The other list

Rating: 9/10 (24 December 2005)

I wonder how this film would be judged without Spielberg's name attached. My feeling is it would be hailed as a masterpiece. However, with great achievement comes great expectations. Most of those expectations will be exploded by the end of Munich, the least Spielbergian of Spielberg's films. Firstly, there is no obvious hero here, and that is the point. Terrorism and anti- terrorism drags all of humanity into an unheroic world. Witness Avner's reaction to the young Israeli soldiers who revere him when he returns from his mission: He doesn't believe he is a hero. Secondly, the pacing will alternately disorient, lag, overwhelm and frustrate. I would argue the beginning of the second act owes heavily to The Day of the Jackal, a film which also tried to demonstrate just how banal the days of an assassin can be. Tony Kushner, best known for Angels in America, writes scenes that disturb. They may irritate you at times, but you will remember them. In Munich, one such scene is the sex scene that ends the movie in which Avner is dreaming about the murder of the Israeli Olympians. It seems so ridiculous at the time, but days later you will still be haunted by it. Finally, Munich's point-of-view may come as a surprise considering it was directed by the man who won so much acclaim for Schindler's List. Of course, you would think Spielberg's sympathies would lie with the Jewish state created after the very Holocaust he set his most acclaimed film during. But Munich is a nuanced piece that takes a horrible event that solidified most of the world behind Israel and shows how Israel's response, to hunt down the planners of the kidnapping, turned into something just as unjustified.