![]() |
Eric Bana leads a team of Mossad agents in Spielberg's uneven terrorism drama Munich |
Adapted by Tony Kurshner and Eric Roth, it’s based on a book
Vengeance by George Jones about the man who claimed to be the leader of
the Mossad cell (whether that is true or not is debated). He’s fictionalised
here (to side-step that issue) as Avner Kaufman (Eric Bana). His team consists
of driver Steve (Daniel Craig), explosives expert Robert (Mathieu Kassovitz),
forger Hans (Hanns Zischler) and clean-up man Carl (Ciarán Hinds) with Ephraim
(Geoffrey Rush) as their handler. The team hunt down and eliminate their
targets – but as the mission goes on they pay a heavy cost, both in their
eroding of their own moral certainties and in blood as they become targets for
repercussions.
Spielberg’s film is his least flashy, least sentimental and
(I suppose) most mature film, a cold-eyed, even-handed look at the Middle East
conflict that acknowledges faults and consequences on all sides, draped in the
muted colours and bleached out photography of 1970s conspiracy thrillers. It’s
also a very long and very self-consciously important film, that makes mis-steps
and at times is crudely obvious as well as being more interested in posing
questions than presenting any answers. Where it is at its best, is
demonstrating how campaigns like this are tasks worth of Sisyphus.
Munich takes a long, hard look at the cost of
violence – both on its victims and its perpetrators. Death in this film is
slow, painful and frequently disturbing. Shot people stagger and slump in
drunken shock, dying slowly. Bomb victims are ripped apart, recognisable limps
left hanging from walls and ceilings. Machine gun bursts tear bodies apart. The
cost of inflicting this violence leaves increasingly deep psychological
violence on the team (we don’t get to see if it does on the Palestinians, a
limit to the films even handedness), as it becomes harder and harder to treat
those they kill as faceless monsters, rather than men with families of their
own.
Spielberg reconstructs the horror of the killings in Munich
with a documentary realism, not shying away from the horror. It follows the
appalling opening moments of the attack, with the athletes taken hostage and
the shocked world media reaction. Spielberg returns later in the film to
restage the final murder of the athletes at the Munich airport with sickening
detail (perhaps too much – but more of this scene later).
Showing the impact of violence from both sides, Munich strains
at always being even-handed (despite this both sides attacked it for bias). It’s
an Israeli story so we mostly see the psychological impact of carrying out the
violence on the Israeli team, and little of the Palestinian perspective. But
the film throws in a chance meeting between Avner and what-could-be his
Palestinian equivalent, where Avner is brutally told that, when fighting for
their home, the Palestinians will never give up, and consider any price worth
paying – attitudes he can’t help but recognise as he fights for his own home.
The film has clear sympathy with the sufferings of the Jewish people, and their
need for a home of their own – but wonders if this is the right way to defend
it. Spielberg is a friend to Israel – but wants to be an honest one.
What starts out as clear and simple (a campaign against
terror) becomes morally complex. The team’s first targets are sympathetic, family
men. When Avner talks to a later bomb victim, he’s friendly and welcoming. A
Palestinian cell they (accidentally or maliciously) end up sharing a safe house
with, thanks to their mutual French contacts, are surprisingly relatable. The
mission’s accomplishments are unclear – the targets are killed, but all that
happens is more people take their place. Worse, those that do are only more
infuriated by the campaign of violence.
That’s the question – how do you fight terrorism? It breeds
on a belief of injustice and persecution – and Spielberg’s film suggests, all
the campaign does is pour petrol on that fire. Avner becomes a paranoid psychological
wreck by the end of the film, plagued with a loss of moral certainty. The film
argues that the only result of all this has been the price he and other have
made – an end to the violence is further away than it was at the operation’s
beginning.
Spielberg’s film is strong on showing the pointlessness of
this campaign. What it’s less strong on is answers. In many ways, the film
boils down to a simple “deep down we are all the same, why don’t we just get
along” message. While handsomely filmed and daring in its questioning about the
futility of anti-terrorist (and indeed terrorist) action, it’s a simplistic
film, largely lacking nuance. The characters are ciphers – Bana, for all his
skill, plays a shell of a character, designed to make statements, who is
alternately ruthless or questioning as the plot demands. Because the film
strives so hard to remain even-handed, it brings little to the table itself in
terms of proposed solutions, merely focusing on telling us what we know: an eye
for an eye eventually makes his all blind.
It’s also a film that has more than its fair share of clumsy
mis-steps. It’s view of the world is picture post-card in is simplicity. First
thing we see in Paris, is a shot of the Eiffel Tower. Go to London and it
rains. First shot in Holland is our characters on bikes. Its characters are
largely plot devices, well played but rarely fleshed out in people who feel
like human beings, more like mouthpieces to express viewpoints.
Most atrocious of all, the film concludes with a penultimate
sequence staggering in its misjudgement. Retired and living in America, Avner
makes focused, vigorous love to his wife intercut with the showing of the final
deaths of the athletes in brutal detail. It’s tasteless, ill-judged and
horrendously unclear. I suppose we are meant to think Avner is purging himself
of his burden of guilt – but the scene is so appallingly done, so grossly
detailed it comes across as both offensive and insultingly twee in using the
deaths of real people (staged in detail) to help our lead character feel better
about himself. When Spielberg does sex, he invariably gets it wrong – and does
again here.
Munich is a very worthy film, but it’s too-long,
dramatically simple, for all its daring commentary on the war on terror. It’s
well-acted – Michael Lonsdale and Matthieu Almaric are very good as Avner’s
French contacts, while Hinds is a stand-out among the team – but the characters
are ill-formed and the entire film takes a very long time to make a very simple
point. Well-made but a film trying a little too hard to always be profound.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: only a member of this blog may post a comment.