Let the games begin: Munich

[richard]

Antony Quinn and Ben Lowry give their verdicts on Spielberg's latest movie based upon the true story of the Black September aftermath


Munich

Blood-spattered piety says Antony Quinn

Steven Spielberg's Munich arrives here after sustaining a hefty barrage of international flak, and the fact that it has alienated both Israeli and Palestinian commentators suggests that the director must have done something right. It is certainly a bold film for him to have made: Nazis and dinosaurs are (we hope) a thing of the past, but terrorists - or, if you prefer, freedom fighters - are an ever-present in today's headlines, and the merest hint that someone of Spielberg's stature is "taking sides" would always be likely to provoke howls of execration.

The film begins with the kidnapping and murder of 11 Israeli athletes by the terrorist cell Black September at the 1972 Munich Olympics, but its real subject unfolds in the aftermath. A revenge hit squad is assembled and, under the aegis of the Israeli prime minister Golda Meir, is dispatched to Europe to hunt down and execute those allegedly responsible for the massacre. The squad leader, a young man named Avner (Eric Bana), is forcefully reminded that his mission is so hush-hush that even Mossad won't admit its existence - though he must make sure to get receipts for everything. The provisional, makeshift nature of the operation is reflected in Avner's motley band of recruits, who include Ciaran Hinds in thick specs and porkpie hat, and Daniel Craig trying to disguise himself with a Sith-ifrican accent.

So begins a whistle-stop tour of capital cities - Rome, Paris, London, Athens - wherein one Palestinian plotter after another is targeted and slain. The suspense of these assassinations generally concerns the unreliable quality of their explosives, for their bomb "expert" (Mathieu Kassovitz) is a toymaker by profession. But the moral precariousness of their mission only gradually dawns on Avner and his cohorts. Can they know for sure that their targets were the men behind the Munich killings?

Their uncertainty is made explicit during a night-time raid on a hotel where the hitmen come armed with photographs of the suspects and, matching them by torchlight to various terrified faces, proceed to open fire. Indeed, the first Palestinian they kill in Rome, the poet Wael Zuaiter, turned out to be a case of mistaken identity - of which the script (by Tony Kushner and Eric Roth) makes no mention.

As the film digs deeper into this world of "intersecting secrecies" and shadowy middlemen (Michael Lonsdale plays a kind of terrorist matchmaker who's also a father figure to Avner) Spielberg tries to be even-handed, and at one stage allows a young PLO fighter to talk about his family and the idea of "home". But simply by dint of its hero being an Israeli, and a man loyal both to his family and his country, Munich keeps putting its thumb on the scale. In one of the better set-pieces Avner, realising that a young girl will be a collateral victim of their booby-trap bomb, successfully averts the danger, a nicety of feeling unlikely to be indulged by a real-life terrorist.

Towards the end, the toymaker-bomber offers an eloquent condemnation of what they've been doing when he says: "Suffering for thousands of years doesn't make you decent. We're supposed to be righteous - we're Jews." It's one of the film's few good lines, deflated in the very next scene when Avner leads a brutal revenge killing of a Dutch woman, as indefensible as anything you'll see in an Asian gangster movie.

And, just when you think it can't get worse, Spielberg pays homage to the finale of The Godfather by intercutting Avner having sex with his wife and a flashback to the Munich massacre. It must stand as the most ill-judged sequence of Spielberg's career. Munich seeks to present a balanced view of Arab-Israeli tensions, but all it adds to the picture is blood-spattered piety. Which isn't much use to anyone.

Spielberg is back on form says Ben Lowry

Steven Spielberg's take on the fallout from the Palestinian gang killing of 11 Israeli athletes in the 1972 Olympics is a masterful return to form, says Ben Lowry

It is 31 years since Steven Spielberg, at a remarkably young 28, burst into stardom with the release of the shark shocker Jaws.

The Hollywood director's films have made billions and warmed hearts across the world, and so he has struggled to be recognised as a serious film maker.

This despite the fact that Spielberg has been a cinematic pioneer ever since that initial success with Jaws.

This is the man who put the viewer right down on the Normandy beaches in Saving Private Ryan, amid the flying limbs, bullets and shrapnel, so that veterans said he had portrayed it as it was.

Spielberg won approval for authenticity from Holocaust survivors too, when in Schindler's List he took audiences inside a Nazi concentration camp.

And he showed us the terrible cruelty of a slave ship in Amistad, in which humans were transported across the Atlantic like battery hens.

Now, at 59, Spielberg has drawn us into the terrifying, paranoid world of terrorism and counter terrorism. It is a subject that should be of interest to every person on this island.

Munich follows a group of Israeli special agents who cross Europe to hunt and assassinate a Palestinian gang which killed 11 Israeli athletes in the 1972 Olympics. From the first scene, in which the Palestinians clamber over a gate into the Olympic Village, this is a nerve-shreddingly tense movie.

It is the dramatic norm for special forces-types to be shown as men of steel who can break in anywhere and bump off anyone without trace. Here, the Israeli operatives tremble and clumsily repeat orders when finally they track down their first target.

Some Israelis denounce Munich for its alleged moral equivalence between terrorists and those who battle against it. Pro-Palestinians say Spielberg romanticises Israeli murder. Others attack the film as a fantastical tale, based on a flawed book.

There may be some validity to these claims, but the relentless message of Munich is that violence begets violence.

One of the key lines in the film goes to Belfast actor Ciaran Hinds, in his impressive performance as Carl, a moderate member of the Israeli assassins. He asks: were we Jews not also violent when we created Israel?

The suggestion, furiously dismissed by his colleague Steve (Craig), is a wise reminder that cycles of violence go back very far.

You might say they go back to a time when man or his ancestors started to fight each other, rather than other animals - a point in history depicted in a memorable scene in the Kubrick epic 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which one ape-like character clubs another.

Such ruminations will not please those on either side of any conflict, including our own dispute, who are convinced that hostilities began with the other side. But Munich also seems to ask: to what extent can - or even should - we think outside our tribe?

Six months after he released a sentimental dud in War of the Worlds, Steven Spielberg has come roaring back to form with one of the best films so far this century - one that merits mention alongside the great movies of the last one.


Source
belfasttelegraph.co.uk