PAYBACK IS A BITCH
Spielberg's exciting 'Munich' doesn't fully resolve the moral issues of revenge
By Andy Klein
Hoo boy! Steven Spielberg wants us to love him: In his "serious" movies, no less than in his "entertainments," he has generally picked subjects that were unlikely to be controversial. Who could be offended by, say, Saving Private Ryan or Amistad? Nazis? Slavery buffs? (This doesn't automatically exclude moral ambiguities, the best case in point being Schindler's List.)
Munich - about a secret Israeli hit squad set up to seek revenge for the kidnapping and killing of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics - is another thing entirely. It's easy to imagine Likud denouncing it for expressing doubt about the righteousness of the mission and Palestinian support groups denouncing it as a defense of outrageous government thuggery.
The film opens with a restaging of the Munich events, intercut with TV news coverage from the time. After all the hostages die in a bungled rescue attempt, then-Prime Minister Golda Meir decides there's gonna be no more Mr. Nice Guy. She authorizes the secret operation, putting in charge Avner (Eric Bana), one of her former bodyguards. He leads a team including four others (Daniel Craig, Ciaran Hinds, Mathieu Kassovitz, Hanns Zischler), who are to assassinate 11 men purportedly connected to the attack.
With all official connection to the Israeli government severed, the five - all of them inexperienced at this sort of work - go very deeply undercover. They hop around Europe, guided by info from Louis (Mathieu Amalric) and his father (Michael Lonsdale), non-ideological intelligence freelancers. They go from city to city, taking out target after target, each with a different method and each with its own suspenseful screwups.
The film focuses on Avner's increasing doubts about the mission, which are generally dismissed by the team's most determined (or most arrogant and stupid, depending on your politics) member (Craig). While Avner is never sure about the morality of what he's doing, he is sure that the mission is destroying his sanity and any chance of ever returning to a normal life with his wife and baby girl.
Spielberg uses a rougher style than is his custom, with a fair amount of jerky, faux documentary camerawork. Each episode is tense and well-constructed, but, at two hours and forty-five minutes, the film suffers from what might be called Kong syndrome: Even if all the parts are terrific, might the whole not have been better with fewer of them?
Spielberg's serious films are always marred by at least one scene where you groan and wonder if he's taken leave of his senses, most famously Oskar Schindler's big speech near the end of Schindler's List. Here, the "Oh, no!" moment involves intercutting lovemaking with scenes of violence: It's one of the hoariest, most irritating clichés in the book, and it never fails to fail.
It's important to note that, despite the grim subject matter, Munich is filled with genuinely funny dialogue. Hey: five Jewish guys stuck in hotel rooms for days at a time? What do you expect?
Bana - who in Spielberg's hands suddenly reveals a resemblance to Tom Cruise - adds another fine performance to his work in Chopper, Troy, and The Hulk. The rest of the cast is universally good, but veteran French actor Michael (sometimes Michel) Lonsdale simply walks away with his few moments as the voice of experience.
A lot of the story feels so, well, filmlike, that you begin to wonder how much of it can be true. Cursory research suggests that liberties have been taken; at the same time, the single most Hollywood, we-need-to-stick-in-a-scene-with-a-babe bit turns out to be straight from the nonfictional source material (whose own veracity, however, can be questioned).
The moral issues here are all too applicable to 21st-century America. Did Golda Meir really say "What happened in Munich changes everything"? If not, it's too familiar a phrasing for the parallels to be unintentional.
Published: 12/22/2005
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