Conspiracy

A film set in a villa outside Berlin. The date is 20 January 1942. There is a meeting at Wannsee. Fifteen men have been summoned. From ministries, the party, the security service and the army. Reinhard Heydrich chairs it. The villa is fine. On a lake, heated, and the hospitality is generous. Breakfast is served. Then they sit. From there the film takes place almost entirely at one table. There is a single item: what is to become of the Jews of Europe. Adolf Eichmann keeps the record. He has the numbers; country by country. Eleven million in total. The talk begins. Nobody says outright what is to be done. The words used are administrative: transport, evacuation, resettlement in the east. There are disagreements. Whose authority it is comes up. A lawyer raises a problem. The status of those the law counts as of mixed descent is unclear. A long argument follows. Measures, grandparents, marriages and exceptions. One man objects. The matter is not morality; he does not want to lose his department's authority. Another is worried. He says the soldiers will not be able to bear doing it. Heydrich answers: the method will change. What the narrative is interested in is not a crime but language: its idea is that the largest decision is taken in the form of a bureaucratic meeting, and that nobody says what they are talking about. The meeting lasts ninety minutes. So does the film. Brandy is drunk at the end. Music is played. The narrative shows violence nowhere. The text is real. A copy of the minutes was found after the war; the summary Eichmann prepared. The screenplay rests on that document. The production was made for a television channel. Kenneth Branagh and Stanley Tucci won awards. Frank Pierson directed. Kenneth Branagh, Stanley Tucci, Colin Firth, David Threlfall and Ian McNeice are in the cast. Who it is for: anyone who likes films that look at history through documents and single-location narrative. Who it is not for: anyone expecting incident; the film is almost entirely talk around a table and nothing is shown.