Munich
The title of Steven Spielberg's fascinating "serious" epic seems at first a little colourless, to match the film's grim grey look and its sober refusal to deliver the pleasures of a revenge-themed action-thriller.
 |
But "Munich" refers primarily to the bloody Black September killing of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. It's not, however, a dramatisation of those events, though they figure hideously at its beginning, and in rather clumsy flashbacks throughout.
This anguished liberal meditation on ends and means, by a committed supporter of Israel, deals instead with Israel's response to Munich - with the small team of men given by Golda Meir (Lynn Cohen) an undercover mission of vengeance, intent on eye for eye and tooth for tooth.
They set out to kill, in a succession of European cities, 11 enemies nominated by senior Mossad operatives. Most of these targets weren't directly involved in the Munich atrocity. Some of the team became troubled by this mismatch, as does Spielberg's film.
Munich neither endorses nor condemns this mission. We see it as the secret Mossad team led by Avner (Eric Bana) experience it, in its complexity, its excitement, its growing moral perplexity, its descent into nightmare as the killings mount up. Some have denounced the film as irresponsibly weakened by ideas of even-handedness, in its presentation of Palestinian terrorists as human beings - with feelings, friendships, daughters, good manners. Doubtless many moviegoers simply resent its deliberate denial of the "rush" of watching justified killings.
Munich is no masterpiece, but it attempts what tragic art does best and the public discourse of politics cannot often afford to do: to imagine both sides of a conflict, to see where both are right and wrong.
Characteristically, Spielberg treats it above all as a personal crisis for the characters involved. The superb actors - Bana, Geoffrey Rush, Daniel Craig, Mathieu Kassovitz, Ciarán Hinds - help the director to personalise the ethical debate with great potency.
But it's not without a political dimension. Munich deals thoughtfully with what WH Auden in Spain, 1937 notoriously called "the conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder". Like Cronenberg's more playful A History of Violence, Spielberg's agonised, conscientious film allows us to start by rooting for its quiet family-man hero - only to lead us into a moral no man's land, where our identification with a man of blood increasingly worries us. The comparatively unironic Spielberg, straining here against his own Hollywood instincts, gains force and loses artistic unity by his commitment to "sincerity".
He's never before had as his focus of sympathy a character whose mission was to kill rather than save. Although set in the 1970s, the film, which finishes with an image of the World Trade Centre on the New York skyline, asks awkward questions - a bit heavy-handedly at 164 minutes, but potently enough - of the Anglo-American present and the wisdom of retaliation.
At the start, Golda Meir declares gravely, "Every civilisation finds it necessary to negotiate compromises with its own values." The mission Avner leads has to mirror its enemies, so that, as she puts it, "You'll do what the terrorists do."
One of the team insists, "Unless we learn to act like them, we will never beat them." But, as another team-member warns Avner, he's wrong to "think you can outrun your fears, your doubts". Having set out with the best of intentions, believing the official line and telling his men "Don't think about it", Avner finds himself a hollowed-out shell, morally homeless, and haunted by nightmares. Philip Horne