Early in Judd Apatow’s comedic near-masterpiece Knocked Up the characters have a conversation about Steven Spielberg’s film Munich. Well, it’s not so much a conversation as a profane back-and-forth talking about how it “f-----g rules” and the plot is boiled down to how it’s about Jews “capping motherf-----s”. Seth Rogen’s character Ben sees it merely as a film where he can finally watch the Jews go Rambo on everyone else while in every other movie the Jews are the ones being massacred. In his own words: “If any of us get laid tonight, it’s because of Eric Bana in Munich.”
Well, if they got a Jewish pride rush from watching Munich, I think they need to get checked out by a professional. Munich is Steven Spielberg’s most disturbing film I’ve seen. Yes, he’s made Schindler’s List, which is an undisputed masterpiece, but we all know the general idea of the Holocaust. In Saving Private Ryan we know that a whole lot of people died bloody deaths on the beaches of Normandy. What those films did incredibly well was put you in the middle of the events, making you a witness to the violence. The familiarity to the subject did not make those films any less gut-wrenching, but Munich is a whole other animal. Here we have a story which is mostly untold in contemporary society, and it flips a lot of modern conventional wisdom on its head. Here we follow Spielberg into uncharted territory, and it’s a punch to the proverbial gut.
It is also notable that Spielberg’s past historical work has not had much in the way of moral ambiguity going for it. I think we can all agree that the mass killing of Jews in Schindler’s List is not something to get behind. However, Munich is as ambiguous as it gets. It begins with shocking and deplorable violence between human beings, and it only gets worse as the film goes on. Spielberg rarely infests his films with an energy so dark, and it doesn’t leave us with much hope at the end, the final shot reminding us of where it will all lead one day.
While Seth Rogen’s analysis in Knocked Up is a colossal misinterpretation, he gets the plot basically right. After the attacks on Israeli athletes by the Palestinian terrorist group Black September during the 1972 Olympics in Munich, Eric Bana’s character Avner is recruited to assassinate 11 men named to have been involved in the massacre at Munich. A team is formed, including a driver (future James Bond Daniel Craig), a forger (Hanns Zischler), a bomb maker (Mathieu Kassovitz), and a cleaner (Ciarán Hinds). The rest of the film follows the damage they do to the targets and themselves.
Munich is one of those films where your opinions going in could affect your interpretation. Some see it as an attack on Isreal (Spielberg denies this vehemently, and I believe him; he’s Jewish, after all), some see it as Eric Bana “capping mother-----s”. I feel most will see it, and should see it, as a representation of the endless violence we see in today’s world, more specifically in the Middle East. The characters are told to answer violence with violence, which may seem reasonable enough given the circumstances, but no one has any idea the price each man on that team will pay. Some with their lives.
The mood grows darker and more suffocating as the film goes on. The team is given more names to assassinate, including an incredibly brutal killing done out of personal vengeance. For each job they must take into account the collateral damage that will be inflicted, and sometimes it becomes too painful for Avner. He becomes unsure as to who the enemy is. It begins with Palestineans, but soon Dutch and Americans enter the mix as well. At one point a group of Americans foil an assassination attempt, and it is implied they are likely CIA operatives. The final scenes deal with Avner’s paranoia. He becomes fearful that he is being targeted by everyone, including his home country. He has witnessed a world in which it is more convenient to blow problems up than to resolve things a little cleaner.
Munich is not a perfect film, including a scene towards the end which is completely botched. For a film that is shot just about perfectly for 2 and a half hours, this scene comes out as choppy and unconvincing. I don’t want to describe it too much for those of you who have not seen it, but the shots here of Eric Bana’s face reacting to a flashback NEARLY resulted in unintentional laughter. Not to mention the final shot makes it all a little too obvious, but I give it credit for holding back from what I thought was coming (Smoke, for those who know).
The last 15 minutes are a miscalculation, but nearly everything before it borders on perfection. The performances are strong all around, and the cinematography (minus the aforementioned scene) is stunning. One of the things I noticed was that it was shot in a rather old-fashioned way, some camerawork a little rougher than usual, particularly for a Spielberg production, but it works perfectly. Munich represents a departure in every way for Spielberg, and it is a mostly glorious film. It’s all rather bleak, but it is an important story. Like Scorsese’s Gangs of New York, it claims to tell a story in our history that has managed to fall between the cracks. Unlike Gangs, I feel this is a story that is incredibly relevant to our world today. It tells us where we’ve been, where we are, and where we’re going if we keep going down this path of endless violence.
Rating:
(out of 4)
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