Alert: spoilers ahead. If you, by some secular miracle, have no idea what Steven Spielberg’s new movie is about, and don’t want to know how it plays out, stop reading.
In 1972, a Palestinian group called Black September kidnapped 11 Israeli athletes competing at the summer Olympics in Munich. Two athletes were killed during the hostage-taking. A German rescue attempt was horribly botched, and the rest of the athletes and all but two of the kidnappers were slain.
That’s the starting point for Munich, a fictionalisation of what may have happened when Israel responded by sending out a hit squad to assassinate the Palestinians implicated in the massacre. One group involved in this mission is the focus of the movie.
There is still some doubt about what precisely took place, but there’s no missing Spielberg’s message. As he tells the tale of the group of assassins, led by a man named only as Avner (Eric Bana), the moral trajectory of the film is made abundantly clear.
At the start, we have Golda Meir explaining why Israel’s response must be kragdadig. Meir is shown being all grandmotherly as well, so we know she isn’t just bloodthirsty. As the mission progresses, the assassins start getting pangs of conscience, and one of them has a decent-sized speech setting out the moral dilemmas. By the end, Avner is deeply disturbed by what he and his cohorts have done: Are they now as bad as the Palestinian terrorists?
This is Spielberg’s message to Israel today and, possibly, to George W Bush too: bloodshed just breeds more bloodshed; vengeance is a dead end. This is all very high-minded of him, but it’s not exactly a surprising conclusion from anyone other than a die-hard militarist Zionist.
The movie treats its subject like American movies have often treated Vietnam, showing us the terrible traumas suffered by American soldiers, without worrying too much about how it felt for the Vietnamese. Spielberg makes a token effort, at least, to show the Palestinian viewpoint — grieving families, for instance, and a rather obvious dialogue between Avner and a Palestinian.
So we get the message, thanks. We could hardly have missed it. (Too late for Ariel Sharon, though.) As for the rest, the movie is an efficiently constructed and glossily shot thriller, though it curiously lacks suspense — perhaps because one quickly becomes aware that it is a vehicle for a Big Message. Or maybe it’s just the same tedium produced by Kill Bill Volume I, in which The Bride draws up a list of people she’s going to kill and then spends the rest of the movie working her way down the list. Despite the fact that it’s about murder, this is the narrative equivalent of shopping for groceries.
There are other oddities in Munich, which derail one’s sense of the story’s credibility. One of Avner’s team is a South African, played by Daniel Craig. We know what Avner’s background is and why he is committed to this mission (he’s Israeli-born, his father’s a hero of the Zionist struggle, and so on), the Craig character is puzzling.
It’s not implausible that a South African Jew should leave this country and join the struggles of Israel. It’s not even entirely improbable that he should have blond hair and blue eyes. But would he speak with such a heavy Afrikaans accent? Is he some kind of Boerejood? Or just an Afrikaner with strong Zionist sympathies? (There were some once.) I think we should be told. Or is Craig just very bad at doing a South African accent? Many of Craig’s utterances in Munich simply made the audience at the screening I attended laugh, rather puncturing the serious tone.
The accents in general are an issue, one that often bedevils this kind of movie — made in English for a largely English-speaking (or at least American-speaking) audience, but dealing with non-anglophone characters. Sometimes, in Munich, there are subtitles, but that’s mostly for the bad guys; the good guys tend to speak English. Hence we have Avner and his wife, in bed, speaking to each other in accented English rather than Hebrew, which would presumably be their native tongue, since they are both Israeli-born. It’s rather like those old World War II movies in which the Germans were shown speaking to each other in heavily German-accented English.
And, weirdly, for all his story-telling skill, Spielberg has to bend the narrative rules to provide a big emotional punch. Watch the flashbacks, which are usually there to tell the viewer about significant events in a character’s personal story and inner life. Such flashbacks are a means of deepening the audience’s identification with and sympathy for a character by letting us into his or her memories.
There are three flashbacks to the Olympic massacre in Munich, each successively revealing more of the carnage following the botched rescue — and all embedded in Avner’s consciousness. One flashback is presented as his nightmare, from which he awakes sweating and panicky. Then, towards the end of the movie, is the most tendentious of them: while fucking his wife with a desperation that indicates how badly he wants to reconnect with ordinary life and love, Avner flashes back, now in full gory, horrifying detail, to the massacre yet again …
Except he wasn’t there. Avner never was in Munich. It’s not his flashback. If he’s feeling so guilty about what he’s done, surely he’d flash back to some of the more unpleasant moments in his mission as an assassin? But no, he seems to possess instead implanted memories of an event at which he was not present, and where he was not a perpetrator of horror. So what does that say about his guilt?
Avner is now simply a vehicle enabling Spielberg to remind us, yet again, and in an uncomfortably heavy-handed way, of who was really responsible for the carnage, the original sin that led to all Avner’s sins. Is he exculpating Avner? Or just doing the usual Spielberg thing and trying to coerce us into caring?