Rightly or wrongly, director John Madden’s Shakespeare in Love isn’t remembered as a Best Picture winner, or even an enjoyable little historical romance. It is remembered as that damn film that beat out Saving Private Ryan and The Thin Red Line at the 1999 Academy Awards.
Its success was its undoing. Nothing engenders backlash like an adequate film elevated beyond its station, and all of Madden’s subsequent efforts have floundered under the pressure of being from the guy who stole Steven Spielberg’s Oscar (though it’s not as if he needed another).
The Debt, a historical thriller about Israel’s attempts to capture a Nazi known as “The Surgeon of Birkenau,” feels like an attempt to bring Madden back into the critical community’s good graces. It’s got plenty of attention-grabbers: a nonlinear timeline, a Holocaust-centric plot, awards-bait actors like Helen Mirren (Arthur) and Tom Wilkinson (The Green Hornet) and, most interestingly, thematic and narrative echoes of Spielberg’s Munich.
Despite (or perhaps due to) cramming in every gimmick he could think of, Madden’s effort at reconciliation falls flat. The Debt is a film that concerns itself with weighty subject matter yet feels strangely weightless. Madden swings for the fences but ends up grounding out.
The film starts out with promise, the opening credits scrolling over a tense long-take that ends with a man (Ciarán Hinds, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2) shockingly throwing himself in front of a truck. That scene sets up a mystery: What’s haunting the Mossad agents (played by Hinds, Wilkinson, and Mirren) who hunted down The Surgeon of Birkenau?
The answer arrives late into the film, and by then, any energy has dissipated. The interim is spent in 1960s East Berlin with the team, now played by Sam Worthington (Last Night), Marton Csokas (Alice in Wonderland) and Jessica Chastain (The Help), pursuing The Surgeon, who is working, disconcertingly, as a gynecologist.
The stakes are low (or at least poorly enumerated), the characters broadly sketched, and the action inert. But the film springs to life whenever Chastain is on-screen. She was ethereal in The Tree of Life and charming, if ditzy, in The Help; here, she makes her case as an action heroine. She’s steely yet human, able to suggest vulnerability in one scene and strangle a Nazi with her bare legs in the next. In a role she shares with Mirren, she more than holds her own.
If only the film deserved its actors. It’s well-photographed and well-designed, but it’s all just window dressing to hide the emptiness at the core. The film suggests depth, but ultimately it’s as light as a feather.
rgifford@umdbk.com
