Eat, Drink, Kill
A Review of HBO’s Conspiracy.

By Victorino Matus, an associate editor at The Weekly Standard.
May 19-20, 2001

hen Stanley Tucci told Variety that HBO has got "the biggest b***s in the business," he was right. Not just because

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the network was willing to spend millions on a movie that lacks explosive action, computer-animated effects, and nudity, but also because it planned on redefining evil on film.

The movie is Conspiracy (debuting May 19), starring Stanley Tucci and Shakespearean thespian Kenneth Branagh. Most of the film takes place in a meeting room inside an opulent villa. Fifteen men laze about, drink fine French wine, smoke cigars and cigarettes, eat roasted pork loins, herring on toast with just a dollop of sour cream, and discuss bureaucratic problems, legal intricacies, and chains of command. There's many a headache and eye rolling. A few wisecracks here and there. But in the end, they break out the champagne and find the solution to their problem: By coordinating their efforts, the remaining 11 million European Jews will be "evacuated" to camps and exterminated.

The meeting that is being chronicled is the notorious Wannsee Conference of 1942. The fifteen men assembled represent some of the highest-ranking department heads of the Third Reich. And their appearance and demeanor at this meeting defies most of our notions of villainy, at least as we are used to seeing villainy portrayed on screen. This isn't Alan Rickman of Die Hard. Not even Hannibal Lecter. Tucci plays Lieutenant Colonel Adolf Eichmann of the SS Jewish Affairs Office — formerly a gasoline salesman. Indeed, his boss Heinrich Himmler was a chicken farmer. And Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop used to sell champagne. It is Hannah Arendt's Banality of Evil.

Portraits of mass murderers are so indelibly etched in our brains as something out of the Legion of Doom — a collection of the most gruesome looking and intimidating figures one can conjure up (or as Tucci phrased it in an interview, "mustache-twirling" bad guys). And imagining the look of fifteen men who helped engineer the deaths of six million Jews is mind-boggling. But in fact, the collection of men who planned to solve the "Jewish storage problem" was just that: men. This is something director Frank Pierson is determined to drive home. At no time in the meeting room is the camera above or below eye level, creating the sense that you are there too, complicit in some unspoken way.

As Eichmann, Tucci performs convincingly, despite his dark Italian looks — perhaps because his character is the one with whom we are most familiar from Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem and from recently released transcripts of his interrogation by Israeli police. The lieutenant colonel was a bureaucrat to the extreme, willing to follow orders though fully cognizant of the consequences, and carrying out his duties with the soulless efficiency of the HAL 9000. Kenneth Branagh, on the other hand, had less to work with. The Academy Award nominee for Hamlet plays Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Reich Main Security Office, second only to Himmler. History knows him only as "The Hangman" and "of diabolical cast." Branagh confesses it was enormously difficult to portray such a man, without any sense of guilt, conscience, or humanity. (Branagh also mentions he'll be more than happy never to don the SS uniform again.) Still, the actor delivers a truly terrifying performance, his friendly smile betrayed by his cold blue eyes.

Though it is explained at the outset that the movie is based on the transcripts of the Wannsee Conference, the script by Loring Mandel follows the actual minutes quite accurately. The discussions of how to handle Germans married to Jews, sterilization of men, women, and children, and, ultimately, the logistics of gas chambers, are not to be believed — and wouldn't be, had all the records been destroyed (of 30 copies made, only one survived, found in the Foreign Ministry in 1947). Of course, in the six months preceding Wannsee, Jews were already being slaughtered in the occupied territories — just not in an orderly fashion. Hence, the fifteen participants met to simply speed up the decision-making process, formalizing what was already understood: That emigration was no longer an option; the liquidation of European Jewry would now become policy.

With any movie, there is a tendency to find sympathy with at least one character. In Conspiracy, the effort to do so is futile. At times, you are led to think that one of the participants is squeamish about the Final Solution — judging by his grimace or his shifting eyes, as is the case with Dr. Wilhelm Stuckart, co-drafter of the infamous Nuremberg Laws. Stuckart (played by Colin Firth) is appalled by Heydrich and Eichmann's hijacking of the meeting, whereupon they decide for all who counts as a Jew, as a half-Jew, and on methods of "evacuation." Yet Stuckart's uneasiness derives not from the act of genocide, but from the apparent flouting of the law, a law he had worked so hard to create. Stuckart quickly reaffirms his anti-Semitic credentials by insisting that Jews must not be underestimated, and that their cleverness must be reckoned with.

Another participant is Erich Neumann (Jonathan Coy), one of Hermann Göring's underlings, who also expresses a concern about the planned extermination of the Jews — why, where will we get most of our slave labor? And the same can be said of the department heads of the newly conquered Eastern territories, who resent having to be the collection centers for all the Jews, including Jews from Germany. Of all the men who exhibit signs of unease during the hour and a half meeting, only Friedrich Kritzinger (David Threlfall) of the Reich chancellory ever expresses remorse for the Holocaust — naturally, after the war is over.

Conspiracy defies the conventional drama. There isn't a single soul to root for, no happy ending, not even a sense of vindication — many of the participants, including the detestable party hack Gerhard Klopfer (Ian McNeice), evade capture or imprisonment. The viewer is left helpless and empty, having sat through one of the most notorious meetings in history, a gathering of men who ate, drank, then agreed to commit mass murder. A gathering of evil redefined.