Munich

Left to right: Steve (DANIEL CRAIG), Avner (ERIC BANA), Hans (HANNS ZISCHLER), Robert
(MATHIEU KASSOVITZ) and Carl (CIARAN HINDS) in a scene from STEVEN SPIELBERG’S “Munich.”
Photo Credit: Karen Ballard. Copyright: © 2005 Universal Studios. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Steven Spielberg’s “Munich” is “inspired by real events,” as the title card reads at the beginning. Several athletes gather near the temporary quarters between the beer gardens and the olympic stadium. Some men looking rather Middle Eastern (read: suspicious) attempt to get over the gate. An American group of athletes sees them and assumes they’re trying to get to the beer gardens. So, they help them jump the fence. The eerie haze of dense fog implies something bad is about to happen. Not more than a moment later, the Middle Eastern fellows abruptly remove their tracksuits and unsheath firearms from their duffle bags. On the one hand, the scene composition here is excellent. On the other hand, it’s fairly contrived and predictable. Yet, after all, it’s probably known by most, if not all, audience members that this film is about the acts of terrorism during the 1972 Munich Olympics.

The terrorists break into the hotel and move quickly to acquire their targets—eleven Israeli athletes. In the news segments that follow, including a rather eerie recording of the late Peter Jennings, we’re informed first that the hostages are alive, then that there were eleven as opposed to the nine originally reported to have been abducted from their hostel, and finally that, upon arrival at the airport, all the hostages have been killed and the terrorists gunned down by German police.

Spielberg therefore cuts right to the chase about his message, that violence begets violence and in the end no one wins. Then for the next two hours and forty-five minutes, he repeats that message—over and over. This is not to say that “Munich” is a bad film. On the contrary, it contains numerous elements that one might find fascinating. However, I think it may play best to a student of film familiar with Spielberg’s apparent favorite, François Truffaut (whom Spielberg gave a cameo as the scientist in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”).

Avner (Eric Bana) is a Mossad agent recruited to assassinate key members of the Palestinian fedeyeen responsible for organizing the attacks. In a meeting with two generals, a Mossad chief (Geoffrey Rush as Ephraim), and the Israeli prime minister Golda Meir (Lynn Cohen), who notes prior to his recruitment, “Every civilization finds it necessary to negotiate compromises of its own values.”

Avner is put in charge of a team consisting of four specalists: A getaway driver, Steve (Daniel Craig); Robert (Mattheiu Kassovitz), a toymaker thrust rather abruptly into bomb-making; Hans (Hanns Zichler) and Carl (Ciarán Hinds, in a stand-out performance). They find a contact in Germany, Louis (Mathieu Amalric), who says he works for his Papa (Michael Lonsdale). A price of $20,000 per lead is offered for the whereabouts of the 11 men Avner and his crew are hired to take out. 11 targets for 11 dead hostages.

At the top of Avner’s list is Black September’s architect of the Munich incident, Ali Hassan Salameh (Mehdi Nebbou). Louis informs him that Salameh is the hardest to catch, and instead feeds him a series of other names. Louis is very dodgy about his connections, and this is Spielberg’s way of informing us, rather clearly, that Louis is not to be trusted entirely. There is a lingering sense that a sort of intelligence love-triangle exists between Louis’ family (as Papa says to Avner in a later scene, “We are tragic men–butchers hands, gentle souls.”), the PLO and the CIA.

The team has various targets in different cities. It’s interesting to note that Spielberg uses each assassination as an opportunity to show the targets had lives, family, children… but it’s done so in a manner that you can see every moral quandary coming a mile away. The first is not so obvious, as the target comes home he’s bringing more than one person’s share of groceries. In the second assassination, it’s far more evident. The moment Robert, posing as a reporter, sees the daughter playing piano, you anticipate a very specific interruption in their plan. As if that weren’t enough, Spielberg lays it on thick with the close-up of Robert’s face shifting away from a smile.

Spielberg likes to use children as a catalyst for emotional catharses in his films, but here he only begins to explore the consequences of violence on the children caught in the crossfire. Unfortunately, he doesn’t see it through. I think, in a sense, he exploits children for emotional effect but not since 1987’s “Empire of the Sun” has he really sat down and tried to see the world through the mind of a child for its own sake, rather than his.

At this point, the Mossad agents begin to debate their methods. Guns or bombs? One method is less likely to cause collateral damage, the other is less likely to leave the target alive. There’s even a whole discussion about it, but there didn’t have to be. I made the question obvious in one sentence, Spielberg spends five or six minutes of screen time restating the obvious. That’s not to say it’s entirely worthless. The numerous dialogues throughout the film are incredibly well-written, but they don’t tell us anything about the characters or their moral conundrums that isn’t already obvious from the visuals. Consider “Spartan” in which the visuals give us one layer of information about events, and the dialogue, which Roger Ebert perfectly described as being “at right angles to the action,” provides another.

There’s been much discussion regarding the observation by some critics that the film seems to sympathize with the terrorists. That isn’t the case. In fact, the film’s problem is that… while it sympathizes with the children, it doesn’t show us any aspect of the world from their point of view. We don’t know what attachments the little girl has to feel one way or another about them. Another dispatched target’s son is dealt with in entirely the same fashion. A young boy patrolling a compound is killed and we can’t feel anything about him one way or the other because, again, we have no frame of reference for valuing his loss in the story.

Whether you feel sympathy for the terrorists or for the Mossad agents is entirely up to you, but I did not feel sympathy for either. Rather, I was preoccupied enjoying the elaborate setups and, dare I say, intrigued by the various methods of assassination devised by Robert, and the ways in which they fail. One bomb, consisting of entirely too much explosive force, wipes out an entire hotel floor. The explosion sound arrives with such force that you feel, sitting in the audience, that you’ve felt a real aftershock. I think I would be lying if I didn’t acknowledge that we, as human beings, are captivated, even fascinated, by the mechanism of violence. Why else would we sit and watch, in stunned awe, the World Trade Centers collapsing, replayed ad nauseum, for about a year?

The film is not morally ambiguous. On the contrary, at the very end, after indulging in a bizarre, if hamfisted, juxtaposition of sex and violence, the camera sweeps across New York, where our intended protagonist, Avner, has taken up residence. The camera stops, so very ominously, on a shot with the World Trade Center towers in the left of the frame.

There are three layers of observation that arise in this moment… The first is the obvious, and elementary, conclusion that Spielberg must be telling us that the World Trade Center attacks were the direct result of our involvement with the Palestinians and Israelis.

The second–less obvious–is, as Meir’s earlier words suggest, governments make strange bedfellows, which come back to haunt them as the balance of power shifts, forcing alliances to shift with them. In our case, the CIA’s recruitment of Taliban and other terrorist organizations in the 1970’s, and our subsequent abandonment of funding their cause as we chose to pursue other avenues of interest, may have created some enemies.

The third, and final observation is that fighting violence with violence, fed by faulty intelligence, leads inexorably toward catastrophe. Again, as if we didn’t understand this point in all the scenes that preceded it, Spielberg inserts a spurious dialogue between Ephraim and a rather paranoid Avner. Worried that Mossad, having disavowed its relationship with him, is now trying to erase his existence, Avner exclaims they’ve killed men on the basis of “evidence no one has seen.”

As I said before, I’m not disparaging this film entirely… It has many superbly-filmed scenes (well, if you ignore Spielberg’s self-indulgent hard-on for diffuse glow, used in every single film of his since “A.I.”–the only film in which it really worked). Janusz Kaminski uses many shallow yet perspective-driven angles and handheld shots to heighten the tension. He also uses a film stock grain and color filtering that place you right in the beginning of the yellow- and brown-hued 70’s. While the score weeps melodramatically in places, the sound design is itself amazing. Not just in the explosion I mentioned before, but also a firefight in which you feel placed squarely in the center, guns discharging from all directions. The problem is that, after you’ve reveled in scenes such as a reflection shot in front of a cookware shop, as interesting as it was you’ll note you’ve seen it before a thousand times, used with precisely the same dramatic intent (which I will not reveal in this example as it would give away two key plot elements).

I think I like this film because I’m deeply analytical and I found myself steeped in the clandestine intrigue. Suffice it to say, however, I did fall asleep in the middle of “The Tailor of Panama.” This movie will appeal to students of Truffaut (note even Bana’s coif echoes Jean-Pierre Leaud in “Day for Night”), who might like to sit back and analyze each scene composition independent of one another, ignoring the lack of a truly progressive narrative (in both senses of the word). On the other end of the spectrum, the audience looking to be told a story that moves from point A, to point B, to point C, and so on, might be better served by “Memoirs of a Geisha”—that is, comparing equal lengths of film.

Munich • Dolby® Digital surround sound in select theatres • Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1 • Running Time: 161 minutes • MPAA Rating: R for strong graphic violence, some sexual content, nudity and language. • Distributed by Universal Pictures