A misguided mess of a movie

Rating: 4/10 (2 January 2006)

First, I really don't care how the mainstream or reactionary Jewish community reacts to this film, and I'm not interested in accentuating the positive in this movie, I thought the movie showed weak and/or bad faith and I'm still not clear on why this movie was made. Further, I'm indifferent to whether this movie is true to life or simply made up, I'm only interested in what the movie seems to be doing in a relatively unsubtle way. Oh yeah, I'm also a Jewish American
The main message is something we have all heard before, "why do they make us act the way we do" (WDTMUATWWD) everything else flows from this, although there is some small attempts at getting a Palestinian perspective, its mainly add on and clearly is not a part of the main "tone/structure" of the movie. Any details of the lives of the Palestinians, one is a poet/translator, another an upper class/refine man living in a fancy part Paris with his wife and daughter (who plays the piano in front of the bomb maker killer) is inundated by the personal life of the main Jewish assassin/murderer/soldier (take your pick). The audience has no real choice not to sympathize with this person because we learn so much about him and to a lesser extent, the other killers. And all, to a greater or lesser extent, seem like pretty okay people. So, even if you knew nothing about the Israeli Palestinian conflict, Munich, Sabra and Shatilla, etc, it doesn't matter, you would end up rooting for the main killer as a function of how much time we spend with them and how little with their antagonists.
Even if you think the actions necessary, what is the point of making the killers sympathetic? They have a terrible job to do, are probably pretty awful people to be in this business in the first place?. Unless, whether intended or not by the film maker, the terrible damage being done to Eric Banna's psyche falls under the rubric of WDTMUATWWD. This also dovetails with the mytho-poetic Israeli purity of arms, "yes we kill but we kill because we have to and we kill only those we have to", (there are variants on this, see Operation Iraqi freedom). Perhaps this damage was to be a microcosm of what is happening in Israeli society generally as a result of the occupation, this is unclear compared to the larger structures of the movie.
Too, there is a great deal of back and forth, as you might have heard, between the assassins which bolsters this myth of troubled/tragic/noble killers. And this isn't just a problem of the peculiar Israeli WDTMUATWWD syndrome, its a general settler colonial problem whereby the occupiers feelings, motivations and actions are always privileged relative to those occupied. We see this all the time in the NY Times, extensive coverage of a suicide bomb going off in a Jerusalem bus, lots of stories about those on the bus killed, (as it should be), but when it comes to Palestinians, we almost always only get numbers here , or, as in this movie, the most glancing reference to the fact that the Palestinians have lives too.
There is also something else quite troubling that occurs in the movie, the main assassin is always having PTSD flashbacks to the events that took place at the Munich Olympics, which doesn't make any sense at all from the stand point of the character, he wasn't there. A particularly troubling scene at the end of the movie has him "flashing back" in the middle of having sex with his wife. This is a the "imperial we" type of flash back, we are all meant to flash back, the killer doesn't flash back to all those he personally killed, some gruesomely, but to the seeming original sin of Munich so we don't forget the primal cause in all this mess. This is Spielberg at his didactic worst, very ham fisted.
On a lesser level, the idea of the upstanding assassin has him not going to bed with the comely hit woman at the bar, only to pass on this privilege to his comrade. (who she kills) This side story sucks, so I won't go into details, except to note that apparently the main assassin will kill with abandon yet not cheat on his wife, I suppose this is believable at some level, but it certainly feeds into the purity of arms idea of upstanding soldiers, pure in all respects.
And, believe it or not, Ehud Barak is mixed in, his execution of a leading Palestinian terrorist/activist/militant/family man, while dressed in drag is featured. Not clear what this was meant to show, but having an actual personage who was the leader of a country portrayed (accurately) as a close up, hands on assassin puts an extra spin on somewhat current events, particularly given Barak's explicitly racist statements about Palestinians.
The scenes with Golda Mier made my blood boil, a nice little housewife fighting courageously against all those who, for no apparently rational reason want to kill Jews. Again, it's a question of focus, if Palestinian leaders would have been portrayed thoughtfully mulling options then we would have a ball game, of course this doesn't happen. The recent movie Paradise Now was far better at problematizing the violence, it was short and very low budget. James Journey to Jerusalem was also much better in this respect, going to the core of current Israeli society. It's a question of focus, artistic vision and simply put, courage. The film maker somehow lost all of this and I'm really sorry for T. Kushner (who I admire and respect), but he got sucked into a misguided effort.