Spielberg’s Take on Terrorism
By Eric Cox

Munich

Released by Universal Pictures and DreamWorks

Rated R for strong graphic violence, some sexual content, nudity, and language

 

It’s obvious that Steven Spielberg is feeling antsy about the war on terror. Two of his last three films, Minority Report (2002) and War of the Worlds (2005), were thinly veiled critiques of the Patriot Act and the Iraq war, respectively.

 

With his latest film, Munich—which, incidentally, ends with a lingering shot of the World Trade Center—Spielberg has tackled terrorism overtly. Moreover, this is no longer science fiction. Rather, as the film informs us from the beginning, it is “inspired by true events.”

 

Following the assassination of 11 Israeli athletes by a Palestinian terrorist group during the 1972 Munich Olympics, the Israeli clandestine service, the Mossad, recruited several agents to track down and kill each of the perpetrators of the assassination.

 

The film follows one of these agents, a man named Avner (Eric Bana), who, coincidentally, is about to become a father. (What would a Spielberg film be without a child?) The mild-mannered Avner is given an unlimited budget and command of a four-man crew of fellow Mossad agents. One of them is a toymaker who now constructs bombs. Two others, well past middle age, provide the voice of reason and moral conscience. The fourth is a trigger-happy hothead who at one point claims that the only blood he cares about is Jewish blood.

 

After paying $100,000 to a friend in a European leftist underground movement, Avner is introduced to a mysterious source who tells him the whereabouts of several of the men on Avner’s hit list. Avner and crew proceed to trail and plot the murder of the men, and during this time the film has the atmosphere of an upbeat buddy-procedural, along the lines of The Dirty Dozen (1967) or Ocean’s Eleven (1960 and 2001).

 

But inklings of doubt and unease among some of the men about their mission begin to intrude when Avner reveals to them that the names of the alleged terrorists on his list were provided by the Mossad with no evidence of their wrongdoing. Although this troubles some of his subordinates, Avner says he doesn’t need evidence: if his government says the men are guilty of something, that’s good enough for him.

 

However, Avner does eventually begin to question his mission when he, his men, and his new family become targets of attempted Palestinian reprisals. By the movie’s end, he will have turned his back on his country and degenerated into a state of paranoia and nervous breakdown.

 

It is during this second half of the film that Munich sinks into the depths of the ridiculous under the weight of its own ponderousness, as these Mossad agents begin wrestling with the morality of what they are doing.

 

Of course the point is that Spielberg, along with screenwriters Tony Kushner and Eric Roth, want us to wrestle with the morality of what Avner and his team are doing, but in effect Spielberg and company succeed only in turning their hero into an unsympathetic wimp.

 

Spielberg has always been at his best when telling stories to children. He has found it much more difficult to respect an adult audience. (Perhaps it is for this reason that he feels obliged to include one gratuitous scene of female nudity in his “grown up” films, as if these are intended to provide a sense of worldly sophistication?) From The Color Purple (1985) to Schindler’s List (1993) to Amistad (1997) and Saving Private Ryan (1998), Spielberg cannot resist pointing out Injustice, or delineating the Good Guys from the Bad Guys for us with the cinematic equivalent of bright neon signs.

 

In Munich, Spielberg appears to be ambivalent regarding his film’s central moral dilemma (which might be a sign of progress to some), but still he cannot help trying to force his characters, and us, to be ambivalent along with him, and the result is just as condescending.

 

Munich is based on George Jonas’s book Vengeance, and that would have been a good title for the film as well. Spielberg, Kushner, and Roth are clearly preoccupied by that theme, but they have missed the boat entirely by focusing on the wrong question. 

 

As Aeschylus showed more than 2,000 years ago in the Oresteia, the question is not whether revenge is morally justified—clearly, to the Greek mind, not to mention the Hebrew one, it was—but rather, where does the cycle of revenge end? That is indeed the most perplexing question in the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian struggle today, and had the film focused squarely on that question for two and a half hours, Spielberg may have produced something spectacular.

 

Instead, Munich slowly devolves into moral relativism and pacifism, which, whatever merits those two ideas might have, lend themselves neither to dramatic tension nor deep contemplation.

 

Spielberg may believe his recent work is on the cutting edge of his society’s biggest moral and political questions, but thus far, that work has been very dull indeed.

 

 

Eric Cox is a movie columnist for The American Enterprise Online. His column appears on Fridays.