When it comes to hiring staff, Steven Spielberg has probably always had his pick. But the support team for his newest film must surely be a first, even by his standards. On the promotion and publicity payroll are no less than Dennis Ross — the diplomat who oversaw the United States’s management of the Middle East peace process for the first George Bush and Bill Clinton — and Clinton’s former press secretary, Mike McCurry. Lending unpaid advice as a script consultant: Clinton himself.
It’s all a long way from ET. But this is no ordinary Spielberg movie. Munich represents a new departure for the director, his most political movie yet, and one that plunges deep into what is perhaps the most intensely disputed conflict in the world.
Assumed to be a front-runner for the Academy Awards, even before anyone had seen it, this thriller, “inspired by real events”, follows a cell of Mossad assassins as they set out across Europe and the Mediterranean to kill the 11 Palestinians responsible for murdering 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972.
Over 164 minutes, we see these men — led by Hulk star Eric Bana as Avner and supported by Daniel Craig, among others — shoot, bomb and variously take out their Arab prey. They also grapple with the legitimacy of their mission. Can they be certain the names they have been given are the right ones? What is the evidence of the targets’ guilt? And, most pressingly, will revenge not inspire its own counter-revenge?
“All this blood will come back to us,” Robert the bomb-maker, played by Mathieu Kassovitz, tells Avner with anguish. By the final scene, Avner agrees: “Every one we killed was replaced by six more.”
The old Hollywood studio bosses liked to tell their more preachy directors: “If you want to send a message, use Western Union”, but Spielberg has put such warnings out of his mind. His film punches its message out in tall, capital letters. Craig certainly got it, telling Empire magazine: “It’s about how vengeance doesn’t work; blood breeds blood.”
As the enlisting of Clinton and his former aides suggests, Spielberg knew what he was getting into and, sure enough, the film has provoked a slew of controversies. First have come the complaints about historical accuracy. The film is based on the 1984 book Vengeance by George Jonas, whose veracity has been repeatedly questioned. Critics say it relies on the testimony of Yuval Aviv, whose claim to have been a member of the Mossad post-Munich hit squad has been widely doubted.
Several former Israeli intelligence agents have said the notion of assassins suffering mid-mission doubt is pure fantasy. Others have laughed aside as “unthinkable” the early scene in which then Israeli prime minister Golda Meir meets and personally recruits Avner for his task.
There is also a striking omission from the film, a well-documented event relating to the revenge effort that could only have added to the drama of the film, but which is bafflingly absent (and to which we will return).
But it’s not just historical purists who’ve been offended, even before they’ve seen it. Several pro-Israel activists have been distressed by what they have heard about Munich, their opposition unmelted by public praise for the movie from the families of the slain Israeli athletes.
At the outer edge of this backlash are the ultra-rightists, who are mounting a viral campaign against Munich. One e-mail begins: “Please boycott this Nazi propaganda movie made by Steven Spielberg in support of Arab murderers.” Several right-wing Zionist organisations are outraged by Spielberg’s choice of writer. Tony Kushner, who won sackloads of awards for Angels in America on Broadway — and here making his feature film debut — has been an outspoken critic of Israeli conduct in the occupied territories and is quoted as saying that the creation of a Jewish state was a “mistake”.
Cooler-headed critiques have tended to lament the even-handedness of the film, its suggestion that somehow the Palestinian killers at Munich and the men who pursued them are, ultimately, as bad as each other. The Israeli consul in Los Angeles — effectively Israel’s ambassador to Hollywood — accused Spielberg of making an “incorrect moral equation” between the two sides. And the highly respected Leon Wieseltier of the New Republic wrote a scalding attack: “[This looks] ominously like the sin of equivalence, and so it is worth pointing out that the death of innocents was an Israeli mistake but a Palestinian objective.”
Spielberg has had some support from the left. Already the US peace movement has seized on the movie as a cogent argument against US President George W Bush’s war on terror and, particularly, the covert US policy of targeted assassinations against al-Qaeda leaders. But his critics on the pro-Israel right have been noisier.
All of this marks an uncomfortable reversal for Spielberg, who has spent more than a decade as one of the Jewish world’s most admired figures. His 1993 film Schindler’s List has become a kind of set text of the Holocaust, seen by more people than will ever read Primo Levi or watch Claude Lanzmann’s nine-and-a-half hour masterpiece, Shoah.
The goodwill Spielberg has built up among his fellow Jews should enable him to weather the Munich storm. More to the point, most people who see the film, especially outside the US, will wonder what the fuss is all about. Far from viewing Munich as anti-Israel, they may well regard it as highly sympathetic.
Some will start by noting that intriguing omission. One of the only certain facts about Israel’s post-Munich enterprise was that they got one target horribly wrong.
In Lillehammer, Norway in July 1973, a Mossad squad, thinking they had tracked down Ali Hassan Salameh, the leader of the Black September faction behind the Olympic killings, murdered instead Moroccan waiter Ahmed Bouchiki. They shot him repeatedly as he walked home with his pregnant wife after a visit to the cinema. They had simply got the wrong man.
The Norwegian authorities caught most of the Israelis responsible, tried, convicted and jailed them. Yet none of this episode, which would surely affect the balance of the audience’s sympathies, is in Spielberg’s movie.
Others will note the opening, heart-pounding account of the massacre at Munich, the event that functions as the emotional premise of the movie: if ever we are in any doubt as to the moral justness of Avner’s cause, we remember what happened at Munich. The assassins’ resolve, and the audience’s, is renewed with every reminder of, and every flashback to, that horror.
More straightforwardly, it is the Mossad men who are humanised. We see Avner and his beautiful, pregnant wife; we eavesdrop on their snatched phone calls. He and his team are shown eating, chatting and, yes, arguing — real human beings rather than killing machines. Their bungles and mistakes only add to their humanity and so tease out more of our sympathy.
The Palestinians are humanised a bit too. One of the targets is a father with a pigtailed daughter, another writes poetry. A third is allowed to make the case for a Palestinian homeland, to explain that they do not kill or maim for nothing. But they are only on screen for a minute or two. The centre of gravity is with the Israelis.
And, of course, the ultimate humanisation is the voicing of doubt. The Israelis are redeemed in the audience’s eyes by their moral anguish. There are several “What have we become?” speeches. Not to sink to the level of the terrorists, “that’s what makes us Jewish”, pleads Robert the bombmaker. Yes, we have suffered terribly, but “we don’t have to do wrong just because we were wronged”.
What it amounts to is confirmation that Spielberg was as good as his word when he told the Los Angeles Times, in one of the few interviews he has given about the film: “I worked very hard, so this film was not in any way, shape or form going to be an attack on Israel.”
On the contrary, Munich is a plea for Israel to be true to what Spielberg would say was its moral self. That plea represents a form of advocacy of Israel. Look, it says, Israel is not some brute military power, but a country of real, morally conflicted human beings. This is a contribution several doveish Israeli artists — such as the novelists Amos Oz and David Grossman — have made to their country before: by revealing Israel’s internal dissent, they show their nation in its best light.
It also confirms Spielberg is on a journey mirroring that of the Jewish community which raised him. At first, he burned with the desire to be not a Jewish director, but an American one telling heartland stories of rogue sharks and cute extra-terrestrials that pitched straight for the mainstream.
Then he came face to face with the Holocaust. In Schindler’s List, Spielberg was enacting the same move US Jewry had made from the late 1960s onwards, placing the Nazi catastrophe close to the centre of American Jewish identity. That film closed on a note of classic Zionism: the monochrome of murderous Europe giving way to the colour of redemptive, rescuing Israel. Schindler’s Jews, those who had survived thanks to him, were shown in contemporary Israel, to the accompaniment of an elegiac, patriotic anthem: Jerusalem the Golden. The Jewish state was the antidote to the problem of European exile and persecution, a view which has stood as a core US Jewish belief since 1967.
In Munich, Spielberg has taken a further step. He still loves Israel, he still longs for its survival and well-being, but now he is paying attention to the moral costs. The impact not so much on the Palestinians, but on the Jewish soul. In this, too, Spielberg is in step with a nagging, if only rarely and reluctantly voiced, sentiment in the Jewish diaspora.
Munich is a flawed film, an awkward blend of action-thriller and political meditation, but it marks a shift in one of the world’s most important filmmakers — and, perhaps, even in the Jewish story that seems, increasingly, to matter to him so much. — Â