Probably
the first public act of modern terrorism on a truly global stage took place a
generation ago in Munich, when an
armed group of young Palestinians representing a hitherto unknown organization
called Black September raided the Olympic Village and kidnapped and murdered
eleven members of the Israeli team. Because ABC televised the games and
broadcast them all over the world, a huge audience witnessed the chaos and
horror of the event, which opened a new chapter in the bloody book of terror.
Less publicly, as Munich shows, in
response to the murders, the Israeli secret service authorized a secret and
illegal team of agents to track down and assassinate the men who planned the
operation.
As
in his Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan, in Munich Steven
Spielberg forsakes the special effects that characterize most of his work to
follow a semi-documentary approach in telling a story drawn from history of the
Palestinian massacre and the Israeli retaliation. He employs a good deal of the
actual television footage from the original event, narrated by the familiar voices
of Peter Jennings, Howard Cosell, and Jim McKay, to lend authenticity to a grim
and ambiguous tale of revenge and remorse.
Spielberg’s
protagonist, Avner (Eric Bana), recruited by the Israeli secret service to lead
a team of assassins across Europe, methodically
carries out a most complicated and difficult mission. Paying hundreds of
thousands of dollars to a family of professional informants for the names and
locations of their victims, he and his team hunt down and kill a number of
Palestinians, mostly with guns and bombs.
The
inherently compelling business of searching out their quarry, avoiding
detection, and planning the killings creates a level of tension appropriate to
the thriller. The ingenuity of the team’s remote controlled bombs, concealed in
telephones and mattresses, further suggests something of the big caper flick. Munich departs from
the conventions of the thriller, however, in its continuing concentration on
the tortured psyches of its people. Its real subject becomes not so much their
dangerous mission, but the moral abyss they inhabit, their own ambivalence
about carrying out what amounts to a series of cold-blooded murders.
Some
of the members of Avner’s crew agonize over the morality of their mission,
which, whatever its initial righteousness, seems to them a betrayal of the
beliefs and traditions of their people and their culture. The prime minister
tells Avner at the outset that a civilization must sometimes “negotiate
compromises with its own values,” a statement that grows increasingly ominous
as their task becomes both more routine and more violent. On the one hand, they
gain ever greater proficiency and confidence at killing, but suffer ever
greater remorse after the deed. The better they get, the worse it all becomes.
The
picture tends to settle into a series of assassinations interrupted by a series
of anguished seminars on what their mission has done to them. The men also
realize that they live in constant danger themselves and, further, that the
Palestinians, aware of the team’s work, undertake their own escalating
reprisals in the form of attacks, hijackings, kidnappings, and bombings. Their
actions resolve nothing, conclude nothing, but instead create an endless cycle
of retaliation and counter-retaliation, with an ever increasing body count.
Despite
the importance of its themes, the tensions of its action, and some terrific
camera work, Munich tends to
repeat its violence and bloodshed until the protagonist and his comrades
essentially squander the sympathy of the audience. Even the intensity of Eric
Bana cannot sustain the endless repetition of his anguished nightmares, the
sappy domestic scenes, and the constant underlining of his insoluble moral
crisis. Almost every member of the cast, however, attains a remarkable authenticity,
especially a charismatic actor named Michael Lonsdale, who plays a sort of
Mafia patriarch selling information to Avner.
Within
its quasi-documentary study of a terrible slice of history, the picture keeps
returning to the events at Munich in 1972 so
that the whole story of the massacre unfolds in pieces throughout the progress
of Avner’s mission. The conclusion of the Munich tragedy
subtly connects Avner with the Black September group, resulting in the obvious
identification of the two opposing sides, terrorists and counterterrorists,
Palestinians and Israelis. As many Americans now realize, the violation of
principles in the alleged defense of those principles leads inevitably to a
profound and permanent moral quagmire.
Munich
(R),
directed by Steven Spielberg, is playing at Henrietta 18 and Tinseltown.
This article appears in Dec 28, 2005 – Jan 3, 2006.
