gynecological practice to gain his confidence, which will have women in the audience wincing.
The film is perhaps a bit over heavy on plotting to the detriment of subtlety of character, which is left to the older actors, particularly Mirren, to flesh out. But it’s a good plot, very well structured and while it doesn’t move the soul, it certainly holds the attention.
[cinemabase tt1226753 video_player]
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