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Linguistic silliness


All things considered, this should have been a very good film. But it loses itself in flat-out boredom, quite a trick when one considers the explosive subject matter.

The film is uneven and lethargic, and it loses considerable credibility with its strange choice of actors and, most of all, languages.

Troy Garity plays Avner Less, Eichmann's Israeli interrogator. Garity is an American. His wife is played by Franka Potente, a German. At home, they speak English to each other in an odd accent that, I presume, is supposed to let the audience know (a huge wink, wink) that they're 'really' speaking Hebrew. All around the embattled Less are protesters with placards written in Hebrew, but Less, his wife, and every other Israeli in this flick speaks English. It's silly; it's the kind of stuff one can see in 1940s-1950s war films, where Germans (or Koreans, or Chinese, or Japanese) speak English to each other in heavy accents.

This same silliness is revisited here with Eichmann, played by Thomas Kretschmann, a native-born German actor. I'm sure he and Less spoke English (a common language for both) to each other in the interrogation room. But in flashbacks, when he's busy ordering the murder of everyone in his path, Eichmann speaks English (with a German accent!!) to his German underlings. Again, I presume we're expected to believe they're all (another huge wink, wink) 'really' speaking German to each other.

To further aggravate this linguistic silliness, we have Stephen Fry, the quintessentially cultured Englishman, playing a high-level Israeli government cabinet minister!!. Stephen Fry? This is surely on the list of the 50 Most Inspired Miscasting Choices of All Time. Egads. Fry tries to speak with what I presume is Hebrew-inflected English, but he can't sustain it. He regularly retreats to his upper-class English accent, and the results are unintentionally hilarious. (Fry recently told the world that he is half-Jewish, or one-quarter Jewish, or something. It doesn't matter: he just doesn't make it as an Israeli Cabinet Minister. He's just too indelibly, inescapably English. Besides, Fry is not a reliable source when he's talking about himself.)

This whole film, for me at least, took a huge negative hit because of the choices of actors and languages. It also wasn't an exciting movie when it should have been. What is stunning is that only a few critics have mentioned the casting, but none has mentioned the languages.









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There are always posts like yours when films like this one is made.

It always strikes me that making a film in English is a good idea if you want foreign sales and reviews.


Leaving aside the importance of english as a world language we have to think about people often not liking subtitles and being confused by multiple languages.

I am happy to watch films in languages foreign to me with subtitles but a lot of people are not.



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There are always posts like yours when films like this one is made.

It always strikes me that making a film in English is a good idea if you want foreign sales and reviews.


Leaving aside the importance of english as a world language we have to think about people often not liking subtitles and being confused by multiple languages.

I am happy to watch films in languages foreign to me with subtitles but a lot of people are not.



This is the primary reason they didn't do it in German and Hebrew with English subtitles: like you say, a lot of people don't like them. I don't mind them; in fact, with my hearing as bad as it is, I won't get a DVD unless it has either English or English SDH (as this film did) subtitles.

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