Magnificent (mild spoilers perhaps)

Rating: 10/10 (31 March 2007)

I didn't catch "Munich" on release, partly because all the stirred-up controversy over its political stance turned me off. I'm glad I've caught up with it, though, and recommend it to anybody skeptical about Spielberg, as I've often been. This is by far the best thing he's ever done, intelligent, dispassionate, clear-eyed about the moral ambiguities of its subject. I admired "Schindler's List" in a lot of ways but it turned so Capra-corny by the end and forced its protagonist to abandon his more interesting amorality and become a two-dimensional saint. "Saving Private Ryan" was a visually powerful war movie married to a conventional war movie script and with a tacked-on, totally unconvincing moral. (I wondered why Matt Damon didn't just grab his crotch and say "Earn THIS.")
In "Munich", though, for the first time there's absolutely no surrender to sentimentality or easy platitudes. A lot of this has to do with Tony Kushner's script. He says in the "making of" DVD extra that he doesn't think of himself as a screenwriter. He should reconsider. Screen forces him to cut back on the baroque verbiage of his stage plays, and he brings a subtlety and sharp dialectical intelligence to what could easily have been a simplistic and partisan thriller.
It's far from an anti-Israel movie. Spielberg and Kushner caught a lot of flak for simply asking good questions about Israeli policy. The policy in question, vengeful hunting down of terrorists and their mentors, is awfully close to the "permanent war" Bush, Blair and their ilk have advocated in the "War on Terror" and which is likely to have the same result -- more, not fewer, terrorists. Spielberg at no point condemns the Israeli response to the Munich massacre, but through his actors (all superb) points up the intense conflicts it engenders within each of the participants in the hunt. None of these characters emerge as right or wrong by the end; their varied human feelings about their mission meld into a polyphonic chorus of conviction and righteousness on the one hand, doubt and unease on the other.
Also, quite wonderfully, the film questions the idea of homeland, for anybody. The scene in the Athens "safe house", which separatists and nationalists from many corners of the world have to share, implies the danger and absurdity of ethnic and religious territorial claims -- again, without shoving the message down our throats with an easy answer. The word "home" echoes recurrently in the film, most powerfully in the final scene. It lingers as a troubling reminder of the claims all nations make upon those who serve them and of the price paid in serving them -- that sometimes you can never go home again, or must redefine what "home" means in the first place (as Avner, the protagonist, finally seems capable of doing). And the final shot of the film quietly but unmistakably deepens the film's fundamental question: what does anybody have to show for the deaths of a few terrorists? What will we, finally, have to show for al Ghraib and Guantanamo?
Frankly, I never thought Spielberg capable of anything this complex, thoughtful or measured. (Those who found it dull should just rent "Raiders of the Lost Ark".) May he put Indiana Jones behind him once and for all and continue to demonstrate that, in addition to being a master of light and magic, he's also learned to think.