Movie Review: The Debt

When I was a young girl, I dreamed of being a Mossad agent even though I hated guns and thought a yarmulke was a type of milkshake. I spent hours upon hours in my backyard playing Mossad agent vs. The Care Bears, attempting to get information out of said bears by tickling their feet with blades of grass and slowly cutting the threads that attached the hearts that were sewn onto their chests with some dull hedge clippers. Eventually the bears couldn't take my interrogation tactics any longer and revealed the location of their secret candy stash. I then deported them to the neighbor's yard via a slingshot.

You can see why I so loved "The Debt". It brought me back to my childhood. The film goes back and forth in time, showing us the original mission of a group of agents who are sent into East Germany in 1965 to capture a famed Nazi doctor known as "The Surgeon of Birkenau". The three agents are David (Sam Worthington), Stefan (Marton Csokas) and Rachel (Jessica Chastain). Things don't go quite as planned back in 1965 and the result has long-lasting repercussions for the participants.

The film skips ahead 30 years and David, Stefan, and Rachel are played by Ciarin Hinds, Tom Wilkinson, and Helen Mirren. We learn that Rachel and Stefan had married and gotten divorced and that their daughter has written a book detailing their heroics. Rachel is forced back into action when a new person claims to be the real Birkenau surgeon.

The director of "The Debt" is John Madden and he is best known for directing "Shakespeare in Love". As we already know from that movie and its Oscar reward, Madden is a gifted director, as able to make Shakespeare understandable to Academy voters as he is able to spin a yarn about Mossad agents. Incidentally, this reminds me. I like to knit.

Helen Mirren proves that old people can still do things that don't require adult diapers or excessive amounts of Glucosamine. Being that she is living with many regrets from her thirty-year-old mission that left her suspect dead, the opportunity possibly to make amends creates an imperative. What that imperative is, I don't really know, but then again, I'm not sure I know what the word imperative really means either.

Speaking of interesting factoids about the cast, apparently Jessica Chastain, who plays young Rachel, and Helen Mirren, who plays old Rachel, are exactly the same height: 5'4". This just goes to show what a great director John Madden is. Either that or it tells us that Helen Mirren has shrunk. Frankly, I like a shrunken Helen Mirren because I felt she looked a little too large in "The Queen".

I don't want to reveal much more lest I give away stuff and ruin the film for everyone, but "The Debt" creates a powerful sense of tension and also shows the flip-side of espionage where decisions that get made linger, sometimes forever. This is such an important lesson to learn. Some memories we should hold like a three-year-old holds a teddy bear that her big sister is trying to tear from her hands while mommy sits idly in the other room sipping her fifth vodka martini. Other memories we should let go and never revisit, unless it's a memory of crashing your mom's car into a cow because you probably want to remember where those cows hang out the next time you're driving down that particular road. Each character in "The Deb" bears a weight and the actors show it, except Helen Mirren, who bears less weight because she's shrunk.

"The Debt" is intriguing and I owe a debt to the filmmakers for keeping things so interesting and making everything so powerful.