Review by Barbara Snitzer
Hannah Arendt is a masterwork biopic of the notable 20th century philosopher that will hopefully bring the German actress who plays her, the great Barbara Sukowa, the American fame she has long deserved. She won a Lola, the German Oscar, for her performance in this movie.
Despite the movie’s excellence, I fear this movie may not find a wide audience due to the general ignorance of its subject, a wrong which hopefully this movie will redress.
Hannah Arendt was a German Jew who was fortunate to escape Germany before the full implementation of the Nazis’ “Final Solution,” but not before her academic career was halted due its anti-Semitic laws. She arrived in New York City in 1941 with an illegal visa where she worked at a publishing house, eventually becoming a professor and author of several influential books.
When the inconceivable news that fugitive Nazi officer Adolf Eichmann had been captured and would stand trial in Israel, she asked the New Yorker magazine to allow her to cover the trial as their correspondent. Over the objections of a junior editor “She’s not a journalist! She’s a philosopher!” editor-in-chief William Shawn (Nicholas Woodeson) recognizes that her first-hand experience with the Nazis will offer a unique perspective.
When Arendt arrives in Jerusalem at the home of her friend Kurt Blumenthal (Michael Degan) who had been an active Zionist alongside Ahrendt in Germany, she realizes from their conversations and the developing preparations she observes in the city, that the trial would likely become a political circus rather than the solemn legal proceeding she believed it should be. Her suspicions proved prescient.
While she followed the trial as it unfolded, she did not provide the New Yorker with timely dispatches; she would summarize the trial after she had a chance to study the transcripts upon her return to New York. Even though there was a three month period between the conclusion of the fourteen-week trial (which she did not attend in its entirety) and the announcement of the verdict, she still had to hustle to complete her writings.
I applaud director Margarethe von Trotta for using archival footage rather than attempting to merge it with re-enactments “Forrest Gump-style”. She does alter the footage a bit- with close-ups that allow us to try to see the real-life monster as he was. Bravo!
When Ahrendt’s articles were published in the New Yorker, they caused an unexpected uproar, particularly in the Jewish intellectual refugee colony, of whom some permanently cut her off. To her credit, she didn’t compromise her views and made time to clarify them. This is illustrated in the climatic scene in the movie, a seven-minute long monologue that Paris Review Critic Roger Berkowitz calls “…the greatest articulation of the importance of thinking that will ever be presented in a film.” I assure you his comment is not an overstatement in the slightest.
Her New Yorker articles were published in a book called Eichmann in Jerusalem: On The Banality of Evil, one of the few books whose subtitle may be more famous than the actual one. The revelatory observation behind that subtitle is but one of the controversial viewpoints that developed from her observations at the trial.
The movie skillfully explains that particular argument, but unfortunately doesn’t maintain this standard for the other arguments included in the movie, which are only a portion of what is in her book. This is not a criticism but a compliment. Editing is a valuable skill.
The movie focuses on three main points:
-
That Eichmann was a normal man
-
That Israel was putting Naziism on trial, rather than just Eichmann as an individual. She believed this was politically motivated grandstanding that compromised the integrity of the Israeli justice system.
- She was deeply critical of the Jewish people, a viewpoint that caused many to deride her as a “self-hating Jew.”
It is the third, most confusing, point that the movie fails to fully explain. While it would have been difficult, it might have been a better choice for the movie to focus solely on the other two. It still would have provided a complete portrait of Ahrendt, and the drama would not have been compromised.
To fully understand this third point requires a knowledge of several threads of history: Jewish history, the history of the Holocaust, the history of the Jewish diaspora, and an understanding of the Jewish experience in Israel between that state’s founding in 1948 and the trial in 1961. Hopefully, I’ve overwhelmed you to the point that you will agree with me that this is beyond the scope of a movie. In fact, the New York Times critic A.O.Scott’s complaint about Hannah Arendt is that it’s not a mini-series.
The trial of Adolph Eichmann was the real trial of the 20th century- not O.J. Simpson. Its significance is fascinating, and I hope the movie will inspire many to learn more about it. Since the movie smartly bypassed an extraneous history lesson, so will I.
Hannah Arendt is not a Holocaust movie, nor a Yentl-type film that tends to appeal to only Jewish people; it is a fascinating portrait of a complex, tenacious woman, not ahead of her time, but at the forefront of it.
5 of 5 Stars
HANNAH ARENDT opens in St. Louis Friday, August 2nd at Landmark’s Plaza Frontenac Theater
