Vita Activa: The Spirit of Hannah Arendt

The film works to rescue Arendt and her phrase “the banality of evil” from years of cliché, and largely succeeds.

Ms. Ushpiz is determined to rescue her subject from the banality of biography. The details of Arendt’s childhood, education, romantic life and professional activity are not ignored, but they nearly always illuminate her ideas.

A documentary about the alternately celebrated and reviled German-born philosopher who gave us the catchphrase “the banality of evil.”

This solid intellectual biography painstakingly follows the development of Arendt’s thought as she was forced to flee her privileged surroundings in German academia, where she was Martin Heidegger’s student and lover, to France and then the United States.

Insofar as Ushpiz succeeds in putting the most provocative, salient, and damning aspects of Arendt's work into a lucid context, she exposes the limits of her own approach.

Vita Activa: The Spirit of Hannah Arendt wrestles with its unwieldy subject with only sporadic success.

It reduces its historical moment to a series of vignettes and voiceovers, each evincing a curiously tone-deaf sentimentality.