Director: Frank Pierson
Starring: Kenneth Branagh, Stanley Tucci, Colin Firth
Year: 2001
Conspiracy was a TV movie, but it plays like theatre, and it hits as hard as an Oscar-worthy film. Think 12 Angry Men but with Nazis, a contained piece of drama that has the intensity of a real world life-or-death decision, and in Conspiracy‘s case, that’s exactly what was truly at stake. This is a film that weighs as heavily as Schindler’s List, and yet is spectacularly lesser known; I remedied that situation for myself, and I would advise you to do the same, because this is a movie worth long remembrance.
This is the true story of a meeting between top Nazi officials during the German invasion of Russia, when the Thousand Year Reich was facing its first stumbling block abroad in Stalin and its first major problem at home in its Jewish population. Hitler wanted Europe cleansed of impurities, which meant the Jews were to be evacuated, and yet moving that many people on that large a scale was simply impossible. And so a fix was proposed to this Jewish Question, which would become known as the Final Solution; murder them all, as quickly and cheaply as possible. This meeting decided that path, damning an entire empire as it tried to eliminate an entire people.
As close to true history as a film can get, Conspiracy follows the exact dictation of the famous Wannsee Conference in Berlin in 1942, where 15 high ranking Nazis decided to annihilate an ethnicity. Only one copy of the minutes of the meeting was found, and this movie brings it to frightening life with horrible accuracy. Some pieces are fictional, of course, but every effort was made to portray the men, their moods, and to convey the results of this meeting, until it feels so much more realistic than it does cinematic. Like a play set on a deadly stage, events unfold at one table in one room, and it becomes sickening how passionately the deaths of so many are ordered, approved, and celebrated. Branagh, Tucci, Firth, Brendan Coyle, Ian McNeice, Tom Hiddleston, so many others you will recognize from so many other projects; this is a movie riddled with talent, executed with blunt purpose, and designed to haunt you with the truth of this fateful, awful day.
My rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆