Curtain Falls on Spielberg

Rating: Null/10 (3 March 2006)

****Spoilers Included****
It's hard to hit the nail on the head about what doesn't make Spielberg tick. Although the man seems to master all the tricks of his trade, lately they just do not gel to make a coherent moving whole. His dramatic films lack soul. He resounds with the obvious, underlining every line of dialog. The sly innuendo of former years has become stiff with overstatement. His films seem exclusively shot in a vast obvious foreground where no detail is left to the intelligence of the viewer. And perhaps the courtesans of the royal court are afraid to tell the king the bad news for fear of banishment.
Munich proceeds awkwardly as if a first draft story-board had been tacked on the wall during a brainstorming session. A poorly edited hastily pasted pastiche that neither rhymes nor runs with its subject matter. Rome, Athens, nor Munich barely feel like the cities they're supposed to represent (probably because they were filmed inand sponsored by--Hungary and Malta). And the Middle East context reflects such a level of Orange County Jewish Club claustrophobia that one wonders if Spielberg and his harem ever even set foot in Israel to research the film.
The actors for the most part are deployed with the standard two-dimensionality we've been accustomed to in a Spielberg film. Shallow in character, high on histrionics. The Mossad team and its top banana Bana act with about as much authority as the San Fernando Valley Chicano-cum-Indians of Costner's Dances with Wolves. Even the prime minister in Golda Meir has become an off-the-shelf Jewish grandmother. The only credible performance was Michael Lonsdale's even if he was cast in the oft stereotyped role of the sly but slimy Frenchman sitting on the fence profiteering from both sides of a conflict (aka The Deer Hunter). And am I mistaken or does Avner's accent shift constantly between a Yiddish lilt and one you'd find in a Nebraskan suburb? Intentional? If so the effect is so 'subtle' as to appear sloppy and is virtually indistinguishable from the speech of another character, Louisand he's French.
One of the reasons many people find this film boring is the redundant nature and treatment of the assassinated Palestinians. The killings serve neither to raise the tension level nor drive the narrative forward. Rather they seem like tics on a hit-man's shopping list. A little bomb here, a bigger bomb there. And weren't those Black September veterans such regular lovable types: one old man who does his own groceries, another's daughter takes piano lessons while yet a third is available with aspirin or sleeping pills after the pharmacy closes. Sounds just like my bourgeois neighbors at home. If that is the point, then it gushes with over-simplicity. Adolf Hitler, too, was probably just as cute when he blew out the candles on his eighth birthday cake.
Then there's the issue of the camera work, where unimaginative framing and sequencing only serve the movie's discontinuity. Witness the messy hit at the Athens hotel. There were also far too many of those slow head and shoulder zooms that added nothing except draw attention to the zoom. The contrived outdoor banquet exchanges at the French country estate comes to mind. Table prayers in France? I've seen it once in twenty years here. And they don't pick apples in June either, even sour ones. All about as believable as Mathieu Amalric's flaunting a wad of $100,000 in the broad daylight of a Paris café. These are undercover agents??
If Mossad is a model of espionage and covert operations on the planet earth, the Spielberg version portrays them as latter day Keystone Cops. On the Amsterdam houseboat, the pocket silencers allow the victim, shot twice in the chest, to gingerly skirt her assassins, saunter over to the kitchen, pet and kiss the cat, walk a little further and ease herself into a rocking chair before realizing her barfly days were over. She could have pulled that gun from the drawer in a fraction of the time.
In another preposterous hit scene, our boys dress up as women and proceed to feign an arm-in-arm stroll along the docks of Beirut (like most Middle Eastern women naturally would do on a dark, deserted and forbidding night), yet don't 'surprise' the guards in the least. They then charge fifteen-man strong up a flight of stairs, blotch the operation by resorting to not-so-silent submachine guns, and retreat back down the stairs straight into the flying bullets of the Fedayeen before escaping into the night without a scratch. What a cartoon.
The clincher of convolution of course takes place near the finale, where Avner orgasms to the tune of the climactic Munich airport shoot-out. Begging the point that he could hardly have flashed back to the Palestinians on the tarmac since he'd been doubting their very culpability all throughout the film, the perverse suggestion that our hero or any other normal male on this planet could even have an erection much less an ejaculation thinking about murder and mayhem just boggles the mind.
Munich is a simple revenge story embarrassingly cloaked in an ever so sheer veneer of topical respectability that make it no more convincing than the Charles Bronson Death Wish series of the 1980s. I, like many, long for the old unique Spielberg touch when it was fresh with Indiana Jones swapping the whip for a gun in the bazaar or the kicking of the chair out from under the hangman's noose in Schindlers's List. When vignettes such as these were laced together back then, there were the makings of storytelling genius. Today, Spielberg is trying hard, too hard, to be Spielberg. And when he fails to find himself, he opts at turns for a bit of Kubrick here, a bit of Hitchcock there. The end result doesn't fly. If Munich is about Home, Spielberg should go there and stay put. It's over. Time to retire.