In an otherwise conventional approach to her biopic, director Margarethe von Trotta makes an exception for one key aspect of the story. It’s a crucial decision. Hannah Arendt (Barbara Sukowa) is already an esteemed professor and public intellectual when she talks The New Yorker into hiring her to cover the Adolf Eichmann trial in Israel in 1961. This is where von Trotta makes the exception: Eichmann is not played by an actor, but represented by the extensive newsreel footage of the trial. A small thing, but critical: An actor might have brought some distinction, some charisma, to the role of the Nazi war criminal.
That could have worked against Arendt’s famous observation about Eichmann’s very ordinariness. She coined the phrase “the banality of evil” to describe the particular horror of the Nazis’ tidy organization of genocide. Instead of the aberrant monsters of the final solution, she proposed a population of bland bureaucrats with blood on their hands. This bold assertion, and the sometimes angry fallout that came after, is at the core of Hannah Arendt. The subject’s a good fit for von Trotta, whose career has frequently taken a political slant; here she casts a merciless eye on how the political is inevitably personal.