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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
Photo by Universal Pictures
Moshe Ivgy, Ami Weinberg and Lynn Cohen in "Munich."
Steven Spielberg tries to untangle the knotty Palestinian-Israeli problem. Does he succeed? And should he be commended just for trying?
Dec 23, 2005 | Among Hollywood's big guns, Steven Spielberg is a rarity: a filmmaker who's willing, every so often, to tangle with moral ambiguity. Or who at least knows moral ambiguity when he sees it. His 1993 "Schindler's List" has plenty of detractors, people who see the picture as Spielberg's milking of an unspeakable human tragedy for dramatic value. But I think Spielberg's motives are far less calculated than that view suggests, and they stem from a touchingly simple need: telling the story of Oskar Schindler's efforts to save people whose persecution was, to him, indefensible by any morally rational stretch of the imagination was Spielberg's way of seeking out a bit of recognizable human behavior in the face of inhuman cruelty. (That's not the same thing as making a "feel-good" Holocaust movie, as he has been accused of; Spielberg doesn't stint on the horrors of genocide, and he's always aware of how few people, in the grand scheme, Schindler was able to save.)
Love him or hate him -- and some of us have both loved and hated him over the years -- Spielberg is often as interested in notions of personal responsibility and guilt as he is in pure storytelling. And at his best, he helps us make the distinction between the facile and somewhat detached motto favored by Christian teens, "What would Jesus do?" and the more probing realist-humanist question, "What would -- or should -- I have done?"
Which brings us to the thorny tangle of Spielberg's latest, "Munich," a fictionalized version of a real-life story: After the Palestinian terrorist group Black September kidnapped and murdered 11 members of the Israeli Olympic team during the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, Germany, Israel responded -- secretly -- by assigning a team of underground hit men to seek out and kill 11 men whom Israeli intelligence had identified as masterminds of the plot. "Munich," its script by Eric Roth and Tony Kushner, was inspired by Canadian journalist George Jonas' controversial book, "Vengeance." (The book's sources have been questioned. The new edition, published to coincide with the movie's release, contains a defense of its veracity by journalist Richard Ben Cramer. Neither the Israeli government nor the Israeli intelligence agency, Mossad, has officially acknowledged that these assassination teams existed.)
Eric Bana plays Avner, a Mossad intelligence officer drafted to lead the hit squad. He approaches the job with mild reluctance, since his wife (Ayelet Zurer) is pregnant, and he'll be cut off from her until his work is done. We don't quite know what makes Avner accept the job -- presumably, patriotism and anger over the massacres, although as Bana plays him, Avner is so grounded and even-tempered that we have to guess at what his convictions are. (Bana gives a sturdy performance here, but there are some clues to his character that might have been strengthened in the writing.) His steadiness suggests that he hasn't thought through -- or doesn't yet dare think through -- the implications of the mission.
Before long, Avner's sharing a flat in Frankfurt with four compatriots: Belgian toy maker turned bomb maker Robert (Mathieu Kassovitz); South African getaway driver Steve (Daniel Craig); German forger Hans (Hanns Zischler); and Carl (Ciaran Hinds), the cleanup man who steps in after the assassins have done their work to make sure no evidence has been carelessly left behind. On the team's first night together -- Avner has prepared a brisket for dinner -- the five sit around a table, introducing themselves and talking about their various specialties. Carl, his solemn, enormous eyes blinking behind heavy-rimmed glasses, describes his job this way: "Me -- I worry."
