The Debt
Review by John L. Ng
October, 2011
“The Debt,” a remake of a 2007 Israeli film “Ha-Hov,” tells the story of three Mossad (Israel’s Intelligence Agency) agents on a secret mission in East Berlin during the cold war. They were to abduct a Nazi war criminal to stand trial in Israel. Their daring mission becomes the subject of a book by Sarah Gold, the daughter of two of the agents, Rachel and Stephan. The third agent is David whose brooding melancholy provides the moral center of the story. The movie opens with the debut celebration of Sarah’s book. The audience soon senses that what is portrayed in the book may not be entirely what has happened. This doubt hanging over the film is a study of the psychology of conscience. By shuttling back and forth between their dilapidated Berlin apartment and their privileged middle class life in Tel Aviv today, we enter the agents’ struggles of conscience, then and now.
Sarah’s book illuminates Rachel’s heroics in capturing the ‘Surgeon of Birkenau’ hiding in Eastern Berlin as an obstetrician. During a gynecological examination, Rachel subdued and drugged her criminal doctor. After a botched transfer, the prisoner was forced to stay in their apartment until an opportune time. While there the prisoner engaged the three in dialogues about morality and being human. His clever queries outmaneuvered their sense of conscience. The three in their own ways began to lose sight of their moral center. When their prisoner attempted to escape, Rachel was wounded but had enough presence of mind to shoot him dead on the street.
Several issues of conscience emerge as the story unfolds between the agents’ past realities and present choices. What is the conscience of truth telling? The pervasive psychology throughout the film is should their past have an imperative on their present responsibility to speak the truth? In an imperfect world, where right does not make might either, is lie telling justifiable? In a broken world, where truth does not always triumph, is living a lie the best choice? In an evil world, where evildoers often out smart the good-doers, is perpetrating a lie the only means to overcome evil?
Another issue the film deals with is the conscience of morality. In his banters with David, the criminal doctor observed that innocent people are not necessarily on the side of morality. How was it possible for a few Nazi guards to herd thousands of prisoners into the gas chambers without resistance, he chided. Innocent people become victims because they are weak in their selfishness. Are they anymore moral than those who victimized them? Then there is the conscience of revenge. In another encounter of relentless taunt, Stephan viscerally sought to inflict physical pain on the one taunting him. But David in a fit of angst stopped him and wondered out loud that when good people avenge evil with evil, are they not reduced to the same evil they oppose.
Our human conscience is the concern of the film. In the real world, the differences between human good and inhumane evil is often smudged. What is the difference between the consciences of the evil doctor and the three agents? What is more humanly unconscionable – telling a lie to secure the intended good or clinging onto the truth at the risk to the good intended? Our humanity is too complex and the world too conflicted to have neat answers. At the end of the day, what is left is our conscience before God.
October, 2011
“The Debt,” a remake of a 2007 Israeli film “Ha-Hov,” tells the story of three Mossad (Israel’s Intelligence Agency) agents on a secret mission in East Berlin during the cold war. They were to abduct a Nazi war criminal to stand trial in Israel. Their daring mission becomes the subject of a book by Sarah Gold, the daughter of two of the agents, Rachel and Stephan. The third agent is David whose brooding melancholy provides the moral center of the story. The movie opens with the debut celebration of Sarah’s book. The audience soon senses that what is portrayed in the book may not be entirely what has happened. This doubt hanging over the film is a study of the psychology of conscience. By shuttling back and forth between their dilapidated Berlin apartment and their privileged middle class life in Tel Aviv today, we enter the agents’ struggles of conscience, then and now.
Sarah’s book illuminates Rachel’s heroics in capturing the ‘Surgeon of Birkenau’ hiding in Eastern Berlin as an obstetrician. During a gynecological examination, Rachel subdued and drugged her criminal doctor. After a botched transfer, the prisoner was forced to stay in their apartment until an opportune time. While there the prisoner engaged the three in dialogues about morality and being human. His clever queries outmaneuvered their sense of conscience. The three in their own ways began to lose sight of their moral center. When their prisoner attempted to escape, Rachel was wounded but had enough presence of mind to shoot him dead on the street.
Several issues of conscience emerge as the story unfolds between the agents’ past realities and present choices. What is the conscience of truth telling? The pervasive psychology throughout the film is should their past have an imperative on their present responsibility to speak the truth? In an imperfect world, where right does not make might either, is lie telling justifiable? In a broken world, where truth does not always triumph, is living a lie the best choice? In an evil world, where evildoers often out smart the good-doers, is perpetrating a lie the only means to overcome evil?
Another issue the film deals with is the conscience of morality. In his banters with David, the criminal doctor observed that innocent people are not necessarily on the side of morality. How was it possible for a few Nazi guards to herd thousands of prisoners into the gas chambers without resistance, he chided. Innocent people become victims because they are weak in their selfishness. Are they anymore moral than those who victimized them? Then there is the conscience of revenge. In another encounter of relentless taunt, Stephan viscerally sought to inflict physical pain on the one taunting him. But David in a fit of angst stopped him and wondered out loud that when good people avenge evil with evil, are they not reduced to the same evil they oppose.
Our human conscience is the concern of the film. In the real world, the differences between human good and inhumane evil is often smudged. What is the difference between the consciences of the evil doctor and the three agents? What is more humanly unconscionable – telling a lie to secure the intended good or clinging onto the truth at the risk to the good intended? Our humanity is too complex and the world too conflicted to have neat answers. At the end of the day, what is left is our conscience before God.
The Informant
Review by John L. Ng Oct 09
The title itself is strangely funny – what’s with the exclamation point and what does it mean! Mark Whitacre, played by Matt Damon with demotic delight, lives and works in the land of Lincoln – the movie is set in Decatur, Illinois. We are reminded of where we are by a Lincoln bust in almost every early scene. Maybe it is Lincoln’s iconic image of wholesome honesty that we should be thinking about. At first, everything about Whitacre seems to have a mid-west wholesomeness, and yet not. His boyish overweight physique, ill-fitted suits and colorful neckties, bad toupee, dorky mustache and bumbling babbles are as promiscuously tasteless as his house cluttered with eclectic collectables. Something is off about him. But we are not quite sure what just yet.
The Informant! by director Steven Soderbergh (Ocean’s 11, 12, 13 movies) is based on a book of the same title, without the exclamation and published in 2000, by former New York Times writer Kurt Eichenwald. The book is an expose of the corruption and downfall of ADM, an agribusiness giant that produced corn and other food additives. The movie begins with Whitacre dribbling philosophically to his son about the virtue of corn. Indeed, corn has made him a wealthy man. He is a biochemist and the youngest divisional head at ADM. He soon becomes a whistle blower to the FBI when his company is about to be outed for a price-fixing scheme.
Sometimes clueless, the FBI agents are at once sincere, gullible and inept. Unbeknown to them and the agency, Whitacre’s hands are as stained with the grime of greed as the other executives in his company. Soon, we realize that he is a congenital liar. As his mendacity piles on high and deep, Whitacre irreversibly descends in a detour of depraved disconnects. While his voice-over concerns with where to buy fancy neckties and how to pronounce porche, Whitacre’s life unravels into a self destructive and self deceived fray. His delusional existence is so pathetic that Soderbergh cynically makes fun of it.
The movie is a fun study of human pathology. But our pathos is not funny; it is lugubriously serious. That is why the church calls the seven deadly sins deadly. We laugh at Whitacre for his apparent banal and bumbling greed. Corporate corruption is so common and pervasive in America that we are tricked again and again into believing that it is mundane. White collar crimes, with its expensive neckties (another strangely funny thing in the movie – an overt obsession with neckties), do not ruffle our sense of jurisprudence like other societal crimes, like rape and murder. Everybody does it and nobody is the victim. Or rather, the victims are faceless.
The movie is fun to watch and I feel guilty for it. No conscientious God-fearing person would find any form of human pathology funny. But calmly, like Whitacre, I can deceive myself into self justification. As I type away on my laptop for this review, I can write that my enjoyment is a fitting testimony of how banally evil human pathology can be. In light of recent corporate corruption (the likes of Enron, Madoff Investment Securities, AIG, Lehman Brothers) in greed and other deadly sins that contributed to our global economic downturn, can we do anything but laugh. While the seven deadly sins are being perpetrated by and around us, we grin as if we are watching a fun movie. If human pathology is funny, then the joke is on us when we gaze into a mirror and realize that the victims, and perpetrators, are not faceless after all.
The title itself is strangely funny – what’s with the exclamation point and what does it mean! Mark Whitacre, played by Matt Damon with demotic delight, lives and works in the land of Lincoln – the movie is set in Decatur, Illinois. We are reminded of where we are by a Lincoln bust in almost every early scene. Maybe it is Lincoln’s iconic image of wholesome honesty that we should be thinking about. At first, everything about Whitacre seems to have a mid-west wholesomeness, and yet not. His boyish overweight physique, ill-fitted suits and colorful neckties, bad toupee, dorky mustache and bumbling babbles are as promiscuously tasteless as his house cluttered with eclectic collectables. Something is off about him. But we are not quite sure what just yet.
The Informant! by director Steven Soderbergh (Ocean’s 11, 12, 13 movies) is based on a book of the same title, without the exclamation and published in 2000, by former New York Times writer Kurt Eichenwald. The book is an expose of the corruption and downfall of ADM, an agribusiness giant that produced corn and other food additives. The movie begins with Whitacre dribbling philosophically to his son about the virtue of corn. Indeed, corn has made him a wealthy man. He is a biochemist and the youngest divisional head at ADM. He soon becomes a whistle blower to the FBI when his company is about to be outed for a price-fixing scheme.
Sometimes clueless, the FBI agents are at once sincere, gullible and inept. Unbeknown to them and the agency, Whitacre’s hands are as stained with the grime of greed as the other executives in his company. Soon, we realize that he is a congenital liar. As his mendacity piles on high and deep, Whitacre irreversibly descends in a detour of depraved disconnects. While his voice-over concerns with where to buy fancy neckties and how to pronounce porche, Whitacre’s life unravels into a self destructive and self deceived fray. His delusional existence is so pathetic that Soderbergh cynically makes fun of it.
The movie is a fun study of human pathology. But our pathos is not funny; it is lugubriously serious. That is why the church calls the seven deadly sins deadly. We laugh at Whitacre for his apparent banal and bumbling greed. Corporate corruption is so common and pervasive in America that we are tricked again and again into believing that it is mundane. White collar crimes, with its expensive neckties (another strangely funny thing in the movie – an overt obsession with neckties), do not ruffle our sense of jurisprudence like other societal crimes, like rape and murder. Everybody does it and nobody is the victim. Or rather, the victims are faceless.
The movie is fun to watch and I feel guilty for it. No conscientious God-fearing person would find any form of human pathology funny. But calmly, like Whitacre, I can deceive myself into self justification. As I type away on my laptop for this review, I can write that my enjoyment is a fitting testimony of how banally evil human pathology can be. In light of recent corporate corruption (the likes of Enron, Madoff Investment Securities, AIG, Lehman Brothers) in greed and other deadly sins that contributed to our global economic downturn, can we do anything but laugh. While the seven deadly sins are being perpetrated by and around us, we grin as if we are watching a fun movie. If human pathology is funny, then the joke is on us when we gaze into a mirror and realize that the victims, and perpetrators, are not faceless after all.