Susan Granger’s review of “Operation Finale” (MGM)
Since Holocaust deniers and Flat-Earth believers keep emerging from the dark recesses of society, perhaps this historical drama has more relevance that one might suspect.
The true story depicts the covert operation about how – years after W.W.II and the Nuremburg trials – Adolf Eichmann, the feared architect of the Nazi’s Final Solution, was finally captured.
Tipped off that Eichmann (Ben Kingsley) was living under the alias ‘Ricardo Clement’ in Argentina, Israel’s Mossad was at first skeptical.
Apparently, when an Argentine teenager, Sylvia Hermann (Haley Lu Richardson), brought home her new, outspokenly Aryan boyfriend, Klaus Eichmann (Joe Alwyn), her father (Peter Strauss) made the connection. But it took a while for Israeli authorities to verify that he was, indeed, Eichmann.
Then in May, 1960, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion (Simon Russell Beale) sent an undercover team from Tel Aviv to Buenos Aires, noting, “For the first time in history, we will judge our executioner, and we will warn off any who wish to follow his example.”
Led by Peter Malkin (Oscar Isaac), they must quietly abduct Eichmann and hide out in a ‘safe house’ until an El Al plane can whisk them out of the country – and their extraction plan is fraught with unexpected complications.
Chronicled by Hannah Arendt in “Eichmann in Jerusalem,” it popularized her phrase “banality of evil,” referencing the war criminal’s quiet complacency.
Working from Matthew Orton’s screenplay, director Chris Weitz gives a subtle nod to his mother, actress Susan Kohner, by having her “Imitation of Life” (1959) playing at the theater where Sylvia first meets Klaus.
After portraying iconic Jewish heroes like Simon Wiesenthal (“Murderers Among Us”), businessman Itzak Stern (“Schindler’s List”), and Anne Frank’s father Otto (“Anne Frank: The Whole Story”), Ben Kingsley cleverly embodies wily Adolf Eichmann.
The only discordant note is a reference to a previous romance between Malkin and the Israeli doctor (Melanie Laurent); it’s a distracting detail.
On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “Operation Finale” is a seriously unsettling 7. Today, one of Eichmann’s sons, a staunch Nazi sympathizer, still lives in Argentina.
