Munchen ist phantastisch

Rating: Null/10 (28 December 2005)

I have seen Steven Spielberg's new film 'Munich'.
I am largely an admirer of Spielberg's body of work. I think Schindler's List a chilling, singular film of a harrowing story, some sequences in Saving Private Ryan as close to actual combat as anything I've ever seen in film and Duel a model of efficiency in storytelling on an obvious budget. To a lesser degree, I enjoy his science-fiction/fantasy although this is not my favorite genre.
And now he's made a film which takes its story from the murder of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics in Munich, Germany, by Palestinian 'terrorists'.
I use quotation marks here because the very term 'terrorist' has been so prostituted over the last forty years, made to serve obvious and, in some instances blatant, political agendas, it has become a largely useless term, it has become hard to know when it is being used truly to identify someone as a terrorist or even if terrorist is still a meaningful word at all.
I wondered here about Spielberg's choice to make this film and what exactly his 'story' would be. I trust Spielberg, I didn't want to be disappointed, but my antennae go up when a filmmaker decides to make a film, the very essence of which may turn on the pernicious usurpation of the term 'terrorist'.
Spielberg has been a gifted filmmaker from the beginning and, over the years, he has developed these gifts to a high degree. The film was visually and emotionally evocative, powerful will be a frequently used term. Nuance, however, has never been his hallmark, I wondered how deeply the contrasts would be drawn, how much black and how much white, how much gray.
Spielberg is a much greater filmmaker than I had imagined.
Oh, as drama, it has its faults. It seems overly long and some plot devices seem contrived, for instance, the general level of (in)competence displayed by the Israeli assassins should have been explored (it is not) and the family of French information brokers seemed implausible. But next to the remarkable achievement of successfully threading a moral needle which has eluded us all, these things grow pale indeed.