Plan A (Paz and Paz)
Israeli brothers, Yoav and Doron Paz, dramatize the historical events surrounding a plot to poison Nuremberg, Germany’s water supply at the end of World War II. Max (August Diehl) provides the lens through which we see this conspiracy unfold. Our introduction to him is pathetic. His neighbor, who notified the Nazi authorities of his family’s Jewish heritage at the beginning of the war, has usurped his home. The same neighbor then beats and threatens to kill Max for inquiring, “Why did you give us away?” It’s a sad scene that Max’s disheveled and miserable appearance really nails home.
Max, homeless and alone, makes friends with another hapless survivor, Avraham (Yehuda Almagor). Avraham is a bit character, but he is essential to the story because he provides the necessary impetus Max needs to push through his tribulations. Avraham serendipitously stumbles upon a unit of the Jewish Brigade, a division of the British Army, led by Abba Kovner (Isahia Golan). They take the two wanderers in and offer them passage to Palestine, the ultimate destination for any Jewish person that wants to escape the specter of The Final Solution which looms over Germany at the close of the conflict.
Avraham eagerly embraces the opportunity to find refuge, but Max still clings to the hope that his family survived the Nazi genocide and will not leave without being sure of their fate. There is a heartbreaking scene at this point of the movie that literally illustrates the insult to injury that Jewish families endured after the war ended: Many were given no clues by the German government as to what happened to their family members. The film makes it easy for the viewer to sympathize with the Jewish players in the movie with scenes like this.
The exacerbated heartbreak of missing loved ones ferments into bitterness for some German Jews and the pace of the film picks up here to show that. Max discovers a rogue component of the Jewish Brigade that operates as a renegade squad that serves up a kosher brand of vigilante just to complicit German citizens and soldiers that escaped formal prosecution at the end of the war and to those who are likely to dodge it later. Max ingratiates himself and becomes an honorary member.
Subsequent scenes, where “guilty” parties get strangled, shot, or worse are reminiscent of Inglorious Basterds (2009), but without any of the humor and slightly less gore. Max doesn’t directly participate in any of the killings, but he does provide a great deal of consultation to the squad as it vets its victims which is somewhat ironic considering the circumstances of the mission that he’s on. And while the method of revenge is ethically questionable, the squad does utilize a code to mitigate “wrongful” executions so, there’s that.
Another bitter contingent, Nakam, choses a more sophisticated, but no less horrific, method of revenge. Nakam, led by Anna (Sylvia Hoeks), devises a plan to infiltrate the workforce of a water treatment facility that is being rebuilt to disseminate poison to the millions of Germans that supported and/or enabled Hitler. However, the film reveals that their success will most likely divest the Jewish people from the refuge of Palestine which people like Avraham are so looking forward to, The Jewish Brigade chose the subtle approach to vengeance for this very reason. And it is for this very reason that the Jewish Brigade decides to plant Max within Nakam to sabotage their mission.
This leads us to the real question of ethics the movie is trying to answer: What should revenge look like? Does it look like the vigilante death squad that sprouts out of the Jewish Brigade. Or, does it look like the domestic terror cell, Nakam? Max, having dabbled in the dealings of both comes to his own conclusion. I won’t spoil where he lands, but if you know your geo-political history you can probably figure it out though.
To be honest the resolution of Plan A is far less important than the questions it asks. How do respond to hate? How do we look past a trespass? What would YOU do if you were in Max’s shoes? The most interesting pieces of irony of this whole escapade are Max passing as a native German while working in the water treatment plant and being commissioned to save the German people from a poisoning. It highlights the absurd and arbitrary nature of ethnic hate. With that being said, the film does fall short of providing the pathos we might get from a movie like Schindler’s List (1993). But, as the last few victims of the Holocaust begin to leave us for good, movies like Plan A keep their stories alive.
