By RICK DENNIS
May 20 2006
Munich
Real Life Becomes Reel Life: In the wake of the murder of 11 Israeli athletes by Palestinian terrorists during the 1972 Olympics in Munich, Israeli prime minister Golda Meir assembled a covert hit squad to kill those responsible.
Director Steven Spielberg tracks the makeshift bunch of assassins as they stalk their targets, plant bombs and improvise hastily when things go wrong (which is often).
So What’s Your Point: In a carefully worded introduction to the DVD Spielberg makes it clear he is not attacking Israel. “It’s an attempt to look at policies that Israel shares with the rest of the world and to understand why a country feels its best defense against a certain kind of violence is counter violence.”
Deja View: There is an eerie resonance to dialogue like Meir (Lynn Cohen) telling her cabinet to “forget peace. We have to show them we’re strong” and the scene where mild-mannered assassin Carl (Ciaran Hinds) wonders aloud whether they are targeting the right guys.
Have you seen the evidence, he asks Avner (Eric Bana). Well, no, the team leader admits: “It was more like this is the story and I believe them. It’s a crisis, a war. You don’t always have to ….”
Carl: “Be thinking?”
Since this is the entertainment section and not the editorial page I’ll leave it up to readers to find modern day parallels.
Not Your Average Action Heroes: Spielberg makes the point that the hit squad are just ordinary men caught up in extraordinary circumstances and trying to reconcile their actions with their beliefs.
Bana (Troy) is especially impressive as a native-born Israeli (sabra) whose chief asset, according to Mossad agent Ephraim (a virtually unrecognizable Geoffrey Rush) is that “you’re not a sabra Charles Bronson. You’re a nice sabra with a dog and a baby on the way.”
In short, someone we can all relate to, which makes it all the more chilling to watch as Avner changes into a stone cold killer. (“Eventually you forget that in the beginning you hated doing it.”)
Academy But Not All the Way: Tony Kushner (HBO’s Angels in America) and Eric Roth (The Insider) adapted their thought-provoking, Oscar-nominated screenplay from Canadian writer George Jonas’ Vengeance: The True Story of an Israeli Counter-Terrorism Team.
The impeccably crafted pic also earned Oscar noms (but no awards) for Best Picture, Director, Editing and Original Score.
Bottom Line: As always Spielberg demonstrates his instinctive gift for inventive camerawork whether it’s “characters in a landscape” long shots or dazzling little two shots that flicker before the eyes and then are gone. The director is such a natural born storyteller that even in a movie built to tackle weighty moral and ethical issues there is still plenty of room for excitingly staged action and compelling human drama.
But be warned: the violence is brutal and unsparing in detail (note the 18A rating) and at 164 mins. it is definitely not for folks with moderate attention spans.
