A dish best served

Noel Vera

If "Schindler's List" was Spielberg's serious take on the
Holocaust, "Amistad" his take on slavery, "The Color Purple" his
take on black feminism, so on and so forth, and if you (like me) are
a touch tired of his take on this or that weighty issue, you may
want to be wary--his latest, "Munich," is his take on the Middle
East, and it's provoked the loudest reactions yet, both positive and
negative, of all his so-called 'serious' films.

Strangely, it's not easy to dismiss this as yet another attempt by
one of the world's most financially successful directors to finally
grow up (something he's been trying to do for twenty-one years):
it's based on the book "Vengeance" by George Jonas (about the
Israeli assassination squads formed in response to the killing of
Israeli athletes in the 1972 Munich Olympics), turned into a
screenplay by Eric Roth (he wrote the terminally clueless "Forrest
Gump"), then revised (probably for the better) by Pulitzer Prize
winner Tony Kushner (he wrote the six-hour gay epic "Angels in
America"). Spielberg pours much of his passion and considerable
filmmaking technique into this, as much as in any of his best works,
and the effort shows: some sequences--the first assassination, the
killing of the woman assassin, the flashbacks to the Munich
kidnapping and massacre--are tautly directed, the violence casually
yet vividly presented so that you flinch when, say, a man suddenly
drives a knife into someone's skull (the casualness suggests a 'you
are there' realism; the vividness--well, you practically feel the
crunch of steel into bone).

Spielberg's thesis (largely based on the book) seems to be that
violence is circular: the Munich massacre provoked the revenge
squads, which in turn provoked reprisals against the squad, all of
which is an increasingly heavy burden on the people involved, and
even on those not directly involved. The final shot--a quietly
ominous glimpse of the Twin Towers--seems to suggest that the cycle
of violence will culminate in that particular act of terrorism; or,
perhaps, reminds us that that particular act of terrorism was also a
response to past acts of violence and hate. Both questionable and
provocative reasoning.

Spielberg's film begins by introducing Munich to us in the same way
the whole world learned of the hostage drama: from television
newscasts, giving fragmented and even erroneous information (at one
point they report that all the hostages had been rescued). The
narrative eventually focuses on Avner (a fine Eric Bana), the
fictitiously named head of the assassination team; Avner is told to
resign from the Mossad (Israel's intelligence service), pick his own
men, buy his own equipment (spending money taken from a series of
secret bank accounts), use his own intelligence sources to find the
eleven men responsible for Munich (he's handed a list of names); the
rest of the film shows how he does this, and what happens when he
does.

The issue of terrorism being a moral morass (granted that such acts
of violence are reprehensible, why do they do it and keep on doing
it?), counter-terrorism potentially even more so (when does it turn
into vengeance, and when is vengeance ever justified?), and any
issue involving Palestine and Israel being the most daunting of all,
possibly no film can ever satisfactorily portray its complexities;
Spielberg was probably asking for the response he got when he agreed
to do the picture (though to be fair he did point out that he might
have felt worse if he had refused). As is, he gets maybe half of it
right. The thriller aspect is well done, even (I think) the long
periods in between (they're necessary to allow us to get to know
Avner and his team, and to allow them to brood on the consequences
of their actions). Spielberg's mistake, I think, is remarkably
similar to Avner's: he grows to rely too much on one source of
information. Avner depends on "Le Group," a band of Frenchmen that,
it's suggested, was originally part of the French Resistance in
World War 2, and now deals with the trafficking of information to
non-government entities (hence the importance of Avner's having left
Mossad); Spielberg for his part depends almost entirely on Jonas'
book.

The problem with this is that Jonas' book has been questioned, not
only on facts that only those in the know would possess, but also on
details that seem to defy common sense. Why, for one, does the
Mossad pick Avner to lead the Israeli response? He's a trained
bodyguard, it's true, but he's never assassinated anyone before, and
it's only too easy to guess how such killings would affect him. Why
trust a neophyte on such an ostensibly important mission? Channel
4's documentary "Munich: Mossad's Revenge" reports that it was in
fact experienced Mossad officers who carried out the mission, that
no one bothered with elaborate ruses to distance the Mossad from the
killings, and the reason why Europe's police forces went along was
because they sympathized with the Israelis on Munich. A far simpler
explanation, and more convincing as a result.

Then there's "Le Group." Spielberg is essentially faithful to Jonas
book, which mentions this mysterious French organization as the
source of much of Avner's intelligence--but since it was Mossad
agents carrying out Mossad killings, then (the documentary claims)
they used Mossad intelligence to do it; no need for mysterious
French organizations whose patriarchal head (Michael Lonsdale,
looking like he should star in his own cooking show) regularly
promises gifts of provincial meats and cheeses.

And why doesn't Spielberg show what happened at Lillehammer--the
operation where they not only killed the wrong man, but worse (at
least from their viewpoint) got some of their people caught?
Wouldn't that have helped his theme about the ill effects of
vengeance? The documentary shows full-on just how wrong things went
for the Mossad in Lillehammer, what a chancy business murder can be;
I don't think it would have hurt the picture to drop a killing or
two to included that.

Spielberg's film takes pains to show the burden of a guilty and
paranoid conscience, and is at its unsettling best when it portrays
Avner reaping the fruits of his labor--not sleeping on his bed,
taking appliances apart to check for bombs, whiling away the minutes
waiting for his time to come. Finally he walks away from it all to
be with the wife he's not seen for years, and makes love to her, and
Spielberg interrupts their lovemaking with shots of the massacre
that started it all (Bad sex--which figures, considering Avner's
state of mind by this time--but why the Munich massacre? Wouldn't
Avner be more likely to recall one of his killings--maybe the
Lillehammer fiasco?). It's all very moving, but the Channel 4
documentary took a remarkably different tack, and included an
interview of the wife of one of the murdered Israeli athletes;
apparently every time the Mossad killed one of the eleven men it
thought was responsible, they would call her up and inform her. And
she hated it; she mourns for her husband, but she didn't want him
used as an excuse for even more bloodshed. The woman's calm words
and quiet conviction was, for me, more powerful than Avner's
admittedly considerable suffering.

All that said, perhaps the single most persuasive element in
Spielberg's film is the tone in which he presents the film--as an
anguished, troubled plea, a laying out not of definitive answers,
but of tentative questions. Should a nation (as Israeli prime
minister Golda Meir (Lynn Cohen) at one point muses) compromise its
principles? Is righteousness such an indispensable virtue? Can one
learn to share sleeping quarters--or even just a stairwell--with the
enemy for a night? Spielberg stumbles as much as he steps forward in
a veritable minefield, but his heart seems to be in the right place,
and he's pointed in roughly the right direction. You flinch at his
clumsiness, the same time you applaud his sometime skill and
foolhardy courage.

(First published in Businessworld, 2/10/06)

(Comments? Email me at noelbotevera@...)