Does an unvarnished truth exist? And, if so, does it intersect, even slightly, with what one might call good? Those questions are at the core of Margarethe von Trotta’s Hannah Arendt, a heady film that is only superficially a biopic of the famed political thinker, “Martin Heidegger’s favorite student” and one-time lover, the first woman hired to teach at Princeton. Arendt has opened in New York & Los Angeles, after having been nominated for & won a number of awards,  in Middle & Eastern Europe, including two German best actress nods for Barbara Sukowa as Arendt.

Although the film has flashbacks to Arendt’s days as a student in Marburg, von Trotta focuses on the few short years of Arendt’s career in America after the capture of Adolph Eichmann, whose trial she “covered” for The New Yorker, resulting in a series of articles published in book form as Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.  The drama of the film itself occurs not in capture of Eichmann, which happens in the first 30 seconds, nor in Arendt’s relationship with Heidegger, nor even in the trial itself – though this may well be the heart of the movie – but in the revulsion with which Arendt’s reporting is met by her closest friends at Princeton, in New York, and especially in Israel.

Arendt, who fled to Paris as the Nazis came to power, was briefly interned in a French concentration camp at Gurs near the Spanish border, from which she escaped and eventually made her way to the US. Alluded to but not represented in the film itself (which is more than can be said for much of her writing, her work with Karl Jaspers, her friendship with Walter Benjamin, her first marriage, or her work in Germany after the war), von Trotta presents Arendt as wanting to understand this ultimate evil by staring it in the eye. Her friends among the US exiles are wary of her trip to Jerusalem to report on the trial for a readership that cannot be expected to comprehend their experiences of horror, a sharp contrast to the almost boyish enthusiasm of New Yorker editor William Shawn (portrayed by Nicholas Woodeson doing everything he can to mimic Wallace Shawn, who might have been better cast to portray his father). Her husband thinks the trial itself is a travesty of justice. In Israel, her friends are frank about the political nature of the prosecution. Israel, she is told, needs myths.