Review of The Debt (2010) by Danijel J — 21 Dec 2011

People say all debts must be paid one way or another, but the payoff itself is the biggest problem in John Madden's The Debt. I must admit I was left a little disappointed with the third act of his remake of a 2007 Israeli thriller. However, the disappointment wasn't nearly as enough as to make me say I regret seeing it. That would represent the panning of a thriller which tries, and in most cases succeeds, to use intelligence and suspense to tell an intriguing morality tale, with great actors at the top of their game to boast. There are not many of those recently, you have to admit.

At the beginning, we see a retired Mossad agent Rachel Singer (Helen Mirren) at the presentation of a book her daughter wrote about her. The book tells a story set 30 years earlier in East Berlin where Rachel, together with her fellow agents Stephen (Marton Csorkas) and David (Sam Worthington) had an assignment to capture a notorious German doctor Vogel (Jesper Christiansen) and send him back to Israel where he was to face a trial for conducting some savage experiments on Jewish prisoners in World War II. Madden uses flashbacks (which take the majority of the film actually) to show us the course of that operation which didn't go exactly as planned. The story then comes back to present, where the consequences of their mistakes must be faced with.

As I implied earlier, I liked the part set in the past much better. I hardly blinked every time the camera was in that stuffy, old apartment. I found all of the three characters and their interaction extremely engaging, the key perhaps being in the way Madden uses the presence of Vogel to show the weakness of David and Rachel and their sentimentality in these circumstances where the suppression of that attribute is perhaps the only way to keep your sanity. The question of the price one pays for the "obligations of patriotism" is expertly worked out through a well written script by Mathew Vaughn and his co-writers. All good things here are derived from a sharp characterization of Rachel, especially the believability of the love triangle. Ban Davis's dark photography inside of the East Berlin apartment creates an atmosphere of imprisonment and claustrophobia we became used to identify this tortured city with.

The actors, young and old, have different roles in the quality of the end result. The first ones increase the power of the flashback part, while the present time guys serve to save the film from falling into mediocrity. With respect to all of them, Jessica Chastain deserves to be mentioned first. Her graceful screen presence and a necessary amount of vulnerability she gives to Rachel will assure you this is someone to look at for the future. She also makes a job easier for Helen Mirren, who has, in this point, reached a status where she can undoubtedly be called one of the few best living actresses. Tom Wilkinson, one of the best character actors around, makes the sparkles fly in all of the scenes they have together.

John Madden made the strongest film he could out of the given material. He moves confidently in the attempts to make this complex story as clear as possible to us. The suspense is derived mostly out of the character reactions and their psyche, and that's why the way he told us what really happened in the past (that climactic moment somewhere in the middle) never seems like a gimmick.

The only flaw of The Debt is a common one for many thrillers-it has a set up too perfect for the conclusion to follow. However, considering the film's many strong aspects I mentioned above, that remark seems almost like an unnecessary pettiness.