Film Critics Club - Conspiracy
Conspiracy is one of my favourite movies of all time, which is why I suggested it for the critic's club. I'm going to briefly list some of the factors that, to my mind, turn it into a brilliant piece and hope that someone who watched it for the first time can get more of a discussion started.
First of all, the entire movie is absolutely chilling from start to finish, if only because it's so breathtakingly normal. This is a business meeting. Some participants are bored, others keen. Some are intelligent, make informed suggestions and have well-founded opinions, while others mainly make snide remarks or miss the point. That the meeting is about the organized extermination of an ethnic group would barely be noticed by a casual viewer.
Every single character is an unmitigated asshole. This is where the genius of the movie really comes through, because the characters (mainly dr Stuckart, excellently played by the consistently great Colin Firth) who are not quite as assholish as all the rest come off smelling pretty sweet. This is a movie where a character who wants to sterilize every Jew, hates them because they are smart, and wants to use a legal framework to oppress them comes off as sympathetic, because his opponents want to kill them, hate them because they're subhuman scum and don't give rabbitshit about the law. Klopfer, who instead of making eloquent arguments make insinuant cheapshots, is the stinker here, not the bright and passionate doctor Stuckart, even though the latter is still a fucking Nazi.
This, of course leads up to the greatest line of the movie, delivered by Firth, when Stuckart has finished his great speech about why he hates the Jews and why his hatred is superior to Klopfer's, ending with "pigs don't know how to hate".
Klopfer (menacingly): "I'll remember you."
Stuckart: "You should. I'm very well known."
Honestly, I could watch Firth play Stuckart for hours on end. The man is a diamond.
The little side-stories (Kritzinger's story about the man who hated his father, Eichmann's story about the rabbi who taught him 'Jewish') add depth to the film and further show the personalities of these people. Not a homogenous population, to quote the movie itself (although in the movie it's said about the Jews).
The very mundanity of the proceedings is the point. Eichmann is not portrayed as a bloodthirsty monster but as a good administrator and organizer. Since he managed to handle the Wannsee Conference so well, he got to handle the extermination of the Jews after Heydrich's death. Makes sense, right? You've got to have a good organizer for something like that. Absolutely chilling. This theme is endlessly repeated, such as when projected execution numbers are mentioned and Heydrich looks at the gathering and says "we can achieve this". You can almost make out the stars in his eyes when he dreams of such an efficient Jew-killing machine.
And that, I think, brings me to the very lesson learned by the film. A wise man (I'm too lazy to look it up now) once said that we can analyze the causes of the Holocaust for centuries, but in the end it happened because a lot of people killed a lot of people over a long time. I think we can go one level further. Ultimately, it happened because there were people at the top willing to look at it as just another project that should be executed as smoothly as possible. They put extermination of millions into the societal agenda, built the necessary bureaucratic and logistical machinery, and put it into operation. These aren't butchers; they're just normal people with very warped ideas.
