Spielberg on a roll

Rating: 9/10 (25 January 2006)

At first, Avner (Eric Bana) has few hesitations about his mission. Never mind that his wife is seven months pregnant; the men who killed 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics are animals. They respect no laws. Now is the time for Israel to show the world its strength, and Avner is honored to serve his country. Meeting his team members, he exchanges pleasantries. One is a doll-maker. The men marvel at Avner's cooking. The camaraderie is more appropriate to a fishing or hunting trip which, in a sense, it is.
Steven Spielberg's "Munich" is neither a paean to the Great Sacrifices required by war, nor a testament to the human spirit. Brilliant as they were in their own ways, neither "Saving Private Ryan" nor "Schindler's List," his recent political movies, share the ruthless detachment that "Munich" demonstrates toward its subject matter. It's hard to argue against the savage brutality of the Munich assassinations, and it's no surprise, really, that Avner and his team relish their task of locating the architects of the raid. When they find their first target, on his way home with his groceries, the banality of the situation gives them only momentary pause. Maybe they were expecting to interrupt a wild-eyed Palestinian in the act of eating a Jewish baby, but what they find is a regular person doing errands. He's an animal, though, and must be liquidated. The same goes for the target whose little girl answers the exploding telephone before him, and for the PLO's KGB contact, who makes pleasant small talk with Avner on a hotel balcony before being incinerated in his bed. Yet Avner can't confidently say that the Arab world is awed by Israel's show of force, particularly when letter bombs start showing up at Israeli embassies across the world, and when his source provides him with a fresh target who turns out to be the successor to a man he's just killed. These people are replaced faster than they can be erased. The letter bombs are a PLO response to the assassinations, which are a response to Munich, which was a response to
Spielberg takes no sides here, impressive for a director with a tendency to wear his heart on his sleeve, particularly when it comes to portraits of his own heritage. "Munich" in fact seems less interested in the particular politics of the Arab-Jewish conflict than with the cyclical dynamics that propel people to fight savagery with savagery. Spielberg presents figures so fixated on breaking one another's will that they're blinded to the long view. Perhaps it's when his compatriot congratulates him on a successful hit and the birth of his daughter in the same breath that Avner begins to reconsider the wisdom of his course, or maybe it's when he realizes that the same source that finds him his targets could just as easily find him FOR his targets. As he ultimately says to his Mossad contact, though, "there's no peace at the end of this." Spielberg has reasserted himself in recent years with some of the leanest, most focused films of his career. With two hard-edged and one half-brilliant sci-fi pictures ("Minority Report," "War of the Worlds," and "A.I.," respectively), a coming of age story that managed to avoid pathos ("Catch Me If You Can"), and now "Munich," I'm reminded why the guy is the biggest filmmaker in the history of the world. "Munich" is sophisticated and remarkably restrained by Spielberg standards. It doesn't profess to have The Solution to Middle East turmoil, or any number of other like conflicts, but it lays bare the folly of the strategies by which they have thus far been characterized.