Mark Reviews Movies: INCITEMENT

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Review by Mark Dujsik | March 12, 2020

On the night of November 4, 1995, shortly after speaking at a rally for peace in Tel Aviv, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was shot twice. He died at a local hospital soon after. The assassination occurred just over a month after the signing of the second Oslo Accord, a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization. Rabin was key to the agreement's success, and since his murder, his political opponents have more or less shredded the most vital aspects of that treaty.

All of this is necessary to explain, perhaps, because the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict has de-evolved since those years, less than three decades ago, when the prospect of actual peace seemed possible. We have a different understanding of that conflict now, and one of the many virtues of Incitement, a dramatization of the life of Rabin's assassin in the years leading up to that murder, is how it uses this story to explain how the conflict went from possible peace to its current state.

It's also vital to explain the background of what happens at the end of the film because history has a strange national bias. Almost from the start of this story, people in Israel undoubtedly will know about Rabin's fate and that the film's central subject is the man who murdered him. Outside of the country and the region, though, it's more unlikely that audiences will have heard of or remember Rabin and the Oslo Accords. It's almost certain that they won't realize the character they're watching, as he becomes increasingly enraged by Rabin's political moves and begins to find a religious rationale for the man's death, is an inevitable assassin. The filmmakers assume the audience knows this information, so it's important to explain it.

Within the context of this film, there's something sadly ironic to that tendency to isolate history to a certain country or region. The whole film is a strong denouncement of nationalism, which this trend of historical education and knowledge reflects. We are now living amidst a worldwide wave of right-wing nationalist sentiments, such as the ones espoused by this assassin and the people whose politics directly or unknowingly provide him with a justification in his own mind to commit murder.

They say that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. The same goes, though, for those who were never taught history. How much could we have learned and maybe avoided if this story wasn't just vital history within Israel? How much about that story has the country forgotten or ignored?

Such are the unanswerable questions presented by co-writer/director Yaron Zilberman's film, a terrifyingly intimate study of Yigal Amir, the man who murdered Rabin because he disagreed with the prime minister's politics and who, to this day, has never expressed any remorse or regret for his crimes. The concept of following Amir—played by Yehuda Nahari with, at first, an eerily easy charm that gradually transforms into a fanatical sense of self-importance—is a thorny one, but the screenplay by Ron Leshem, Zilberman, and Yair Hizmi is deft in the way it evades any simple explanation for the man's transformation into a zealot and a murderer.

There is no single event, moment, or idea that arrives at Amir's feet to cause a sudden transformation. There is no one person or group that radicalizes him. Watching as this life of a military veteran and a promising law student descends into murderous certainty, we're taken aback by how many of the characteristics of this killer were present from the start, because such things about a person really cannot be identified until after the fact (That's why it's so important to know what this man will do as we watch him).

We see Amir living a mostly privileged life. When the first Oslo Accords are announced, he is mostly quiet, although clearly skeptical of the notion of peace. Soon after, an American-Israeli man murders 29 people at a mosque in the West Bank, and Amir's allegiance becomes clearer. He attends the murderer's funeral and gradually starts speaking about him in admiring tones.

More about his situation is revealed. His military friends talk with pride about Amir was the "executioner." His mother (played by Anat Ravnitzki), a teacher, expresses dismay at Rabin's actions and celebrates that her son's name prophesizes him as a "savior." Amir's father (played by Amitai Yaish) holds hope, even as there are retaliations for the mosque massacre, that peace might be a possibility. The parents aren't aware of their son's mounting radicalization, but when the father begins to suspect that his son might do something violent, he tries to set Amir straight.

Much of the portrayal of Amir focuses on his overblown sense of self-worth, such as how he expects that Nava (Daniella Kertesz), a classmate, will marry him, because he is owed that simply for being himself. When she expresses doubt, Amir immediately turns on her, dubbing her, her family, and her entire ethnicity as close to traitors.

The question of treason against, not only the state, but also the very concept of a Jewish state is key among Amir's defenses for his hatred of Rabin. He seeks out multiple rabbis, many of whom have spoken out against Rabin in terms that sound close to threats, looking for a religious justification for the prime minister's death. When they don't take it that far, Amir begins making the case on his own, parsing the Torah for language to rationalize a "death sentence."

The calls from Rabin's political opponents, including Benjamin Netanyahu, only harden Amir's resolve. Zilberman, who shoots the entire film in the boxy aspect ratio of television of the period, intercuts actual archival footage of a rally, where Netanyahu riles up a crowd, including the film's version of Amir, and ignores their chants crying for Rabin's death. The combination of reality and dramatization is seamless and a horrifying reminder that, while the film is inherently fictionalized, its foundation is the truth.

To be clear, the film does point fingers at and place some blame upon people other than Amir—but only those who deserve it and only to the extent which they deserve it. The central point of Incitement, though, isn't to blame or to simplify. It's to portray, with a clear-eyed perspective and a dreadful sense of claustrophobia, how a seemingly ordinary person reveals himself to be a cold-blooded, fanatical killer—all the while still thinking of himself as perfectly ordinary.

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