holocaust movie

Hannah Arendt: an intellectual argument now stale

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HANNAH ARENDT

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.

Lore: das grimness

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As Lore opens, Hitler has just died and the German defeat in WW II is complete.  A Nazi couple are about to be imprisoned for WW II atrocities, leaving their 14- and 12-year-old girls, 8-year-old twin boys and an infant little brother to make their own way through the chaos of post-war Germany.  Lore is the oldest sister who must navigate the band to their grandmother hundreds of miles away.

It’s a very harsh environment.  Cities are bombed out, the economy has crashed and the German people are suffering such deprivations that even the warm-hearted cannot afford to give away food to strangers – and there aren’t many warm hearts around.  Social order has completely broken down, and everyone is suspicious of everyone else.  On top of it all, the German people are shaken by the exposure of the extermination camps.  The occupying forces run the gamut from hard-eyed Americans to homicidal Russians.   The safest route involves hiking through the Black Forest and crossing a major river, all while trying to finagle some morsels to eat and avoid getting killed.

Along the way, they are guided by another refugee, a Holocaust survivor.  Yes, that is ironic and unsettling, and the relationship between this figure and the kids never gets comfortable.

Lore’s strength is its singular viewpoint – that of the innocent children of monstrous people.  The audience’s instinct to root for children is challenged because these kids, while not culpable for their parents’ crimes, have been indoctrinated with some very ugly beliefs.   The arc of the Lore character is particularly dramatic.

However, Lore is very grim.   The intensity is so unrelenting, as the children face danger after danger, that it wearies the audience.  Aussie director and co-writer Cate Shortland has chosen not to include any moments of respite for the audience.  For better movies that mine this subject, see my list of 5 Essential Holocaust Films.