Hannah Arendt
Director: Margarethe von Trotta
Cast: Barbara Sukowa, Janet McTeer, Julia Jentsch, Axel Milberg, Nicholas Woodeson, Megan Gay, Ulrich Noethen, Michael Degen, Klaus Pohl
Rating: (M)
4 stars (out of 5)
Will cinema ever be done with the Nazis? So far, I'd say definitely not.
Still, every now and then a film comes along that explores the subject in an intellectually satisfying way that re-awakens your sense of how truly vile the Nazis were.
Hannah Arendt (Rialto) tells the true story of a middle-aged woman who writes a magazine article about a war crimes trial.
There are no uniforms, no guns, no explosions, no chase scenes yet this is as chilling as any more conventional retelling of Nazi atrocities.
Hannah was a German intellectual who just happened to be Jewish.
She got out of Germany, moving to France only to be interned by the Vichy government.
She managed to get a visa to America, which saved her life, and became a successful and beloved college professor whose fields included philosophy and political theory, with a dash of advanced German on the side.
When the Israelis kidnapped Adolf Eichmann from Argentina and put him on trial for war crimes in Jerusalem, she reported on the trial for the New Yorker.
She was fascinated by how this Nazi monster was, in fact, a paper-pushing nobody and coined the phrase ''the banality of evil'' to describe the paradox.
That is what we remember today about her, but at the time she walked into a controversy by not censoring any taboo subjects that the trial threw up.
She told the truth, but it was a truth many did not want to hear.
Best thing: It is so nice to be treated as an adult for a change.
Worst thing: There is a parade of intellectuals through Hannah's apartment and the movie does little to differentiate between them, so it is often hard to match people in later scenes with their earlier appearances.
See it with: A bit of background knowledge.
