vernon film society
Bringing the best in world and Canadian film to film lovers of Vernon and the North Okanagan
THE DEBT
Monday, October 31
John Madden
Cast: Helen Mirren, Tom Wilkinson, Sam Worthington, Ciarán Hinds, Jessica Chastain
Run Time: 101 minutes
Country: USA
Year: 2011
Language: English
Rating: 14A (Violence
A Gala Presentation at the 2010 Toronto Inter¬national Film Festival®, and starring the venerable Helen Mirren (The Last Station, The Queen), The Debt is a cracking political thriller. Directed with crisp, confident strokes by John Madden (Shake¬speare in Love), it offers all the pleasures of tight plotting and international intrigue, but grounds them in conflicts that have been urgent for sixty years. The stakes here are life, death and the hon¬our of a nation.
In 1997, three veterans of Israel’s secret service, the Mossad, return to a hero’s welcome. Rachel Singer (Mirren), is the lone woman. Her daugh¬ter has just written a book about the threesome’s most famous exploit: a 1965 operation that saw them hunt down and terminate a notorious Nazi war criminal in East Berlin. The book brings the episode back into the spotlight, but the attention makes Rachel’s fellow agent David (Ciarán Hinds, There Will Be Blood, Life During Wartime) uneasy. In one shocking scene, he takes a decisive action that suddenly puts the other agents at risk, and opens whole new questions.
Madden shifts briskly between these scenes and the time of the original assassination, when the young agents snuck into East Berlin to track down the war criminal. They aim to bring him back to justice in Israel, but the situation proves more volatile than planned. Still, the mission catapults them to hero status back home.
But, decades later, cracks appear in the offi¬cial story - a man in Ukraine surfaces, claiming to be the target of their original mission, still alive and ready to talk. Although her spy days are long behind her, Rachel is pressed into service to com¬plete the operation.
Madden allows his characters not just rough edges but hard ones. Sam Worthington (Avatar, Last Night) and rising star Jessica Chastain (The Tree of Life) do wonderful work as the young David and Rachel. Tom Wilkinson (The Ghost Writer, Duplicity) is pure pleasure to watch as the ruthless spymaster. But it is Mirren, giving full range both to Rachel’s icy discipline and the conflicted emotions of a mother, who stands out.
The Debt is as polished and professional as its secret agent characters, pulsing along at a thrill¬ing clip. But there is a substantial moral dilemma at the heart of this film: should the truth ever be sacrificed for a story that inspires a nation?
"The suspense builds nicely, the twists come as surprises and its key characters are vivid enough." - Kirk Honeycutt, The Hollywood Reporter
