From the beginning, "Munich" made me more than a little uncomfortable, but, for the sake of professionalism and my editors, I decided to stay. Good thing, too, because in doing so I got to see Steven Spielberg at the height of his abilities as a director, an obscure and seemingly random cast that performs beautifully and a film that is provoking without completely crushing you in too much self-righteous rhetoric.
"Munich" is first and foremost a thriller, and Spielberg takes this genre to a new level of artistic achievement. Despite the length of the movie (over two-and-a-half hours), the action rarely lags. It opens with the infamous crisis at the 1972 Olympics, during which Palestinian terrorists assassinated Israeli athletes, cutting between the action, the surrounding media circus and both the elated and devastated reactions of the rest of the world. What follows is a series of edge-of-your-seat episodes that, at their best, resemble Hitchcock's tight editing and pacing.
Spielberg works well with cinematographer Janusz Kaminski ("Schindler's List") to create a set of hauntingly beautiful backgrounds in which a string of violent vignettes occur. Grey Paris, washed-out Israel, rainy London -- for the most part it is easy to keep track of the characters' whereabouts. What becomes increasingly more difficult is navigating the ethical territory, and Spielberg, with a screenplay by Tony Kushner ("Angels of America") and Eric Roth ("Forrest Gump"), cuts no clear path.
In the beginning, the action resembles a caper along the lines of "Ocean's Eleven," and the film's morality is equally optimistic. Matters are fairly black and white: while the world watches photographs of the eleven hostages flash on screen, Israeli officials file through pictures of the eleven terrorists to be killed in revenge. The former is good, the latter is evil and revenge is necessary to preserve the Israeli nation. Justice, the audience learns, will be served by Avner (Eric Bana, last seen in "Troy"), leader of an assassin group that also includes Steve (Daniel Craig, the future James Bond), toy- and bomb-maker Robert (Mathieu Kassovitz), Hans (Hanns Zischler) and the conscientious Carl (Ciaran Hinds). They crisscross Europe in search of these men, relying on the information broker Louis (Mathieu Amalric) and his "ideologically promiscuous" Mafia-like family.
Soon, however, the cycle of vengeful violence gets the better of Avner and his comrades. The plot is saturated with blood, and not just in the immediate action. Time and again, the story is punctuated by real-life media accounts of the terrorist acts of Black September -- hijackings, bombings and assassinations. Our protagonists also begin to spiral out of control. Black September becomes quite the hydra -- for every leader they take out, more rise to replace him. Avner's men themselves become victims of terrorism; their targets are no longer bound by that initial list of eleven. The audience finds itself wondering when the violence will end, and when Avner will be able to return to his family.
Avner is clearly the moral center of the movie, entangled in a web created more by Mossad and a host of international intelligence groups (CIA, KGB, PLO) than by himself. He, Carl and, ultimately, the audience begin to doubt Mossad's intentions -- did these men truly plan Munich? Will killing them even accomplish anything? Avner's job destroys him, reducing him to a paranoid shell of a man who realizes that he is just as likely to be sold out and killed as the very men he hunts. Bana turns in a subtle and moving performance, his hollowed out face almost as hard to watch as the shootings and bombings. Also notable are Geoffrey Rush as the agents' case officer and Michael Lonsdale as Papa, the head of Louis' intelligence operation.
Earlier, I said that part of the joy of watching "Munich" is that you are not hit over the head by preachy morality. There certainly are, however, many conversations about the nature of violence, revenge and the specific cases of Jewish suffering and the Israeli nation. At times, these themes become repetitive. Spielberg says nothing new about the ongoing cycle of violence of which the events in Munich in 1972 were a small part, but so much has been said over the past thirty years that it would be hard to do so. It seems like Spielberg just was not sure how to end a movie whose core conflict is still grabbing headlines every day. This struggle most strikingly manifests itself in the poor editorial choice of intercutting the final flashback to Munich and a sex scene between Avner and his wife.
The real story of Munich extends far out of the scope of the film itself, both hundreds of years into the past and up until the present day. The film's relevance to our reality is obvious and it is summed up in the final scene where the camera lingers on the still-standing Twin Towers from Brooklyn, Avner's new home. It is a fitting end to the film -- not an exclamation point, but a question mark. What have we accomplished since the events of Munich? What have we lost? And where will we go from here?
