Operation Finale

Year 13, Day 335 - 12/1/21 - Movie #3,987

BEFORE: December is here, I'm in the home stretch.  Here are the format stats for the films of November: 

7 Movies watched on cable (saved to DVD): Broken City, Contraband, The High Note, The Killing of a Sacred Deer, The Best of Enemies, Peppermint, Jack Goes Boating

3 Movies watched on cable (not saved): Birthday Girl, Birth, In Secret

6 watched on Netflix: The Midnight Sky, Barry, Mudbound, Monster (2018), Horse Girl, Manson Family Vacation

1 watched on iTunes: The Oath
1 watched on Amazon Prime: The Goldfinch
2 watched on Hulu: My Friend Dahmer, Ingrid Goes West

20 TOTAL

And here are the links that will get me to the end of the year, after tonight: Ben Kingsley, Bruce Willis, Jonathon Schaech, Ana de Armas, Keanu Reeves, Sean Bridgers, Ron Livingston, Tom Skerritt, Ben Whishaw, Morfydd Clark, and Justin Edwards. That's how close Christmas is now, just 13 films away!

Oscar Isaac carries over from "In Secret". I'm also giving a birthday SHOUT-out to director Chris Weitz - born on November 30, 1969.  I know, this is my film for December 1, but I skipped yesterday, and also I started watching this one on 11/30, and finished on 12/1.  So it counts. Chris Weitz also directed "About a Boy", "The Golden Compass", "The Twilight Saga: New Moon" and co-wrote the screenplay for "Rogue One: A Star Wars Story". 

You might notice that I could have crammed "Dune" before this one, between two other films with Oscar Isaac - and tomorrow's film could have easily been replaced with "Shang-Chi".  Well, I decided to move all these current hot films into January, partially because my December chain was built months ago, and it still WORKS so I'd rather not abandoned it, but there something else shared by many of the films scheduled for December.  They're all taking up TOO much space on my DVR (and the Netflix list) and something simply must be done.  Tonight's film has been on the DVR since April of 2020, and seriously, I need the space for new movies. So it's got to go!

THE PLOT: A team of secret agents set out to track down the Nazi officer who masterminded the Holocaust. 

AFTER: It's getting VERY close to that time when I usually look back on all the movies I watched this year, and try to make some kind of sense out of it all. (Forget it, it usually can't be done...). But right now, a quick check shows that there's been a rather surprising lack of Nazis in this year's films - which is odd, because the last two years, they've been all over the place, from "Downfall" to "The Reader" to "Jojo Rabbit". The only film in 2021 that even came close to the subject was "This Must Be the Place", and I don't think I can take that film seriously, not at all. Wait, I did watch "The Eagle Has Landed" back in June, about a Nazi plot to kidnap Winston Churchill, but with Robert Duvall playing a Nazi and Michael Caine and Treat Williams in starring roles, I don't think I can take that film seriously either.  They sure didn't. So between horror movies, time travel and documentaries about politics and pop stars, I haven't even had the time to think about World War II - it made a brief appearance in "Mudbound", though, and that documentary about Walt Disney? Oh, yeah, "Midway", of course, but that was the war in the Pacific, not in Europe. 

So let's rectify that tonight, with a serious film about Israeli agents tracking down ex-Nazis in Argentina.  Totally different from "The Boys of Brazil", geez, I'm still having trouble getting over THAT one...send in Agent Steve Guttenberg!  Well, Hannukah is going on right now, so I don't know if this is appropriate, but let's score this one as a win for Israel anyway, how they tracked down Adolf Eichmann in 1960 and brought him to Israel to stand trial for Nazi war crimes.  Just 15 years after the fact, but hey, a win is a win. 

I don't know if I would have cast the actor who's most famous for playing Gandhi as Eichmann, though I will say that Ben Kingsley definitely has some range.  Right?  Arab, Egyptian, Indian, British, you give him an ethnicity and he'll play it. And he played a Polish-Israeli in "Schindler's List", don't forget.  But I wonder what goes through an actor's mind when his agent calls and says he's been offered a role as a prominent Nazi - is the temptation there to turn it down on principle, or is it just another acting challenge, to get inside the head of a man like Eichmann and maybe find something there to work with?  I have no idea. 

"Operation Finale" points out right at the beginning that Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler and Joseph Goebbels all committed suicide - aka "the cowards' way out" - so they were never put on trial, never held accountable for their actions.  There were those Nuremberg trials, which sentenced 13 men to death - most prominently Hermann Göring, who then committed suicide before he could be hanged. Hung? Either way, another coward.  After Nuremberg there were a series of smaller trials, but eventually those came to a close in 1949 or so, and after the other countries sort of dropped the ball, Israel decided to pick it up and keep the trials going.  Mossad agents in the field would scour the globe (and boy, did the globe need a good scouring!) looking for evidence of Nazis who escaped Europe, to bring them back to stand trial.  

The last trial of a World War II Nazi I can find a record for took place in 2020, if you can believe that, they found a 93-year-old man who served as a concentration camp guard, but since he was only 17 at the time he served in the war, he was tried as a juvenile and got a rather lenient penalty. (What, they only hung him once? JK.). He got a suspended sentence, not a "suspended" sentence.  After the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961, there was the 1987 French trial of Klaus Barbie, and the trial of John Demjanjuk in Munch in 2011.  

So this is a true story, even if this 2018 film didn't get everything exactly right. (Who am I to say?) It's certainly a lot more believable then Sean Penn playing an aging glam rocker tracking down the Nazi who tortured his father, even though he's got no training for detective work, surveillance and is just no good in a fight.  Seriously, WTF?  Was that movie supposed to be a comedy, or what?  Because it just didn't WORK as a comedy, in that there was nothing fun about it, it was just too darn ridiculous.  

Agent Peter Malkin was a real person, a real Mossad agent, who later wrote a memoir about the capture of Eichmann.  The film sees fit to show a botched intelligence operation first, one where the wrong Nazi got killed (but hey, still a Nazi, so it's OK) and there's no sign of this on Malkin's historical record.  Perhaps this was added for this film to humanize him, to show the classic hero with feet of clay? Or to explain why he was later SO thorough in confirming the identity of Eichmann, who was living in Argentina under an assumed name.  But, he still lived with his son, Klaus Eichmann, who did NOT change his name, and Adolf pretended to be that young man's uncle, not his father. I guess this was what happened, it just seems odd that an ex-Nazi hiding out wouldn't take more steps to distance himself from his old life, or work harder to conceal his identity.  I mean, his wife kept her original first name, that was kind of a tip-off to the Mossad, that this man who MIGHT be Eichmann had a wife named Vera, just like Eichmann did. I thought Germans were stereotypically more organized and thorough than that. 

Once the Israeli agents had Eichmann in their possession, you'd think the hardest thing would be to get him to admit his true identity and the nature of his crimes, but he gives all that up pretty quickly here, perhaps in a display of over-confidence?  The agents also then find that El Al, the Israeli airline, won't agree to fly Eichmann to stand trial in Israel unless they have a letter from him, agreeing to get on the flight.  Rules are rules, I suppose, and maybe the airline didn't want to be an accessory to kidnapping, but this is a NAZI being kidnapped/extradited so it seems like an odd play to draw that moral line.  In the end they're going to drug Eichmann, dress him up like a pilot who's had too much to drink, and basically "Weekend at Bernie's" him on to the plane, so at that point, does consent really even matter?  

The team's flight is rescheduled for ten days later, and then they've got some time to work on Eichmann at their safe house, to get him to sign the paperwork and approve the flight.  Again, NITPICK POINT, he's going to be knocked out during the flight, so maybe just forge his signature on the letter?  Just a thought. Ah, if only one of the Israeli agents could develop some kind of rapport with the Nazi, gain his trust and learn how his brain ticks, so he can subtly influence him, play on his over-confidence and work the mental angles to convince him to sign the letter?  Hah, what do you suppose the chances of that happening are?  

Well, we know that Eichmann eventually DID get put on trial in Israel, so the attempt to get him there is something of a foregone conclusion, so that does manage to dispel the suspense quite a bit.  It's good that he was punished for his war crimes, but knowing that in advance is a pretty big spoiler, sorry to say. 

Also starring Ben Kingsley (last seen in "Spielberg"), Lior Raz (last seen in "6 Underground"), Melanie Laurent (ditto), Nick Kroll (last seen in "A Good Old Fashioned Orgy"), Joe Alwyn (last seen in "Harriet"), Haley Lu Richardson (last seen in "The Edge of Seventeen"), Michael Aronov, Peter Strauss (last seen in "Nick of Time"), Ohad Knoller (last seen in "The Operative"), Greg Hill, Torben Liebrecht, Michael Benjamin Hernandez (last seen in "Triple Frontier"), Greta Scacchi (last seen in "The Red Violin"), Allan Corduner (last seen in "Defiance"), Tatiana Rodriguez, Pepe Rapazote, Simon Russell Beale (last seen in "Mary Queen of Scots"), Rocio Muñoz, Rita Pauls, Ana Luzarth, Ezequiel Campa, Aitor Miguens, Antonia Desplat, Eduardo Green, Patricio Witis, Pablo Flores Maini, Julian Rodriguez Rona, 

RATING: 5 out of 10 forged passports