The movie starts like a thriller. A man, walking alone in the night, is suddenly kidnapped by some men in a van. The man screams. The image is dark, except for the lights of the van which hurries toward us. We understand later on that the kidnappers were Mossad agents and that the man was Adolf Eichmann. This is 1960. Hanna Arendt (Barbara Sukowa) has been living in exile in New York with her husband (Axel Milberg) for twenty years. She is a well-known professor, she and her husband are a happy couple, she is surrounded by friends. After hearing the news of Eichmann's arrest, she convinces the New Yorker to send her to Jerusalem to cover the trial. The article that she ends up writing and that the New Yorker decides to publish is of course more than a mere journalist account, but a philosophical reflection on the origins of evil. Arendt's now famous theory is that Eichmann was not a monster nor an anti-Semite, but just a cog in the Nazis' infernal machine, unable to think and to feel empathy. This idea is what she called the banality of evil. In her essay, Arendt also denounces the collaboration of some Jews with the Nazis. Of course those ideas create a scandal among the American intelligentsia and the Jewish community around the world. People attack her without trying to understand her, and of course, as it is often the case, without even reading her. How can a Jew who experienced the concentration camps put herself in a nazi's shoes to try to explain his crimes? How can a Jew dare criticize other Jews? Many of her friends break off their relations with her. One of them, on his deathbed, asks her "don't you love your people?" and she answers that she can't love a people, she only loves her friends. Two visions conflict with each other, communitarianism against freedom of thought. The film is interesting in the way it shows this free thinking at work. Hanna Arendt, wonderfully played by Barbara Sukowa, is shown smoking in her apartment, sitting at her desk or in a sofa, lying on a couch, standing at the window. She is shown writing and thinking, and it's never boring. You can criticize the film for many things, but not for its dullness. You can criticize Margarethe von Trotta's academic filmmaking, especially when she uses flashbacks to evoke Arendt's relationship with Heidegger. You can criticize her partial perspective. She never questions her character, she makes Arendt a heroin, a sort of Robin Hood fighting for truth. Arendt's character is far from bland, but she has no contradictions, no gray areas. Except for the final speech to her students, Arendt's work is not really tackled, but this is not a film about a philosophical work, it is a mainstream film about a woman that von Trotta wants us to like. And we do. The film is a tribute. Von Trotta intelligently treats the historical dimension by inserting archive images of the trial. You see Eichmann in his glass cage, answering the judges' questions. You also see survivors testifying, and some Jews trying to justify themselves. Thus, except for one superfluous scene, the trial is not re-enacted, and this is for the best, because fiction cannot replace already existing images. You can criticize the film for its didactism, or praise it for its informative qualities. You can't criticize the film for its lack of accuracy, because it is a portrait, and, like every biography, it is biased. Here, the biography is almost a hagiography, but a hagiography that is open and clear in its intentions.
Review of Hannah Arendt
