Movie Review: The Debt

            I have a friend, who shall remain nameless (unless he decides to name himself), who didn’t want to see The Debt because he thought it was going to be a piece of “Zionist propaganda.” Well, I convinced him otherwise and we went to see it together with some other friends and, well, it wasn’t Zionist propaganda, not quite.

The Debt, starring Helen Mirren (always great, great here), the new It girl Jessica Chastain (whose It-ness I totally understand as I get lost in the milky-etherealality of her skin and ocean-blue depth of her eyes and burning red passion of her hair and ahh...), and one of my very favorite actors whom I hardly ever see in anything. No, not Avatar-Boy (Sam Worthington). I’m talking about the villain from the second Mission Impossible:

No, not Tom Cruise. The other MI: 2 villain, actor Marton Csokas...

Wait, sh*t, I just found out that I’ve totally confused the New Zealand born Csokas (who is NOT in MI: 2 but is in The Debt) with Scottish-born actor Dougray Scott (who is in MI: 2 but NOT in The Debt).

Csokas:
 


Scott:
 


Wow, that was embarrassing!
            Anyways, The Debt is sort’a like Munich: an action-y film about super bad-a$$ Israeli Mossad agents going after people who messed with The Jews who then sort-a kind’a start to second guess themselves/feel bad.

In Munich, the Mossad agents go after Black September and start to second guess themselves as a function of the brutality they use in exacting their Justice; in The Debt they go after an evil Nazi doctor hiding in East Germany as a creepy gynecologist--

--and start second guessing themselves only after they have successfully perpetrated a (SPOILER!!!) “noble lie” for almost thirty years.

The Debt is, in so many words, a strongly acted, inconsistently paced, often exciting meditation on the problem of the “noble lie,” i.e. the lie that one tells for the purported sake of others.       

Insofar as The Debt problematizes a group of Mossad agents telling of a noble lie for the sake of the state of Israel/their children, The Debt is an interesting, fairly entertaining film that I wouldn’t mind seeing again were it to accidentally show up on the old Bube Tube.

However, insofar as The Dept, like Munich before it, seems to be a film suggesting that the agents of the state of Israel feel bad sometimes doing what they have to do in the name of their justice, well, perhaps it really is a piece of Zionist propaganda like my friend feared. As a wise old woman--

--once told me, feeling bad doesn’t make you a good person.