The Bad News
MUNICH
Directed by Steven Spielberg
Screenplay by
Tony Kushner and Eric Roth
Starring Eric Bana, Daniel Craig, Ciaran Hinds,
Geoffrey Rush
Reviewed by Matthew C. Brown
December 23 2005
Munich is a difficult film, and not just in subject matter, though that matter is undeniably murky, troubling, and complex. In Munich, Steven Spielberg has made a filmed response to the innumerable criticisms over the course of his career that he is unabashedly wedded to hope at all costs; even his exceptional (and bleak) Schindler's List played the eventual note that there is something redeeming in mankind, and that it ultimately comes out.
Munich is undeniably grey where Schindler's was black and white (har har), and bears the imprimatur of a filmmaker discarding artfulness in the search of truth... but for all the victories achieved here (and they are many), something remains elusive. The most difficult thing about Munich is knowing what to do with it: what it is saying is so important, and how it is saying it is so egoless, that we want to call it a masterpiece, but we cannot. Something holds us back.
Munich is hardly about Munich at all; in many ways it is in fact about New York, of which we are reminded in both the first shot of the film (a title card of hundreds of city names cascading across the screen, in which New York is directly central) and the last (a chilling vista of Manhattan, with the World Trade Center towers standing in silent warning of the "victories" to come in Middle Eastern warfare). When Mossad agent Avner (Eric Bana) is sent on a long-term mission to assassinate the perpetrators of the Munich massacre, he sends his wife to live in Brooklyn for her safety; when he is done with his mission, he will have difficulty abandoning New York for Israel.
This is natural and important, and one of the classical wages of doing things that most men cannot do in the name of protecting society: the inability to return home. For Avner, this gulf is slowly achieved over the course of the film, as he and his squad meticulously assassinate Palestinian after Palestinian in their effort to complete a list of 11 names of purported Munich organizers. And I certainly mean "slowly:" for what is essentially a spy thriller (and one of the film's glories is the degree to which, subject matter aside, it could have easily come out of the Hollywood 1970s, had Spielberg's career continued left after Sugarland, instead of gone right with Jaws) which could easily have been a brisk 90-minute firecracker, we are instead given a ponderous, Chimera labyrinth at nearly three hours. Here, the excess is unnecessary. Ultimately, the film only gains momentum in fits and starts throughout; there's a clarity missing that a tighter cut would have achieved.
In the lead role, Bana has a great deal to accomplish, and his treatment of Avner is fluid and self-effacing; it isn't until long after Avner has veritably sold his soul that Bana even begins to show us why. By this point, the death toll is rising on both sides of the scorecard, as members of Avner's team begin to fall victim to reprisals for their actions. I am particularly fond of Ciaran Hinds and his incredible supporting turn in this film, playing a calculating and fatherly mentor to young, fatherless Avner. Daniel Craig stands out as a flamboyant Brit with far less emotional maturity (and therefore, far fewer ethical qualms) than the rest of the team. Michael Lonsdale also has a wonderful cameo as the patriarch of a family of French anarchists, who laments that he, like Avner, has been given a quiet soul and butcher's hands.
Ultimately, though, these characters largely exist as external fodder for Avner's inner torment, and what Spielberg and Bana have achieved here is pretty slick as it cycles everything back inward towards Avner. As a 3-hour character study, Munich is top-notch.
For the second time this year (following A History of Violence), an essay about violence has used a sequence of a man performing oral sex on his wife as a visual shorthand for his initial status as a decent, sensitive husband1. As in Violence, too, this initial sequence of ultimate matrimonial togetherness (in Munich the wife is even pregnant, to further transform the sequence into an erotically flush primal scene) is paired with a later sex sequence that is brutal and unsettling, to demonstrate how much our hero has changed in the throes of his violent nature. In the latter scene, Spielberg constructs his visual and thematic cum shot like a third-year film grad who's been hopped up on theory classes, cross-cutting between Avner's tormented coital fumblings and the final payoff of the Munich massacre itself, and even concluding on a flashbulb slow-motion shot of geysers of sweat streaming off Avner's orgasmic brow. The subject matter is so grave, and the cross-cut elements so devastating, we're pretty sure we're not supposed to laugh.
The rest of the time, the Spielbergian craft is a virtual no-show, or at least, has been rendered deceptively unassuming through (I assume) Spielberg's usual trick of not storyboarding films like this. He lenses the film in 2.35:1, which is unusual for him, and eschews more gleeful camera gags and reveals in favour of a tossed-off, documentarian approach. He only slightly ratchets up the visual stylistics in moments of great tension, and to great effect (a frame of Avner's first victim falling face-down on a bottle of milk is particularly deft, as is a tremendous sequence involving an over-powered bomb, a hotel suite, and a pair of rutting newlyweds). There's also a stunning sequence of Avner's team executing a female assassin who took down one of their own, leaving her bare-breasted and gurgling her own blood. The violence in Munich is brutal and grotesque, and grows in subtle distortions of morality at an exponential rate.
Spielberg's priorities are clearly in place here. He wants to tell us that, in contradiction to the prevailing filmmaking theory that violence is somehow viral, violence is in fact catastrophically innate. There is no happy ending to this story or any other, a point that the film returns to again and again (a character even says it out loud at some point). As long as there are two passionate peoples with one homeland between them, there will be hate and blood until the sands themselves are soaked in it.
That's a bold statement for any filmmaker, and I admire what Spielberg is saying, even if I cannot fully engage with how he is saying it. Since the conclusion of his formal artistic career, Spielberg has been largely rudderless, steering towards interesting external projects with a perceived randomness. That he occasionally lands on a Munich or a Catch Me If You Can is gratifying, but if I might ask, is Steven Spielberg ever going to get back to making Steven Spielberg movies?