Flick Flak: The Debt
The Debt
Director: John Madden
With: Jessica Chastain, Sam Worthington, Helen Mirren
15, 113mins
Ah, it’s Ciarn Hinds; it’s good to see him back on the big screen. He was actually in Tinker Tailor recently but had about four lines in the entire film. He’s a great actor; hopefully he’ll have a good role this time around - oh God he's been squashed by a bus!
So goes the first few minutes of The Debt, or at least for me. A really quite graphic impact between bus and man reverberates through the lives of Rachel (Helen Mirren) and Stefan (Tom Wilkinson) as they discover, on the eve of the release of a book detailing the mission the three of them undertook in 1966, that their former colleague is dead.
The first half of the film then follows the three young Mossad agents as they attempt to kidnap and extract ‘the surgeon of Birkenau’ from Berlin. The flashback style is a useful plot device, not just a gimmick, and allows the story to develop in a way which wrong-foots the audience.
There are some fantastic scenes in this portion of the film, including a really tense one at a railway station and one potent portrayal of a painful love triangle as David (Sam Worthington) struggles to contain his sadness while Stefan seduces Rachel in the next room, loudly playing a piano. That sounds daft put like that, but it is pretty effective.
The acting is altogether great. Jessica Chastain is the stand-out in this, the first film I have seen her in, but by all accounts she is about to become huge with turns in The Tree of Life, The Help and Coriolanus. While all of the older actors are, as usual, excellent (Mirren and Wilkinson are reliable) it is the younger ones who really shine; Sam Worthington, who until now I’ve never really considered as an ‘actor’ (following Clash of the Titans and Avatar), is really quite good in a sympathy-evoking role.
As good as the first half of the film is, it really slows down once the action returns to 1997, and unfortunately becomes a bit more sensational and generally ‘Hollywood’. The ending is indicative of this: instead of ending in an unsatisfactory but realistic way it gets slightly ridiculous and spoils the film for me.
But all in all The Debt is an intelligent thriller which asks some interesting questions, without shying away from issues which have no right or easy answer. Very well-acted and with some memorable scenes, it’s well worth a watch.
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