Inside a Conspiracy

It seems a random movie to have heard buzz about, but more than one of my friends had mentioned hearing good things about Conspiracy. It was made for HBO in 2001, starred Kenneth Branagh, Stanley Tucci, and Colin Firth, and was a roughly real time account of the meeting in which a group of high-ranking Nazi officials discussed the "final solution" program to eliminate Jewish people from Europe. I decided to check it out for myself.

As you'd probably expect from the names of those actors, the performances in the movie are top notch. Branagh in particular is strong as an oozing, loathsome figure that discusses mass murder as casually as dinner, and orders everyone around in an oily way that gets under your skin. Firth ends up playing perhaps the closest thing this film has to a "good guy," who tries to take issue with the legality of the proposal and gets roundly shouted down.

In historical fact, a transcript was taken of the actual meeting depicted in this film. All copies were supposed to have been destroyed, but one survived to be the grounds for much study and the basis of the script. I have no idea how faithfully this movie script stays to the actual transcript, but watching the film made me suspect that it is probably quite close to true.

I base this on the fact that the movie isn't really all that successful as a piece of drama. This is partly due to a knowledge of history; we all know exactly what these German leaders would go on to enact, so there's no real tension to be had in the movie. But neither does the movie really bring any dramatic angle to it. The only real perspective being offered here is, "man, weren't these some evil sons of bitches?" And yes, we all knew that. There's no revelation. There's no real range of emotion at play here.

But the film does engender one emotion again and again: disgust. Repeatedly, these skilled actors deliver horrific lines of dialogue with chilling off-handedness. So even though the film really has only this one statement to make, it does it quite effectively. Overall, the movie rates a B- from me. If you have any interest in World War II history, it's a movie you might want to check out.