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Steven Spielberg's political thriller MUNICH is an enigma. It's one of the least commercial movies ever made by the cinema's most commercially successful filmmaker. Speculation was that the story of the '72 Munich Olympic massacre and its aftermath was bound to be pro-Israel, and that it would, ultimately, accentuate the positive. Neither is the case. MUNICH has no heroes or villains. It sees the long aftermath of the birth of Israel as a descent into a hopeless cycle of violence and it has no silver lining of the kind that left audiences tearfully smiling when they exited Schindler's List or Saving Private Ryan. Based on a fictional version of the Munich events which has been freely adapted by co-writers Eric Roth and playwright Tony Kushner, it only claims to be "inspired by real events." Still it opens with a docudrama account, interspersed with authentic TV news footage, of the Black September terrorist kidnapping of eleven Israeli athletes and coaches at the Munich Olympic Village, and ends with their murders hours later at the Munich airport. In between, it tells the imagined story of a commando team recruited by the highest level of Golda Meir's government, cut loose from any official connection with the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad, and charged with finding and assassinating the ringleaders of the massacre. The leader is Meir’s former bodyguard Avner Kaufman (Eric Bana), whose team includes the usual specialists. When she gives him his mission, Meir, a personal hero of Spielberg's, sets the movie’s central theme when she tells Kaufman that "every civilization finds it necessary to negotiate compromises with its own values." As they embark on their mission, MUNICH becomes both a thriller and a gangster saga, with its "family" bound in blood, and steadily losing sight of its moral compass. As they carry out their bloody task, these men will gradually become the thing they hate. Along the way, having started out with our full sympathy, they gradually lose it, even as the flashbacks to the massacre become more vivid and horrifying. Spielberg is also careful (too careful, his critics have charged) to portray the team's Arab and Palestinian victims as human beings, with families and ideals and a sense of their own heritage. MUNICH is, in the end, a morality tale, and its grim lesson on the futility of violence has reinvigorated a debate roiling within the Jewish world on standing up to antisemitism and the implications of calling ourselves a righteous people. Will MUNICH make any money? Probably not, but I’m guessing that Steven Spielberg doesn’t care. He put over $100 million and all his skill and craft into a movie that makes an unpopular point. Money-maker or not, it's the movie his conscience told him to make. I think that, at this point in his fabled career, that's reward enough.
Steve Taylor is a retired attorney and magistrate who is a member of the Southeastern Film Critics Association. His criticism may also be heard each Friday on WHQR-FM (91.3) |
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Munich a film by Steven Spielberg |
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Carolina Civic Voice Spring 2006 Vol. 6, No 1 |