Steven Spielberg (2005)

The speed and brilliance of Michael Kahn’s editing make Munich very exciting to watch even on television:  in the cinema its visceral power must have been irresistible.   Steven Spielberg – working from a screenplay by Tony Kushner and Eric Roth, based on a book by George Jonas – tells the story of how a group of assassins, on behalf of the Israeli government, hunted down the Black September terrorists responsible for the deaths of eleven members of the Israeli team at the Munich Olympics in 1972.  The storytelling is highly accomplished yet the longer Munich goes on – and it runs 163 minutes – the less impressive it is.  I think there are two main and linked reasons for this.  The first is structural; the second is to do with Spielberg’s particular skills as a film-maker.

The succession of assassinations, in spite of there being nothing remotely comic about them, calls to mind Kind Hearts and Coronets and Spielberg’s bravura staging of each killing makes you inclined to admire them as political action thriller highlights – to start comparing and even ranking them.  ‘Operation Wrath of God’ takes the avengers all over the world to find the wanted men and you start to think of the assassinations as the Rome one, the Paris one, and so on.  In Rome, the Arab assassinee buys milk shortly before he’s ambushed and it comes as no surprise that the white liquid spills and merges with the victim’s blood cinematically:  this sequence, although it’s gripping, goes on a bit too long.  The next episode in Paris, however, is hard to fault, with its suspenseful complication involving the Black September man’s young daughter, who you fear is going to be blown up.   The circumstances of the killings reflect actual events whereas the assassins are fictional characters.  At one point they seem to be getting killed off as quickly as their quarry.  This too tempts you into unseemly thoughts about which squad will have the last man standing.

The upside of all this, though, is that because the action sequences dominate and command respect (as action sequences) you can also find yourself thinking the whole story is being handled in an admirably serious-minded way.  Kushner and Roth have certainly written plenty of crisp, intelligent dialogue, with less crude political point-making than might be expected.  But because Spielberg is absorbed in the technical challenges his shift in tone and emphasis in the last part of the film – to ask the question:  what did the Israelis’ revenge achieve? – is clumsy and anti-climactic, when it needs to be quietly devastating.   How you receive Munich as a moral essay is likely to depend on your political prejudices.  (Sally and I watched the film together. One of us was inclined to root for the Israelis; the other was readier to partake of the futility-of-vengeance theme.)  John Williams’s score, complete with its Schindler’s List echoes of Jewish lament, isn’t greatly helpful to Spielberg on this occasion.

The principal character is Eric Bana’s Amer Kaufman, a Mossad agent of German-Jewish descent, chosen by Golda Meir (whose bodyguard he once was) to lead the assassination squad.  Amer, who leaves his post in Mossad to take up the assignment, is the only member of the team whose personal life is described in any detail.  When the squad starts work, his wife (Ayelet Zurer) is pregnant with their first child.  The development as characters of the other members of the team – played by Daniel Craig, Ciarán Hinds, Mathieu Kassovitz and Hanns Zischler – is limited, and we see them largely from Amer’s point of view.  The contrast between Eric Bana’s musclebound physique and sensitive face is effective, and he gives a good, conscientious performance – although you get the sense he feels under pressure.  Perhaps Bana hasn’t quite the variety needed to bear the weight of this major role.   He’s well enough supported by the others even though Ciarán Hinds is, as usual, a strong but overemphatic presence.  As Amer’s handler, Geoffrey Rush brings a welcome vividness to the proceedings but he too isn’t quite right – he’s a bit too theatrically vivid.   The two best performances, by some way, come from Mathieu Amalric as Louis, a French informant to Amer’s team, and Michael Lonsdale, as Louis’s father.   The character of Louis, with his Alsatian dog and tendency to speak in gnomic epigrams, seems to belong in a more light-hearted political thriller but Amalric is very true.   His accented English is so odd that it sounds believable and his sense of humiliation in the presence of his father comes through convincingly.   In the latter role, Lonsdale is so quietly magnetic and incisive that he steals the show.

While violence is hardly in short supply, Spielberg deserves credit for the mayhem in Munich usually being startling because it means something (the arty images of shed blood in the Rome killing are uncharacteristic).  One of the toughest scenes in the film involves the murder by Amer and his remaining colleagues of a Dutch woman (Marie-Josée Croze).  They’ve discovered she’s a contract killer and responsible for the murder of the team member played by Ciarán Hinds.  They track this woman down in the Netherlands and shoot her.  She’s wearing only a bathrobe and it flaps open as she lies dying:  one of the men covers her up, another tells him to leave the robe open.  It’s a shocking moment but it makes good sense later on when the man who wanted the woman’s nakedness exposed expresses his regret for that (but not for her killing).   The scene also chimes disconcertingly with the moment we first met this woman, when she propositioned Amer in the bar of a London hotel.   The events of Munich in 1972 are well handled at the beginning – a splicing of live action and news footage.  But the later flashbacks to the Olympic village and Munich airport in Amer’s imagination are among the worst bits in Munich – especially an improbably realistic nightmare and a sequence in which Amer’s fevered imaginings are crosscut with him making aggressive love to his wife.

23 June 2012