The Debt (2010)

John Madden's The Debt arrives with the sober bearing of a film that knows it is about Important Things, and to its credit it mostly declines to announce them. Helen Mirren and Jessica Chastain share the role of Rachel Singer, a Mossad agent whose celebrated 1965 capture of a Nazi obstetrician named Vogel turns out to have been a fabrication. The narrative shuttles between East Berlin and a 1997 Tel Aviv book party, and it handles the mechanics of espionage with a craftsman's patience: the pelvic exam used as an ambush, the stalled extraction, the prisoner chained to a radiator. There is no environmental sermon here, no critique of capital, no inquiry into body image. The villains are Nazis. The heroes are spies. The film has other business.

Rachel is a capable woman at the center of an operation run by two men, and the film grants her guilt, desire, and moral weight without editorializing about it. This is a female-lead thriller of the old school, competent and unsentimental. The Jewish identity of the characters is central, though it is the identity of history and persecution, not the identity of a contemporary cultural argument. The casting is white and European, as the material demands, and no argument is made about it. A mental asylum appears as a plot location and not as a portrait of anyone's inner life.

Where the film earns its modest friction is in its premise. The heroic account is a lie, and everyone has retired on it. That inversion of official memory, and the way it glances at the myth of Jewish passivity, gives the thriller a conscience. But the film lectures sparingly. It prefers to let a Nazi explain Jewish weakness over a bowl of soup, and to let us draw our own uncomfortable conclusions. The result is a well-tailored, slightly overlong genre piece that flatters the audience a little and scolds it almost never.