Interrogating the Architect in Eichmann

A A A Comments (2) By Ella Taylor Wednesday, Nov 10 2010

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Eichmann
Directed by Robert Young
Regent Releasing
Open November 12, Quad Cinema

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Based on pre-trial transcripts of Adolf Eichmann's 1961 interrogation by the young Israeli police captain Avner Less (here played by Troy Garity), British director Robert Young's well-intentioned dramatic re-enactment of their encounters is burdened by sepia-period accessorizing, laborious flashbacks, spurious comparisons between the two men's domestic lives, and the downright bizarre casting of Franka Potente as Less's ailing wife and Stephen Fry as an Israeli pol who wants the case wrapped up in five minutes or less. Still, Young's stilted filmmaking is enlivened by a subtly magnetic performance from Thomas Kretschmann, Germany's go-to guy for sturmführers of all stripes. By turns dreary, wily, self-justifying, frighteningly indifferent, and pathetically sentimental, his Eichmann is shown not as the faceless bureaucrat following orders, but as a proactive administrator of the Final Solution who defied Himmler's orders to stop the deportation of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz. Whether his sadistic monomania was causally linked to the twisted sexuality Young attributes to him remains an open question. Eichmann is on firmer ground questioning philosopher Hannah Arendt's contested idea of the "banality of evil," which she articulated in her book about the trial, and in its insistence—through scenes of Holocaust survivors' furious protests against a trial for Eichmann—that without democracy and due process, fascism can triumph again.

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Dondilinger246 03/17/2011 6:11:00 PM

The film Eichmann (2007) is a revision of history that seeks to take away from his true character and roll Eichmann played in the Third Reich. The way the film only display's one side of Israeli sentiment, cuts up historical events, chooses events, and exaggerates scenes and steers away from the fundamental questions raised in the trail demonstrates the weak portrayal of Eichmann's character and historical events. This film is a joke to say the least and refuses to take the real serious issues raised by the Eichmann case. The character of Eichmann and the issues faced at the trail are very important issues. The film is reactionary and unintelligent, an an overall revision of history. Hanna Arendt had done great research in her "Banality of Evil: Eichmann in Jerusalem", but as she understood his hanging to be more legitimate and more justifiable in an international tribunal so that the justice could be more legitimate and serve the others who he had deported out of the country and into concentration camps. The crimes he committed were against many people (Gypsy's, Slav's, Polls, etc..) and many nations, not just Israel, and the perspective laid in the film is only one of many of people in Israel and around the world.