Hannah Arendt and the Brooklyn Dodgers

Has anyone ever done this before? May I be the first? Let us compare Hannah Arendt with - Jackie Robinson. Near contemporaries, I bet they knew absolutely nothing about one another. Each a subject of a recent biopic, I bet M. and I may be the only two people to see both. And yet - there are similarities, both between them and between the two movies, 42 and Hannah Arendt. Both suffered discrimination and even oppression, both stood up for their beliefs, both alienated many people by doing so, both exhibited bravery in the face of challenge and hatred. JR, however, did so in the popular arena of sports, with the backing of a brave and wise mentor and with the support of his people - he felt he was standing up for the entire black race in America. For Arendt, as we learn from the film, the playing field was quite different - a European refugee, a world-renowned scholar of political theory, she took on a journalistic assignment, covering the Eichmann trials for The New Yorker - as the film makes plain it was a risk for editor Shawn to hire an academic for such a prominent and time-sensitive assignment. Arendt insisted, in her reporting, to include a section on Jews who abetted the Holocaust by collaborating with the Nazis. Though it appears, at least from this movie, that her critique was accurate, many readers accused her of blaming the victim or worse. So the film is not about her standing up for Jews but about how her stubborn idealism made her a pariah - many of her closest friends turned their back on her. In that sense, HA is a pretty good film about a moment of social trauma in U.S. history that's now barely remembered. In fact, I'm surprised anyone could get backing to make a film about a German-American philosopher of totalitarianism. No chance this would knock Catching Fire off the top spot in weekend gross. That said, I wish it could have been a better film dramatically and cinema-graphically. Just like 42, HA is a kind of leaden - lots of very didactic conversations that are there to obviously make a point, and not enough drama or emotion. In fact, many key elements are left unexplored - would have liked to know a lot more about her relationship with that Nazi professor Heidegger. And would like to know more about what made her tick emotionally, not just intellectually - to see her actually wrestling with how she should, or should not, write about the collaborators, for example; or to see more of her loneliness after her estrangement from many close friends. One thing that HA does and that 42 did not do was use archival footage effectively - this movie integrated actual footage of the Eichmann trial very well into the contemporary narrative. This movie does preserve, in amber, a nearly forgotten chapter in the history of journalism and of Judaism.