Hannah Arendt is a movie about an intellectual argument that has since been resolved in favor of the title character. Hannah Arendt was a noted political theorist and a leading thinker on totalitarianism. In 1961, The New Yorker assigned Arendt (a German Jew who herself avoided the Holocaust by fleeing to the US) to cover the trail of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann. Instead of finding Eichmann to be personally monstrous, she saw him as a bureaucratic functionary who failed to think through the monstrous consequences of ordinary tasks; he took pride in successfully loading people on to a train without taking responsibility for sending them to their extermination. Arendt made Eichmann the poster boy for she coined as “the banality of evil”.
While the banality of evil is is a concept generally accepted today, it caused a furor at the time from those who could not accept that a human catastrophe of the magnitude of the Holocaust could have been enabled by ordinary humans. Hannah Arendt is the story of that controversy. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to make a compelling movie about a quibble between intellectuals – and even more challenging when the argument itself has been stale for 40 years.
Arendt had achieved academic status in the 1950s that was remarkable for a woman of the time. She was also arrogant and tone deaf to political correctness, which helped her step into the controversy.
Arendt is ably played by Barbara Sokowa. Janice McTeer (Tumbleweeds, Albert Nobbs) gets a much flashier role as Arendt’s loyal friend, the feisty writer Mary McCarthy, and McTeer’s performance is by far the most watchable piece of the movie.
For a much more visceral exploration of the banality of evil, I recommend Blind Spot: Hitler’s Secretary, described in my 5 Essential Holocaust Films.
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