By weaving several fictional story lines around an event every well-infortmed person of that time remembers, a cross-section of that moment is suspended in time. Although it is fiction, it rings true and is highly authentic where it needs to be. It is quite true to the Israel of that day.
This approach succeeds where previous films about Eichmann have failed. When he has been portrayed by the likes of Ben Kingsley, Robert Duvall and Thomas Kretschmann, the story has gotten falsified by making Eichmann too interesting. In 1960, Eichmann was kidnapped in Buenos Aires by the Mossad, and put on trial in Israel as shown. People were mostly impressed with Eichmann's unimpressiveness. The leading account is Hannah Arendt's EICHMANN IN JERUSALEM. He came off as a plain, inarticulate, incongruously normal little man. The phrase, "banality of evil" came to stand for it. That phrase has been widely misunderstood as encapsulating some profound, counterinuitive insight about the Holocaust. It does not. It is merely an observation specific to Eichmann.
It has mostly been forgotten that the Mossad mission was intended to capture Eichmann and Dr. Josef Mengele together. But Mengele dropped out of sight, to surface later in Brazil. He was never brought to justice. He drowned accidentally off a gorgeous Brazilian beach while vacationing in 1979. Because he exhibited essential elements that Eichmann lacked--perversion of a privileged, cultured upbringing as well as science and medicine--he ought to have been the man on trial in the glass booth. Had that succeeded, we would have heard far less about "banality of evil" down through the years.
