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(More customer reviews)"Conspiracy" is a perfect example of what happens when you pair a first-class cast with a first-rate script. You discover (or re-discover) that you do not need explosions, MTV-style editing or gimmickery to tell a good tale. This movie has all the budget and movement of a play, and is entirely dialogue-driven. But it works. Oh boy, does it work.
It is generally credited by historians that the infamous "Wansee Conference" of January 1942 was the real beginning of the Holocaust, i.e. of the Nazi Reich's all-out effort to exterminate the Jews of Europe. Prior to that, the Reich had contented itself with kicking them out of public life, taxing them into beggary, subjecting them to every form of humiliation, and essentially negating their status as human beings. When the war started, however, this policy, known as the 'emigration solution' (i.e., solve the "problem" of Jews living in the Reich by forcing them to emigate) became obsolete. The inefficient and corrupt Nazi bureaucracy was ill-suited even to handle the relatively small population of German Jews; and Nazi conquests, however, quickly increased the number of Jews in German-occupied territories to around eleven million. In other words, the very success of the German military effort in Europe had actually increased the size of the 'Jewish problem' a hundred times over. And since forcible emigration of 11 million people outside the German sphere of influence was not possible, something else had to be done to tackle this 'problem.' But what?
"Conspiracy" is about the bureacratic genesis of the Holocaust. It shows, in more or less real time, a fictionalized version of a real-life conference of 15 officials from the SS/SD, Gestapo, Railway Ministry, Interior Ministry, Government General, and Ministry of Justice, which was chaired by Reinhard Heydrich and organized by Adolf Eichmann. As a movie, however, it is really a study in the essential amorality of bureacracy and, to use a tired phrase, the banality of evil.
First off, the performances are superb. Kenneth Branagh gives probably the best turn of his career as Heydrich, a man who has absolutely no philosophy, ideology or morality other than a Terminator-like determination to carry out his orders, whatever they may entail, and to crush any obstacle in his path. You get the feeling he would be just as content to kill everyone with brown hair or webbed feet if that was his assignment, and if a few fellow Nazis happen to oppose him, then he would be just as happy to 'evacuate' them as any Jews. In fact, the description that Dr. Stuckart uses for the Jewish people in the film, "arrogant, self-obsessed....(but) sublimely clever, and intelligent as well" is actually a very good description of Heydrich. Branagh portrays him as a man with no human qualities himself, but excellent instincts about human nature. He knows when to condescend, when to bully, when to threaten, and when to appeal to self-interest, and he can shift from one to the other and back without a trace of discomfort.
Stanley Tucci, as Eichmann, is also very good. Like Heydrich shifts his personality around like a revolving door depending on what is required of him, but he is also a true-blue bureacrat in the worst sense of the word. To his superiors, especially Heydrich, he is utterly subservient; hovering about like a dog, laughing politely at jokes he doesn't find amusing, attempting with limited success to be 'one of the guys' when Nazi vulgarity rears its head. But to his subordinates he is a coldly arrogant bully, slapping one soldier in the face for throwing snowballs outside, telling another he will pay for a dish he broke by accident. In fact, he reminds me of a couple of schoolteachers I had growing up....and at least one boss.
Colin Firth is brilliant as Wilhelm Stuckart, the lawyer who drafted the Laws for the Protection of German Blood and Honor (better known as the Nuremburg Laws), and who is perfectly content to see all the Jews of Europe sterilized and shipped off
to be used as slave labor, possibly even exterminated wholsesale, so long as it is all done within a 'legal framework' (HIS legal framework). Eichmann characterizes the bureaucrat from hell, then Stuckart is certainly the lawyer from hell; a person who has no gods before the law, and simply cannot abide the idea of the whole crazy scheme being perpetrated without benefit of a legislative blessing. Eleven million murders? That's nothing. But without enacting a law first? Unthinkable!
Ian McNeice, as Stuckart's nemesis Dr. Klopfer, a corpulent Nazi Party bigwig with a disgustingly smug and vulgar way of handling himself. .... He's a raging anti-Semite who is all for killing the Jews, so long as the Party doesn't lose any administrative turf to the SS in the process. He has no respect whatever for the law despite being a lawyer himself (as is almost everyone in the room....go figure that one....); and unlike the brilliant but rather naive Stuckart, Klopfer has no illusions about rule of law in Nazi Germany. We have the power to do what we want, he says; we can always re-write the laws afterwards.
"Conspiracy" was written by Loring Mandel, who deserves special praise for penning a movie that is nothing but conversation but which is still very gripping. I'm surprised some people would quibble with his dramatic interpretation of what happened; how could you make an entertaining about what the actual conference was probably like -- fifteen Nazi lawyers drinking wine, eating canapes, and reading figures about mass deportations and what does or does not constitute a Jew? Mandel's script gets to the heart of the mentality behind the Holocaust, which was that despite being at war with the British Empire, the Soviet Union and the United States of America, despite being outnumbered six to one in manpower and 20 - 1 in industrial capacity, despite fighting on multiple fronts and lacking most of the natural resources necessary for war, and despite the unspoken consequences to themselves and their country's reputation if they lost the war and their 'secret' was exposed, the mentality of WWII Germany was still open to the idea of diverting massive resources into slaughtering defenseless civilians by the million. If that isn't the bureacratic blindness from hell, what isn't?
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