Munich

Despite the focus on action and what may amount to a revenge plot, Munich is a film of ideas and issues, and it is easily the most cerebral film Steven Spielberg has made. But its cerebral nature is tied up with the action, and with the reasons underlying the action. It is also an genuinely engaging film that draws one into the lives and situations of the characters. Munich is a fictional film based on the premise that the Israeli government sought to assassinate 11 conspirators involved in the killing of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics. According to the film, the Israeli government hires a Mossad agent and former bodyguard of Prime Minister Golda Meier to lead a small team of assassins. His name is Avner. Over a period of several years he and his team kill seven of the conspirators along with a number of collateral victims.

The film traces the efforts of the team to carry out its mission. But the real focus falls on Avner and his team—how they respond as a group and as individuals to their mission, how they are individually affected by the acts they commit.

Although the main characters are Israelis, whom we follow as they carry out their mission, Munich for the most part takes a neutral point of view. It narrates the story from neither the Israeli nor the Palestinian point of view, though it is sympathetic to both. It shows the leaders of Israel trying to decide how to respond to the murder of the athletes. They conclude that they must violate their own fundamental principles in order to protect their nation. It suggests that violence in the cause of national defense or retribution may have consequences as undesirable as the crimes that are being answered. It does not excuse terrorism and murder at the Munich Olympics, but it does try to explain them. It also views the members of Black September and other terrorists as human beings, not as villainous stereotypes, but as individuals who feel compelled to take certain measures in defense of their beliefs. In presenting the Israelis and the terrorists in this way, the film is distinctively daring and confronts the viewer with his own prejudices and preconceptions.

I must restate the previous paragraph. The film is told from the viewpoint of Avner and is focused on the operations of his team. But the assignment he is given is cast in doubt from the start. Golda Meier's government is uncomfortable with it and even as Avner is given the assignment he is told that the Israeli government will not acknowledge his team in any way. So even as the film explains the assignment and why it is necessary it raises questions about the legal, moral, ethical issues involved. The film never loses sight of these questions and issues. At the same time, it makes a point of treating both the Israelis and the Palestinians, including the terrorists, as human beings--in assuming this neutral position the film takes a controversial and daring treatment of its topic. It is daring because it is so at odds with what one would expect--it refusaes to accept the usual stereotypes and political attitudes one would expect from an American film about Israel and its response to terrorism. The film is never hostile to Israel--it simply seeks to consider whether the response Israel takes to terrorism in the film is the right response.

Munich takes as its text the maxim that no hand lifted in violence remains unbloodied, that every violent act has consequences. This is a text of particular relevance for our times. (Manohla Dargis writes in her New York Times review: “Only this matters: blood has its costs, even blood shed in righteous defense.”)

Key words in the film are family and home. We first see Avner as a family man, married to a beautiful wife whom he loves and who loves him. She is pregnant, and there is the clear glowing promise of the child she will bear and the family life they all will share together. In service of his nation, Avner sacrifices all of this, at least for a time. At one moment, midway through the mission and far from home, he calls his wife and their child, now a year old, says a word to him over the phone. He weeps, and the moment is heart wrenching.

The members of Black September are defending home as well. In a somewhat incredible scene, the Israeli team finds itself sharing a “safe house” in Greece with a group of Palestinians. Neither group knows who the other really is, though they recognize each other as Israelis and Palestinians. One of the Palestinians tells Avner that “Home is everything,” and this becomes a justifying principle for both the terrorists and the Israelis who are trying to kill them. The Palestinians blame the Israelis for the loss of their homeland and for every misfortune that has happened to them. The Israelis answer every act of Palestinian violence with a swift and brutal response. The cycle seems endless.

The film expresses a pervasive distrust of organized governments, of nations. It makes clear that there is a marked difference between homeland and nation. Governments pursue their own goals and exploit individuals such as Avner to do so. Individuals don’t matter. Despite the fact that the Israeli government believes that killing the terrorists is essential for national security, it does not want to be associated with the killings—they are being carried out covertly, beyond the pale of international law. It therefore enlists Avner and his group to do the killings and then severs all connections with them--as far as the government is concerned, they don’t exist. Avner’s contact with the Israeli government (played by Geoffrey Rush) tells him as much. When Avner returns from his mission, a government official gleefully tells him that “Of course, there is no award for this.” Governments don’t want to be associated with the violence they commission. For the sake of self-preservation, governments resort to brutal acts of violence, of immorality, they would never publically condone, that blot out the identities of those who are commissioned to commit them.

Violent acts have consequences. One violent act begets another. This Old Testament adage of an “Eye for an eye” has a self-contained quality that seems to suggest that a retributive act cancels out the original act of violence. Instead, as Munich suggests, one violent act begets another violent act that begets still another; the cycle perpetuates itself endlessly. In Munich characters often talk about how acts of violence make murder necessary. Whether the violence is committed by Israelis, or by Palestinians, the meaning is essentially the same. The controversial and unusual position the film takes is that the Israelis have made their own beds, by their own brutal retaliations against Palestinian acts of violence, and now they have to reap what they have sown. The Palestinians are not exempt from this vicious cycle—they too have made their beds and are equally implicated.

Nations are implicated as well. At one point Avner learns that the CIA is making payments to one of the Black September terrorists so that Americans will not be targeted. American money helped fund the Israeli team. At the end of the film, the twin towers in the background of the final scene put an additional touch on the notion of violence begetting violence, implying that the U. S. was involved in that sequence of events leading up to the apocalyptic culmination on September 11.

The film questions whether issues of right and wrong, morality and immorality, have meaning anymore. Avner somehow comes into contact with an information agent, a man whose family sells information for an appropriate price. The family claims to have no political motives and in fact says it will refuse to do business with Avner if they learn he is working for a government. For four to eight hundred thousand dollars each, the agent sells Avner the name and whereabouts of the terrorists. The first time Avner visits the family (they seem to live either in France or northern Italy), he finds them having a picnic, with children running to and fro. It is an idyllic, warm, comfortable family setting. The agent’s father expresses fondness for Avner and wants Avner to call him father. Yet later in the film it becomes apparent or at least likely that this family is selling information about Avner in return for money as well. Their loyalty is to money, nothing else. This is the film’s supreme emblem of corruption and perversion.

The final issue is the decay of Avner as a human being, his growing immunity to the acts of violence he commits. He becomes, in a sense, what he is seeking to kill.

In the film’s penultimate scene Avner makes passionate love to his wife. At first he doesn’t respond to her, but in his mind he begins to envision the murder of the Israeli hostages at the 1972 Olympics. He is aroused. The point here is complicated. On the one hand, murderous passion replaces love. On the other, Avner will never be able to rid himself of the violence in which he has become mired—the violent deaths of the Israeli athletes, his violent killings of the terrorists. This man who began this film as a family man, looking forward to fatherhood and a family life, ends the film paranoid that his family is being targeted for death and unable to think of anything but death.

The film implies that in the modern world everything is decentered. Traditional values are meaningless, though we still invoke them. Nations function independent of their citizenry, which they manipulate in pursuit of their own ends. Vengeance no longer belongs to God but becomes a weapon of justification. Civilized individuals are reduced to brutal killers, and brutal killers are also seen for what they are, civilized men. It’s a world where the civil, domestic existence that Avner and his wife hoped for is an illusion, a chimera. It’s a world where the motivating concept of home loses its meaning in the wake of what must be done to defend it. We may think we are acting on the basis of principle, in carrying out whatever acts of warfare we find necessary, but Spielberg suggests that in the end principles are hollow, or perhaps that principles are nullified by the acts carried out to defend them.

Spielberg’s film does not in any sense ignore or justify the Munich murders. They are horrible—physically and morally repugnant. But by trying to see them in a context larger than one of political or national rivalries, it seeks to make a statement about violence and retribution in the modern world. The film’s failure to view the events in Munich from one nation’s point of view, its willingness to question the Israeli government’s way of dealing with terrorism and its enemies, its exploration of the terrorists’ point of view, undoubtedly made it a challenging experience for many viewers. I suspect this accounts for many of the equivocal and negative reviews the film received, and for its failure to garner many major award nominations.

Munich is too long. It loses focus and momentum in the last thirty minutes, and it wanders around trying to come to a resolution, trying to show how Avner attempts to deal with himself and his family in Brooklyn. All of this seems an afterthought that lacks dramatic tension, but it does effectively show how Avner has become a tormented shadow, imprisoned by the memory of actions he carried out because he believed they were necessary, which he still believes were necessary, but which have distorted and wrenched him so that he has become a wraith.

This is a powerful film, both emotionally and intellectually. It is the best film Spielberg has made.