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Movie Review by:
Jim "Good Old JR" Rutkowski
Directed by: Steven Spielberg
Written by: Tony Kushner, Eric Roth, George Jonas
Starring: Eric Bana, Geoffrey Rush, Daniel Craig
Running time: 164 minutes,
Released: 12/23/05.
Rated R for strong graphic violence,
some sexual content, nudity and language. |
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A
film of uncommon depth, intelligence, and sensitivity,
Munich defies easy labeling. Watching the movie is like
reading a top-notch espionage thriller by Le Carre or
Deighton. Yet, at the same time, this is a visual
experience. The moral and ethical elements, layered atop a
story that is ripe with suspense, put to shame Hollywood's
typical ventures into this genre. Munich is an eye-opener -
a motion picture that asks difficult questions, presents
well-developed characters, and keeps us white-knuckled
throughout. It is one of the best films of 2005.
I was eleven years old at the time of the 1972 Olympics, so
my recall of events is shaky. But I remember my parents
being engrossed by the television coverage, and I understood
at the time that something terrible was happening. Some of
that coverage - news clips featuring Jim McKay, Peter
Jennings, and others - is used during a fifteen-minute
prologue in Munich. This film is not about the Black
September terrorist action that shattered the stillness of
the Munich Olympic village, but about Israel's response to
that act. Spielberg sets the stage by opening with a mixture
of dramatic re-creations and archival news footage. By the
time we meet the main character, Avner (Eric Bana), the die
has been cast.
Avner is the leader of a five-man team of covert, ex-Mossad
operatives who have been given unofficial status by the
government of Israel so they can track down and assassinate
the 11 Palestinians responsible for planning and executing
the attack. Their lone contact is their handler, Ephraim
(Geoffrey Rush), who provides them with information about
how they can obtain money to fund their operation. Avner
accepts the job despite having a seven-month pregnant wife (Ayelet
Zurer) waiting for him in Jerusalem. For Avner, nothing is
more important than patriotism - at least when the ordeal
begins.
The group consists of Steve (Daniel Craig), a South African
hothead who is eager - almost too eager - to shed blood;
Carl (Ciaran Hinds), an unnaturally cool and collected
"cleaner"; Robert (Mathieu Kassovitz), a toymaker-turned-bombmaker;
and Hans (Hanns Zischler), an expert forger. After making
contact with an information collector named Louis (Mathiew
Amalrac), Avner begins learning the locations of his
targets. His mission takes him around the globe - from Paris
to Düsseldorf to Beirut to Athens to London to New York City
- as his pursuit of his goal becomes single-minded. Tragic
near-misses, an erosion of conscience, and the realization
that the hunters may have become the hunted turn Avner's
assignment into a nightmare. And the most dangerous target -
who may be allied with the CIA - remains elusive.
Munich, which is based on George Jonas' book Vengeance,
claims to have been "inspired" by true events, which places
it into the category of fiction. Key events occurred, but
all of the character interaction is made up. Despite the
historical nature of the story, the synergy with today's
events is impossible to miss. Every word that is spoken
about terrorism is as relevant today as it was in the early
1970s.
The best espionage thrillers are gritty, claustrophobic
pieces, filled to the brim with lies, betrayals, and
paranoia. Those qualities are evident here. What begins as
an act of patriotic fervor ends in a quagmire of moral
ambiguity. Avner doesn't know what to believe any more, and
he has lost the capacity to differentiate right from wrong,
necessary from gratuitous. What's one more death, even if
the person's name isn't on the list? The currency of his
world is information, but its reliability is often
determined after it's too late. And trust is a luxury Avner
cannot afford. The deeper one gets into the espionage game,
the more difficult it becomes to differentiate reality from
a fabric of deceit woven by enemies - if those enemies truly
exist.
Munich illustrates how Avner's moral compass is knocked
askew. In the beginning, he doesn't question the
righteousness of his actions. But when it comes to make the
first kill, he hesitates, and it falls to one of his
confederates to fire the shot. As killing becomes easier,
Avner questions its morality before ceasing to care. It
becomes a routine: learn where the next target is, devise a
plan, then execute it. On one occasion - perhaps the most
tense and masterful scene in the film - a little girl
answers an explosives-packed phone that is intended as a
lethal trap for her father. On another occasion, Avner ends
up within the blast radius of one of his bombs.
With each assassination, there is a Black September
reprisal: a bomb in a bus station, a shooting spree, etc.
There's nothing new about the cycle of terrorism, but all it
means to Avner and his team is that they have opened a
"dialogue" with their opponents. For Prime Minister Golda
Meir, the doctrine is inescapable: "Every civilization finds
it necessary to negotiate compromises with its own values…
Forget peace now. We have to show them we're strong." Does
Israel have the moral high ground? And, if so, for how long?
At one point, one of Avner's team comments, "[We] do what
the terrorists do." In the trenches of this kind of war, are
there good guys and bad guys, or has everyone slipped into
the murky gray of the middle ground?
Spielberg asks, but cannot answer, a key question: Is a war
against terrorism winnable? We would like to think the
answer is "yes." It would help us sleep better at night. But
Munich points out a sobering truth: for every terrorist
killed, there is another - possibly a worse one - waiting to
take his place. Capturing or killing Osama bin Laden would
be a great propaganda victory, but would it mean anything?
In the end, Avner and his team must face this question. Can
the killing end with 11 men when each is replaced before his
body has been interred?
Spielberg takes pains to present both sides of the issue. To
proffer the Palestinian perspective, he provides a rational
terrorist who engages in an intellectual debate with Avner
about how the Palestinians have resorted to the only methods
left to them, how they are willing to wait generations to
achieve their aims, and how the concept of "home" - no
matter how unappealing the actual land - is precious beyond
all others. Black September, unlike other recognizable
terrorist groups like the IRA, is the only organization
without a land to call its own.
With a performance that never misses a beat, Eric Bana gives
us a man who loses his way, morally and spiritually. When he
acts purely for revenge, Avner becomes what the Mossad
intended, but he never envisioned. As Steve, future James
Bond Daniel Craig shows a caged, homicidal fury. Ciaran
Hinds (seen most recently as Julius Caesar in HBO's Rome)
depicts Carl as a dignified, repressed man whose passion is
bubbling beneath the surface. Mathieu Kassovitz and Hanns
Zischler round out the primary team of actors with sincere,
low-key performances. The chameleon-like Geoffrey Rush shows
up as Avner's handler. Veteran French actors Michael
Lonsdale and Mathiew Amalric play the father-and-son source
of much of Avner's information.
With Munich, Spielberg has emphasized his position as one of
the world's most compelling filmmakers. The film works on
numerous levels and, like Saving Private Ryan, it becomes
the rare genre film that escapes its expected boundaries and
is transformed into something new and powerful. This is a
serious, adult motion picture. The ending is not as bleak as
it could be, but it will send audiences away in a reflective
mood, pondering not only the events of the film, but how
close Spielberg's fictionalized world of the early '70s is
to our real world in the 2000s. |
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MUNICH ©
2006 Universal Pictures/DreamWorks SKG
All Rights Reserved
Review © 2006 Alternate Reality, Inc. |
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