‘Operation Finale’ Presents Oscar Isaac as a Dashing Nazi-Hunter

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MOVIE: Operation Finale
DIRECTOR: Chris Weitz
CAST: Oscar Isaac, Ben Kingsley, Mélanie Laurent, Nick Kroll, Joe Alwyn, Haley Lu Richardson
AVAILABLE ON: Prime Video and iTunes

For as extensively covered a subject as World War II has been at the movies, one of the more particularly fascinating corners is the tracking down and bringing to justice of the remaining Nazi apparatus after the war was over. From Judgment at Nuremberg, the stirring courtroom drama from king of the message movies Stanley Kramer, to Steven Soderbergh’s The Good German which looked at the political intrigue of the fallout in Berlin to 1978’s The Boys from Brazil, which starred no less legendary an acting trio as Gregory Peck, Laurence Olivier, and James Mason in a film about the hunt for escaped Nazi war criminal Dr. Josef Mengele in South America.

The subject of Nazis fleeing to South America after the war has long been one of great fascination, and Operation Finale fits comfortably in that niche. It also, as a movie about a team of Israeli spies and Mossad agents going through the nuts and bolts of assassinations and extractions, seeks to capture a good bit of what Spielberg’s Munich had going for it. Operation Finale doesn’t approach the expert level of Spielberg — nor that film’s strangeness — but it’s an engrossing yarn, featuring a magnetic lead performance by Oscar Isaac, and that ain’t nothing.

Operation Finale tells the true story of the capture and extraction of Adolf Eichmann from Argentina in 1960. Eichmann had been hiding out there for a dozen years by the time the Mossad team found him, and in the interim, testimony from the Nuremberg trials had painted a damning portrait of the man who essentially managed the logistics for the Final Solution. He was also, in 1960, among the last of the Nazi high echelon to be brought to justice. One of the strongest impressions that Operation Finale leaves is the importance, to the surviving Jews and to the state of Israel, that Eichmann be brought to very public justice.

This is why Mossad agent Peter Malkin (Isaac) and his team are tasked with capturing and extracting Eichmann (Kingsley) rather than outright assassinating him. This presents a problem when that extraction is put on hold and the Mossad team must remain in hiding, with Eichmann, for several days. It’s here where some of the film’s thornier moral ideas get wrestled with, as Malkin gets incrementally closer to Eichmann, despite clear orders to the contrary. Isaac plays the conflict within Malkin with plausible deniability; we know he’s tormented by the death of his sister in the Holocaust, but we also believe he is absorbing Eichmann’s attempts to plead his case. That Eichmann is described as a man who has convinced Jewish rabbis to load the trains to the concentration camps themselves, his powers of persuasion are not to be underestimated. And Kingsley plays Eichmann with an unsettling opaqueness, which gives even the audience a moment’s pause as to whether we should reevaluate this Nazi pencil-pusher. It’s in these scenes where Weitz flirts with being the most provocative, even if he backs off in the end.

The Mossad team is, if not quite worthy of Munich levels of workmanlike fascination, well-cast and quite watchable. Mélanie Laurent, probably still best known as the Jewish cinematic avenger in Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, plays the group’s skeptic and Isaac’s best scene partner. Simon Russell Beale, who was so memorably wicked in this year’s The Death of Stalin, delivers one particularly stirring scene as Israeli prime minister David Ben-Gurion. And Nick Kroll fares much better at tamping down the comedic energy he couldn’t quite suppress in Loving.

Meanwhile, a particularly well-cast subplot sees Haley Lu Richardson (last seen being utterly delightful and magnetic in Support the Girls) as a young Argentine girl who is dating the very handsome boy (Joe Alwyn) who also happens to be Eichmann’s son. It’s through Richardson’s character that Eichmann is found, but rather than just have her play a cog in the film’s machinery, Weitz keeps these young characters as a recurring subplot that plays a vital contextualizing role. While Eichmann tries to talk himself out of his noose by playing on the guilt of a Jewish vengeance, we see Alwyn — who is having quite the year playing beautiful monsters, between this and Boy Erased  — take Richardson to a local rally where anti-Semitic sentiment is already beginning to roil into an organized anti-Jewish movement. The idea of eternal vigilance against another Holocaust is one thing to keep as a mantra. Here, though, Weitz gives terrifying blood and guts to the specter of anti-Jewish animus, something that obviously reverberates through post-Charlottesville America today.

Chris Weitz has had a long and very interesting career since co-directing American Pie in 1999. He’s made a Twilight movie (New Moon), bombed out in his attempt at a post-Lord of the Rings franchise (The Golden Compass), scored a very unexpected Oscar nomination for Demian Bichir in A Better Life, and made one of the better and most underrated character comedies of the 2000s in About a Boy. Operation Finale fits right in, in that there’s nothing else in Weitz’s filmography that feels quite like it, and it’s a lot better than you’d think it would be.

Where to stream Operation Finale