Hannah Arendt
The couch you’ve put off replacing fails to camouflage where you both sit and how often you both sit there, pointed at the TV and not at each other. You beam a silent mental defense at guests when you see them note the faded fabric: We talk, too. It’s not just Law & Order reruns and the NFL and Breaking Bad around here. But, really, there’s no denying the banality of passivity.
The banality of evil, though, that’s cause for debate, at least in Hannah Arendt, a witty, unapologetically intellectual dramatization of a furious moment in midcentury moral argument. Director Margarethe von Trotta doesn’t forget the drama. Or the argument. Or the morality. Or the midcentury.
Von Trotta and co-writer Pamela Katz don’t waste time explaining who the thinkers are in this film, which centers on writer and teacher Arendt (Barbara Sukowa, magnificent) and her thorny New Yorker probe of the 1961 Adolf Eichmann trial and the troubling aftermath of its publication. It’s less biopic than in medias res cross-section of postwar academia, Manhattan publishing, and a marriage between philosophical powerhouses at domestic equipoise. (Axel Milberg is both charismatic and soothing as political thinker Heinrich Blücher, Arendt’s husband.) It’s also a velvety-looking ode to a time when people still bothered to make their crazy death threats in writing rather than just shouting at a screen from a sofa.
