Operation Finale

Rating: PG-13
Runtime: 2 hours, 2 minutes
Director: Chris Weitz

Quick Impressions:
I like Jennifer Garner, so I’m going to do her a favor and pretend the movie Peppermint doesn’t exist. (I mean, why would I pay to watch a movie when I couldn’t even finish watching the whole trailer? I could be wrong, but Peppermint looks terrible, and stories about murdered children stress me out.)

Also, I can’t watch horror movies. They don’t usually scare me in the moment, but moments are fleeting.  I’m positive if I’d seen The Nun last night, then I’d be seeing that nun standing at the foot of my bed grinning at me Satanically for the next month and a half every time I wake up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night.

So that left Operation Finale, a cheery tale about Adolf Eichmann, architect of the Holocaust.  Actually, both my husband and I found ample cinematic appeal in the idea of Oscar Isaac as a Mossad agent sent to Argentina to track, capture, and extract high-ranking Nazi-in-exile Eichmann, intriguingly portrayed in this film by Ben Kingsley.

I’ve heard Operation Finale described as a historical suspense thriller, but I think any emphasis on suspense is misplaced. I mean, Eichmann was very publicly tried and convicted and hanged in Israel in 1962. So there’s really no doubt that Isaac’s Peter Malkin and his team are going to get their target out of Argentina successfully. Honestly, for a drama about such tense material, Operation Finale isn’t very suspenseful at all. But I don’t think it’s trying to be.

The reason to watch Operation Finale is the magnificent chemistry between Isaac and Kingsley, the palpable tension of their brilliantly acted moments together. And we really do feel that tension. Those scenes are the heart of the movie, which is very good, much better than I expected it to be, in fact. I’m so glad we saw it.

The Good:
This isn’t the kind of spy movie where people jump across rooftops or even execute complex plans. This plan is simple. They grab Eichmann, take him to a safe house, and then just stay there until they are finally able to get a flight home. So suspense doesn’t build. What builds is tension.

The question is not, “Will they do it?”

The question is, “Why did he do that?” (We might also ask, “Would others do the same thing? What is Peter capable of? What are any of us capable of?”)

But honestly, the biggest question is, “Why did he do that?”

Peter and his team have a unique opportunity. They have time to kill in this big empty house with an apparent monster accused of engineering one of the greatest moral atrocities of history. It’s almost like they’re living out that old conversation starter, “If you could have a dinner party and invite anyone in history, living or dead…”

They are literally feeding dinner to the guy who worked out the logistics of the Final Solution. They take turns giving him food, accompanying him to the bathroom, making sure he doesn’t escape. Of course, except for the trained negotiator, they’re not supposed to talk to him.

But wouldn’t you be tempted to talk to him? I would. I mean, why did he do that?!!

Everyone in the house with him lost close relatives (and in some cases, their entire families) in the Holocaust. So as the time spent in that house drags on and on, they’re all tempted to talk with him.

The other huge temptation, of course, is to murder him. (“Murder” may actually be the wrong word here since the man freely admits to facilitating the deaths of millions. He doesn’t even bother to deny it. He’s strangely blasé about the whole thing, saying he was just trying to be practical and do his job. Of course, Hannah Arendt literally coined the phrase “banality of evil” after watching Eichmann’s trial, so what else would we expect from him?)

Operation Finale is the kind of movie where the characters grapple with philosophical and moral quandaries, and as we watch them, we begin to ask ourselves the same types of questions.

The whole thing sounds like extra credit on a philosophy test. (“So you’re stuck in a house with the devil for days. What do you do?”)

The point isn’t, “Will they escape?” We really should be more worried about how the experience will change them or what we would do under similar circumstances.

The parts of the story that happen outside the house are the least provocative. They’re not dull, but they’re perfunctory, everything we expect in a movie on this subject. The Nazis act like Nazis. Some innocent people are hurt. The Israeli government seeks to avoid a diplomatic incident. There’s a lot of red tape at the airport. These things are interesting, but totally predictable, and I wouldn’t be surprised if some of this is just Hollywood storytelling since it all seems extremely familiar.

But it’s much, much harder to predict what’s going on inside that house, how the interpersonal conflict and each person’s internal conflicts will play out.

Kingsley’s interpretation of Eichmann requires more than one viewing. As masterfully played by Kingsley, the man remains enigmatic. He does not hesitate to recite prayers in Hebrew or share the same cigarette with a Jew. He paints himself as more of an overworked pragmatist than an antisemitic monster, but in the end, he looks more like a textbook sociopath, cunning, lawfully amoral. Even his viciousness appears to be a convenient mask designed to elicit a response he believes he can use for his own ends. He does appear to care for his wife and children (though for what reasons, we do not know.  Maybe he wants his name to carry on or enjoys looking at passing trains but finds it boring alone).

And Isaac plays a guy wrestling with ample baggage of his own who must survive a protracted game of negotiation with such a character.

Alexandre Desplat’s score gives the third best performance of the film (after the outstanding work of Kingsley and Isaac). At first I found it almost jarring, but very quickly I got used to it and began to welcome its flourishes. Sitting around in a house does not always look riveting on screen, so the music does a lot to externalize the tension felt by the characters involved.

I also enjoyed seeing Nick Kroll play a much more dramatic role than usual. Before this, I can only remember seeing him in comedies.  And Simon Russell Beale gives a well delivered speech in his one brief scene.

Best Scene:
We know what Peter wants from Eichmann, but what does Eichmann want from Peter? I love all of their conversations, which get better and better as the movie builds. Best, of course, is their final conversation when we finally see what the desperate Nazi has been playing at all along. If nothing else, he’s a master strategist to the end. (He’s also quite the equivocater. Notice how it’s always the most monstrous people who say stuff like, “Well, we’re all monsters,” or, “We’re all animals.”)

Best Scene Visually:
An early scene showing Peter making a mistake is absolutely key to setting up the story. He gets a look at a young child and suddenly makes a chilling realization. (He’s standing in someone’s house at the time. He does all his most profound thinking inside houses.)

Best Action Sequence:
There’s not a lot of action in Operation Finale. It’s more of an inaction movie. (But I mean, if anyone should be encouraged to spend some time sitting around doing nothing, it’s Eichmann. He’s done quite enough already.)

The “meeting” scene when Sylvia first meets her boyfriend’s associates has a lot of energy. True, the sequence feels pointedly contrived, but it does nicely dramatize the insidious danger of allowing cells of Nazi sympathizers to flourish unchecked.

I’m also a big fan of the struggle which results in the lost glasses.

The Negatives:
I love Mélanie Laurent.  Her involvement is one reason I wanted to see the movie, but there’s really no need for her to be in this film. Her character has almost nothing to do. Well, I mean, the character serves a purpose on the team. She also serves the story, acting as a confidante and motivator for Malkin. But as I watched, I thought, “This role needs to be expanded because it would be better if Malkin did x,y,z.” Then I remembered that Malkin is a real person. So is Hannah a real person, too? Even if she is, I think the character needs either more development or even less screen time. I feel like she’s just hanging around to flesh out Malkin’s character. If that’s true, that aspect of his character could be fleshed out further. If there’s not time for that, then reduce the role and cast someone less famous than Laurent, whose considerable talents are wasted here.

I also wish we knew more about two other significant females in the cast, Sylvia, who finds Eichmann, and the poor girl who buys the groceries, who is just kind of left hanging. Sylvia and her father are extremely interesting characters who put themselves at great personal risk. I’d love to know a bit more about their story.

I think Greta Scacchi’s role could be enlarged, too, since Eichmann’s wife’s thinking is even more of an enigma than his. Of course, maybe there’s really no more that we can know. While trying to figure out if Klaus was actually Eichmann’s son (he was) or his nephew, I happened upon an interview with the youngest Eichmann son, Ricardo, which gave me the impression that his mother was a private woman, someone hard to understand.

Honestly, I feel like there are two movies here. One is about all the people scrambling around behind the scenes in Buenas Aires and in Israel, and the other is about what’s going on inside that house. The “scrambling around” aspect of the movie is a little messy. There are a lot of characters, and most of them seem like they’re in a movie. That part of the story needs some tightening. Part of me thinks it could be eliminated entirely. The other route would be to expand and give us a better understanding of the characters. For someone with a father so frustratingly hard to comprehend, Klaus Eichmann is such a one-dimensional, stereotypical Nazi brat. He even looks like a Nazi in a movie. I could swear they’ve given him some kind of eye-make up to make him appear more evil. The Eichmann/Malkin discussions are so focused and thought-provoking, but I don’t think as much care was taken crafting the supporting characters.