The Debt (2011) 

Directed by John Madden

Opens nationwide on 8/31/11

Photo credit: Laurie Sparham

An elegant middle-aged woman with a horrific scar carved into her cheek demands our immediate attention. Who is she and who could possibly be responsible for such cruel disfigurement? As the plot unfolds, we learn that this woman, “Rachel Singer,” is Israeli, and yet she does not have an Israeli accent. When we meet her, the year is 1997, but then the story carries us back to 1966, where we are told she is 25. The math is easy: 25 in 1966 means Rachel Singer was born sometime around 1941. Is she from Europe? Is she a survivor? Is her scar from the Holocaust? Yes . . . and no . . .

John Madden’s new thriller The Debt is based on a 2007 film by Assaf Bernstein and Ido Rosenblum called Ha Hov. I saw Ha Hov in 2008 when it played in our Chicago Festival of Israeli Cinema and I hated it. It was the one film on that year’s schedule that I refused to recommend. Look it up in our Films for Two database and you will see: “Great cast wasted in plodding, far-fetched drama about Mossad agents hunting down a Nazi war criminal.”

And yet, even though I knew absolutely every important plot point (not a one of which has been changed), The Debt literally kept me on the edge of my seat from start to finish. At one point, I balled up my shawl, stuck the edge into my mouth, and bit down hard so the people sitting next to me wouldn’t hear me shriek. How to explain such a change?

Let’s start with the cast. Clearly I had no objections to the cast of Ha Hov. Who could object to casting Gila Almagor (“the First Lady of Israeli Cinema”) as Rachel (called “Rachel Berner” in Ha Hov), and Neta Garty (so lovely in Turn Left at the End of the World) seemed fine as “Young Rachel.” I just thought they were trapped in a dumb plot.

But even though Helen Mirren’s face appears in all the posters, it’s Jessica Chastain who owns The Debt. Chastain is this year’s “It Girl” (luminous as the mother in The Tree of Life and adorable as the bimbo in The Help), but I am still dumbfounded by her transformation into Young Rachel Singer.

There’s only one performance I can compare it to: in 1974, I walked into The Godfather: Part II having liked The Godfather well enough for a gangster flick, but wait! Who is this guy playing “Young Vito Corleone”? He’s phenomenal! Sure enough, DeNiro, who had some good credits before that, won an Oscar in 1975 which launched him into the cinematic stratosphere.

In both cases, the magic lies in an actor’s ability to embody a far more famous actor so completely that you really believe you are actually seeing the young Marlon Brando and the young Helen Mirren even though your brain certainly knows otherwise.

Photo credit: Laurie Sparham

The other star of The Debt is Alexander Berner. The first thing I did when I got back to my desk was ask IMDb (the Internet Movie Database): who is the editor of The Debt? Berner is even less well-known right now than Chastain is, but if you’re a cinephile like me and you see that one of his prior editing credits is The Baader Meinhof Complex (2008), then you go to sleep knowing your instincts were right on the money this time.

Last but not least, I suspect screenwriter Jane Goldman made subtle additions to a story that originally had no female input, shading Rachel’s character just enough to make her totally real to me. (Goldman and her writing partner Matthew Vaughn are best-known for the dynamic “superhero comedy” Kick-Ass.) Without watching Ha Hov again, I can’t be more specific, but since I’m not telling you to watch Ha Hov anyway, it really doesn’t matter.

I don’t want to say any more about the plot of The Debt because I want you to see it with all its mysteries still intact, so I’ll end with an open question which I hope we can discuss online and/or the next time we see each other out and about. Have we reached the point, as Jews, where our debt to the past is now in conflict with our debt to the future? This is the question that drives the plot of The Debt; this is the question that motivates everything Helen Mirren does in her scenes as Rachel Singer; this is a question that deserves our time and attention—as Jews—long after the thrills in this thriller are a distant memory.

As I create my first blog post for the new JUF News website, I’m also in the process of completing my 72nd print column (which will appear in the September 2011 issue). In 2005, when Aaron Cohen asked me to join the JUF News team, I was the film critic for the World Jewish Digest. Aaron said he liked my WJD columns, but he needed me to do more. "Jan," he said, "I want you to make Jewish cultural life in Chicago so exciting that no one here will envy New Yorkers anymore." Well, at least that's the way I remember it.

And so, I have now spent six years feasting on the cultural buffet of an extraordinarily vigorous metropolis that has sometimes extended all the way up to Milwaukee, Wisconsin to the north, Munster, Indiana to the south, and Elgin, Illinois to the west. Thankfully Lake Michigan will always define the eastern edge of my territory . . . right, Cindy?

But when we started discussing blog content, I asked to focus on my first love: film. So in addition to my monthly culture columns, I will also be contributing monthly movie posts - sometimes new films coming to local theatres for the first time and sometimes treasures (old and new) that you can watch on DVD.

And as it happens, by some magical synchronicity, Criterion Collections has supplied me with the perfect start: a luminous new release of The Great Dictator, the Chaplin masterpiece originally released in 1940.

Even though I'd seen the scene of Charlie Chaplin in a Hitler outfit dancing with a globe countless times, I never knew its context before, so I missed its full poignancy. Chaplin plays two roles in this film: "Adenoid Hynkel, the Dictator of Tomainia," and "a Jewish Barber" (who, like Chaplin's beloved character "The Tramp," gets no further identifiers). As Hynkel's power grows, life becomes ever more difficult for the Barber and his friends in the ghetto, nevertheless, his love for "Hannah" (a laundress played by Paulette Goddard) blossoms.

The globe-dancing scene begins in minute 53, and the next 5 minutes (from ~ 53:30 to ~ 58:17) may well be the most sublime footage ever recorded. But you must watch both "chapters" (Chapter 10: "Emperor of the World" and Chapter 11: "Barber of the Ghetto") to realize the great depth and breadth of Chaplin's incomparable genius.

The wonderful parts of this film are so wonderful that I wish I could tell you the whole film is perfect . . . but I can't. After the barber is sent to a concentration camp modeled on Dachau (~ 83), Chaplin devotes over 20 minutes to Hynkel's attempts to sideline "Benzino Napaloni, the dictator of Bacteria" as they both race to invade "Osterlich."

Although Jack Oakie's Mussolini impersonation is almost as good as Chaplin's Hitler riff, these comic antics go on way too long. But if you decide to slip away to the rest room, be sure to return with plenty of tissues, because the final moments (beginning ~ 110), will break your heart.

Watching it again yesterday as I prepared to write this review, I found myself sobbing at the end. Hannah, beaten and bereft in Osterlich, hears words of hope from the barber and revives. Watching this scene now, over 70 years after it was filmed, two things are clear. First, the barber is right: democracy will triumph and Hynkel's time as a "Great Dictator" will, in fact, be very short. But even as American audiences were laughing in their theatre seats, Jews in Belarus and Ukraine were already being slaughtered by the hundreds of thousands, and millions more would perish before the real Hitler was finally defeated. How did Chaplin know all of this, in 1940, when almost everyone else on the planet wanted only to avert their collective gaze?

Charlie Chaplin: may his memory be for blessing.

PS: On the question "was Charlie Chaplin Jewish?," I refer you to a definitive piece in The Jewish Quarterly by Canadian professor Holly A. Pearse. Short of extensive DNA testing, the accepted answer appears to be no. On the other hand, Paulette Goddard (born Marion Pauline Levy) definitely had a Jewish father, and although she played a wide variety of roles, one of her best-loved continues to be sassy "Miriam Aarons" in The Women (1939).