Movie Review - Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt ***½ (NR) For a complete reversal of the summer’s usual levity, here’s a fact-based drama that challenges the viewer to keep up with the historical and intellectual pace of a screenplay. Arendt was a German jew who was lucky enough to emigrate in the early 1930s She studied philosophy under the famous doctor Martin Heidegger, and became a respected professor and author in New York. When Adolph Eichmann was found and brought to Israel for a war-crimes trial in 1960, Arendt flew there to cover the proceedings for The New Yorker. Her perspectives on aspects of the Holocaust caused a huge backlash here and abroad.

This film mainly covers the time of the trial and its aftermath, with occasional flashbacks for context. Many factors contribute to its density. Much of the film is subtitled. Heavy accents and a rather poor sound track make the English difficult to follow. A couple of Arendt’s conclusions were academically interesting, but colloquially offensive.

She found Eichmann to be more of a bureaucrat than a monster. In her view, that made the Nazis’ evil even more insidious and troublesome. They convinced ordinary people to do unspeakable acts without remorse. What that revealed about human vulnerability to manipulation provided more of a cautionary tale with dire implications for recurrences than the events that occurred. That included the willingness of Jewish leaders to cooperate within the Ghettos and camps, believing that was the best they could manage to minimize the horrors, while arguably doing the opposite. No one wanted to hear that - especially while the wounds were still so fresh among the survivors and around the world. (8/2/13)