“Tell you what: we’re gonna start with Munich, then proceed to Death and the Maiden, and finally finish with the ending from Argo. How does that sound?” I don’t know if that was the actual pitch to the producers of Operation Finale, the biographic extraction of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann from Argentina to Israel in 1960, but it can’t have been far off. For such an important story to tell, Operation Finale feels about as unique as a brown-eyed Swede. Yeah, I suppose they’re relatively rare, but nothing you haven’t seen before. Maybe I just see too many movies. Sorry, lost my head for a second. There is no such thing as seeing too many movies. We all know this is true.
Many of the architects of the Jewish extermination in WWII committed suicide: Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, Hermann Göring to name a few. But those are a big few. Jews wanting post-war catharsis were denied such. This is why it’s really important for Robert Mueller to keep doing his job – after we all realize the full extent post-presidency of Trump’s awful, we too will want a catharsis of such kind. If that means the conspiratorial minions of Trump’s evil go down, we will take it for the decided lack of anything else … including “making America great again.” Back to our film, one very high-ranking Nazi did not commit suicide and escaped to South America. Adolf Eichmann (Ben Kingsley) lived quietly in Argentina for years and years after the last bomb had dropped.
In 1960, the Mossad got quality intel that Eichmann was in Buenos Aires. This bio says they were tipped off by an undercover deb (Haley Lu Richardson) going steady with Klaus Eichmann (Joe Alwyn), Adolf’s son, but I gotta believe the recent upswing in in pro-Nazi activity might have been a hint. I mean, sure, Argentina had just survived Eva Perón, so political idiocy is no stranger to the place, but even she wasn’t singing, “Don’t Cry for My Arm Swastika.” That started happening in the late 1950s. Meanwhile, the Mossad decide that assassination isn’t an option; it is extraction or nothing; Eichmann must be “brought to justice” whatever that means. I’m not a fan of violence or the death penalty, but mann.
Team Mossad is led by Peter Malkin (Oscar Isaac), who I found too glib for this assignment. Combine that with a previous operation he botched and I really wonder if Mossad was hurting for quality agents at this time. The basic plan is for the Mossad to identify a Jew-killing German in a foreign country (Munich), privately capture and interrogate Ben Kingsley to get a confession (Death and the Maiden), and, finally, extract person(s) by plane from a potentially hostile nation (Argo). The biggest problem is not that the plan seems derivative (which is bizarre considering Operation Finale describes real events), it is that Ben Kingsley is a better actor than Oscar Isaac. I don’t want to sympathize with Adolf Eichmann; he was a monster. I want to let the Mossad get their day. I want Peter Malkin to get vengeance, not play “good cop.” I wouldn’t call the meat of this picture unsatisfying, but Munich had a much better handle on the justice of the situation – and the targets in Munich were not quite responsible for six million Jewish deaths. At that
rate, I’d rather the plan had more tension in it than getting the Frost/Eichmann treatment.
Ben Kingsley has sure gone full 180, huh? Once a captured Jew in Schindler’s List, now he’s the man who sent himself off to Auschwitz. I wonder if it’s ever confusing to be an actor.
From the Roman sentries who marched Jesus to execution to Oliver North and Iran-Contra scandal, history is riddled with a depressing array of “I was only following orders” lackeys. I have no idea what I would do if given the choice of “follow this terrible order or the rest of your brief life will be spent in pure misery,” so a small part of me is sympathetic to the Eichmann portrayed by Ben Kingsley. However, coordinating the deaths of six million Jews isn’t quite an “I was just following orders” kind of thing. It seems more like a “my boss told me we needed to become a paper-free office, so I fired our paper supplier, looted every desk in the company for scraps and disposed of them, bad-mouthed the evils of paper in every local media, including newspaper, then arranged a boycott of that as well, developed seven new forms of paperless communication, and burned down every tree in the country just to be safe.” The world needs not sugar-coat Adolf Eichmann even if his captor might have. Given the rise in Argentinian Nazism in the 50s and 60s and our present rise in Neo-Nazism world-wide, Operation Finale is an important film, but it’s not quite as important as it ought to be.
♪Don’t want your “Sieg heil” anymore
Don’t want your goose stepping at my door
We died in masse on Polish ground
String him up, that Nazi clown♫
Rated PG-13, 102 Minutes
Director: Chris Weitz
Writer: Matthew Orton
Genre: More Nazi fun!
Type of being most likely to enjoy this film: Holocaust survivors
Type of being least likely to enjoy this film: Nazis, Neo Nazis
♪ Parody Inspired by “Cathy’s Clown”
