Anthropoid.

Two years ago I read Sam Taylor’s translation from the French of Laurent Binot’s remarkable novel HHhH.   In fact it is a book within a book.  Binot tells  how he came to write, and did write,  the story of the attempt by two SOE trained Czech soldiers to assassinate Reinhardt Heydrich in Prague.  Heydrich was the  Chief of the Nazi Secret Service and third ranking officer after Hitler and Himmler, and made ‘Protector’ of Bohemia and Moravia in June 1942.   This region now comprises the Czech republic.

Hitler had claimed this region as part of the so called ‘Greater Germany’ and had been allowed to march in and take over. Heydrich was appointed to crush any and all resistance, and this he did with the efficiency and ruthlessness  he had shown at the Wannsee Conference,  designing the ‘Final Solution’ to the ‘Jewish Problem’ along with his second in command, Adolph Eichmann.    Mass shootings of Jews had proven to be inefficient and even SS soldiers found them had to carry out.  Gassing people with exhaust fumes in trucks was no more efficient.  So at the Wannsee meeting the final solution of using extermination camps was devised.

 

The two soldiers who undertook the mission to kill Heydrich were Josef Gabcik, a Slovak, and Jan Kubis, a Czech. 

The mission itself is not supported by all of those in the Czech resistance movement, who knew that, successful or not, there would be massive retribution visited on their people.   But the mission was authorized by the Czech Government in exile in London and by the US and British Governments via the Special Operation Executive.

Kenneth Branagh made a film about Heydrich and the Wannsee Conference, Conspiracy, in 2001, and back  in 1943 Fritz Lang filmed a Berthold Brecht script, Hangmen Also die! that ‘imagined’ the mission, but was not fact based.

Now we have Anthropoid (the actual code-name of the attempt), written and directed by the Brit Sean Ellis, who also took charge of the cinematography.   Cillian Murphy and Jamie Dornan play the assassins, supported by a host of European actors we may not have seen on screen before,  including Charlotte Le Bon and Anna Geislerova as their supposed and maybe, eventually, actual girlfriends,  and with our familiar Toby Jones as the local head of the Resistance. 

I suspect that many if not most of the people seeing this will already know the story, or at least about the fates of Heydrick,  Gabcik and Kubis,   but there is still a palpable tension right from the start.   Who do you trust in a place riddled with collaborators, traitors – or potential traitors?    The music helps engender and maintain this tension.   The film is shot in a grainy Super 16 mm format, and often in muted colours,  making Prague often look drab in daylight and beautiful in misty mornings and evenings.   The cast of actors mainly unknown in Anglophone countries adds to the feel of authenticity. 

The two leads are convincing, showing the fear that always underlies true courage.   ‘Being brave is not being fearless’ my father told me once.  He was a British paratrooper fighting at the Battle of Arnhem and knew that bravery is about being afraid of something and doing it anyway.    I thought the film was careful not to make it’s heroes ‘Heroes’, not its heroines ‘Heroines.’   They were ordinary people in extra-ordinary situations who did extra-ordinary things with great courage.    The level of acting throughout the movie is consistently high.

The assassination attempt is well re-constructed, but it is not the climax of the film.   After the attack the two assassins joined seven other men who had parachuted in on difference SOE missions as they took refuge in the crypt of Orthodox Church of Saint Charles Borromeu in Prague, later called  St Cyril and Methodius Cathedral.     Their location was betrayed and seven hundred SS guards attacked them.   The ensuing battle is the real climax.

And afterwards?    The Biblical injunction ‘an eye for an eye’ is not just a license for retaliation.  It is a limit to the exact scale of retaliation.  Only an eye for an eye, no more.   Of course this was not a limitation the Nazis respected.     A false lead took them to the village of Lidice,  outside Prague, and it was  destroyed.   All of its 1500 inhabitants were killed, it buildings razed and bulldozed, its orchards burnt and its fields salted.

Many more people died in Prague.

This raises the question  referred to earlier; ‘was this assassination justified, knowing that there would be terrible repercussions?’     The people who would die in retaliation had no choice, no vote in the decision making.   The German’s rule in the region would not become lighter, nor its methods more humane.  In fact the opposite.    It is true, however, that this action, showing the determination of the Czech people, and its aftermath, the brutality of their oppressors, did bring the Allied powers to formally support the Czechs and Slovaks in their struggle. 

Of course wars are declared without a referendum, and sometimes without united civilian support.   No one voted to destroy Dresden, Hiroshima or Nagasaki.   And whether or not we agree with those actions  we may have to accept that in an evil situation – and war is always an evil situation – there are no ‘pure’ options.  If there are only two evils available then the lesser is the one to choose.  It helps if we know what it is.  But sometimes we can only make our best guess and somehow learn to live with the consequences.    

 

Even the ethics of assassination are complex.  We may remember that during the war Dietrich Bonheoffer, a leading German Protestant Minister and theologian,  came to the conclusion that it was necessary to assassinate Hitler to  avoid a greater evil, and joined the Stauffenburg conspiracy.   He was hanged on Hitler’s direct orders in April 1944.    

The greater tragedy of course is that Heydrich’s extermination plans were already in place.  In the following fourteen months after this attack over two millions Jews and nearly fifty thousand Romanies were killed in in the camps at Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka set up by him.  

I recommend this though-provoking film. 

Deepwater Horizon.

Deepwater Horizon  balances its technical proficiency and explosive power with a genuine concern for the dignity of the real people who survived, and those who did not survive,  this terrible and avoidable tragedy.   

In April 2010 the semi-submersible exploratory drilling rig Deepwater Horizon,  rented by BP and operating 40 miles off the Louisiana coast, caught fire.   There were 126 people onboard.   During the next few hours Eleven people died.  Many were seriously injured.  In the weeks – months- that followed millions of gallons of crude oil poured into the Gulf of Mexico, a major ecological and community disaster.    Years of litigation followed, with BP eventually paying out over $13 billion to individuals, businesses and the State.    In November 2012 BP pleaded guilty to 11 counts of manslaughter,  two misdemeanors, and a felony count of lying to Congress.    In 2014 U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier ruled BP was guilty of gross negligence and willful misconduct and had acted with “conscious disregard of known risks.” His ruling stated that BP "employees took risks that led to the largest environmental disaster in U.S. history,” that the company was “reckless,” and determined that several crucial BP decisions were “primarily driven by a desire to save time and money, rather than ensuring that the well was secure.”

Many of the compensation agreement made by BP included gagging clauses and  so the script for this movie had to be largely put together by Matthew Carnham and Matthew Sand  from the public record of legal hearings and a major New York Times article written by David Rohle and Stephanie Saul, with every word run past battalions of lawyers paid by the film’s producers and by BP.   The producers also ran into difficulty finding anyone to provide the essential transport services they needed to film out at sea, or to lend them a rig to film on.  In the end they had to build their own rig.

If the film is not clear about the actual causes of the disaster it is because nobody really knows.    Something went badly wrong, allowing an explosive ‘gusher’ of oil and methane gas to rise up the Marine Riser  from the sea bed to the floating rig five kilometres above and then ignite when these hydrocarbons were sucked into the diesel generators onboard, causing a series of devastating explosions.  The rig sank the next day but the gusher burned for 87 days.   

It is clear however that undue pressure was put on the sub-contracted engineers by the BP Executives on the rig - Donald Vidrine and Robert Kaluza - to complete the drill even though the results of essential safety drills were ambiguous.    The work was behind schedule, and delay costs money.    Even before the explosion it was being called the Well from Hell.

It is not surprising therefor that the film only does what it can do.  This it does brilliantly, concentrating on the personal disaster and the responses of the men – and one woman – on board rather than examine the complex legal arguments.    When Mark Walhberg came on board (literally) as star and co-producer he took the part of Mike Williams, the Chief Electrical Technician Engineer on the rig.    Kate Hudson plays William’s wife, Felicia, waking him on the morning he is due to leave for his weeks long shift on the rig.   There is a scene where their  young daughter shares what she is going to tell her class about ‘what my Daddy does’, which she says is ‘stopping the dinosaurs below the sea bed from escaping.’      This is a simple and effective metaphor for the dangerous operation conducted by the Deepwater Horizon.

From the start we know that we are heading towards a major disaster.    We may not know how it will happen, but the build up of tension is palpable, aided by Steve Jablonsky’s superb sound design.   He has scored many horror movies, and this is a different kind of horror movie.   The cinematographer, Enrique Chedick shot 28 Days Later, and 127 Hours,  so he knows about building tension and shooting in cramped circumstances.       We see many shots of the drill column  reaching from the rig to the concrete cap five kilometers below,   the cap meant to hold back the enormous pressure of the ‘dinosaurs’ pushing from below.    The column shudders, bolts pop, the concrete heaves and the pressure dials on the rig rise into the red zone.    On the rig another pressure battle is taking place between the engineers and the execs.    No one wants to make the decision to stop the drill, at a cost of millions of dollars.  And the readouts are ambiguous.   The one man on board who has the authority to hit the red button and stop the drill happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.   The courts, however,  decided that the pressure exerted by the company was criminal.   Do you notice how many times I have to use the word pressure’?  This film is all about pressure, and how systems and people respond to pressure.

I do wonder what film Paul Greengrass would have made.  He oversaw the reconstruction of the actual conversations on board Flight 93 as it flew towards it’s destruction in Pennsylvania on 9/11, and those in the flight control offices.   Of course he also made Captain Phillips. 

But Director Peter Ross has done good work here.   There is not time enough to  build the characters of the rig’s staff, even of those who died, but he does show how ordinary men and women respond to extreme circumstances, often with extreme courage, doing whatever they can to save the live of others even at the risk of – or cost of  - their own.   The ongoing explosions are well handled, and even though we have Mike Williams as our central heroic figure the other main players get their chances to shine.   He is joined by Kurt Russell as Jimmy Harrell, the Offshore Installation Manager for TransOcean, the firm that owned the rig.  He exudes the kind of rugged reliability that a man in charge of such an outfit needs to win the trust of the people in his care.   John Malkovitch as BP’s Vidrine maybe enjoys playing the villain too much. Gina Rodrigues is the woman who ‘steers’ the rig,  keeping it in place 5 kilometers above the drill site.   She has to be rescued by Williams at the end, panicking at the prospect of jumping into the burning sea, but is not otherwise a stereotyped screamer.    

Wahlberg does what he does and does it well, and I was pleased to see how that the film shows how after Mike Williams’ amazing composure and courage as he battled to save lives on the rig he collapsed in total shock soon after.   PTSD seems to have kicked in, and may never have left.    When asked if the film accurately shows the  destructive power of the blow-out  Williams himself has said that nothing ever could.    He has never set foot on a boat since that day.

As I was watching this movie I sometimes wondered about its morality.   Was it exploiting a recent tragedy?  Why wasn’t it clearly damning the executive decisions, driven by the ruthless greed that is the companies highest value?   

But in the end I decided that it was doing all it could.   It honours those who deserve honouring and damns those who do not, even if that can only be at the local level.    The BP execs who directly contributed to the disaster were on the rig themselves.   Their decisions put them in danger too.   They could have been among the 11 that died.   I think there are questions about the way the crew put up with a history of poor maintenance and equipment failure on the rig, but of course the real villains live much higher up the food chain, so high that they are virtually unreachable, unimpeachable.   None of them went to prison even after BP pleaded guilty to eleven manslaughter charges.  

We can call this ‘structural evil’ , when organizations themselves embody greed and do not care about the cost to others, even when it costs lives.    It would be so nice to think that this has nothing to do with ourselves, but it does.  And we are all part of it.     At the start of the film,  as the men of the new shift fly out to the rig,  we glimpse something of the enormous infrastructure the oil industry depends on even at such a local level.    The oil industry spends trillions looking for, refining and transporting oil.  And who pays for it all?   Who wants it to exist?  We do.