**** (out of ****)
Starring Eric Bana, Daniel Craig, Mathieu Kassovitz, Ciarian Hinds, Mathieu Amalric, and Geoffrey Rush
Directed by Steven Spielberg & written by Tony Kushner and Eric Roth, from the book “Vengeance” by George Jonas
2005
164 min R
Ignore all the controversy for a moment and you’ll see what makes Steven Spielberg’s “Munich” a great film: it is a superb, exhilarating, wrenching thriller. Each murderous encounter is stretched almost to the limit, each victim is humanized, each blood pack bursts at just the right moment. Whereas Spielberg tripped up a little with “War of the Worlds” earlier this year, which felt kind of fakey, he never steps wrong with “Munich.” In that mysterious way of Hitchcock, the perils of characters we have just met—who seldom speak, and who sometimes aren’t even subtitled when they do—become twists in our bellies. And as for the characters we follow through the entire movie, this is what Spielberg does best: we care what happens next.
In fact, one of Hitchcock’s later films was the fine and interesting spy thriller “Topaz,” which actually won him Best Director at the National Board of Review the year it was released. In it, Hitchcock presents a group of spies mechanically going about their duties, but never says whether their cause is righteous or not. The spies in “Munich” perpetually hem and haw over the justness of their mission, but—like “Master & Commander” from a couple years ago—there’s no music or heroic camera angles to back up the characters self-justifications. If anything, the spies are so human that their self-justifications are undercut, simply because we know they’re trying more to convince themselves then each other.
This ambivalence has been a cause of much controversy surrounding “Munich,” because the film is inspired by true events. But Spielberg uses this ambivalence to heighten the suspense; he knows that beyond the questions of “will I succeed?” and “will I survive?” is “should I have succeeded and survived?” If Spielberg can be criticized for anything, it is using these real-life events simply to wind up a suspense machine. And, even if he did, I don’t care, because the machine works that well.
The best description of “Munich” I’ve heard so far (and I forget who said it) is that the movie is a Rorschach test, not so much a window into the minds of Spielberg and screenwriters Tony Kushner and Eric Roth, but a mirror. It doesn’t answer our questions but, in the true form of art, ask us things that may not have occurred to us. If we live with the black-and-white morality of a “Lord of the Rings” film, we cease to be human, in much the same way no one seems very human in a “Lord of the Rings” film.
Of course, the other element that makes a great thriller is that stuff blows real good. Spielberg directed a little film called “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” which is probably the final word on stuff getting blowed up. With “Munich,” he goes for realism (or what I imagine realism to be) in gunfights, in which men stand close to each other, shoot frantically, miss, and scramble for sorry cover. A grazed arm can cause instant death, while other men keep standing and shooting even as their chests are perforated over and over again.
The lead spy is played by Eric Bana, essentially reprising his role in Wolfgang Petersen’s “Troy.” Israel replaces Troy, and he is as an honest husband and expectant father. Bana (“Blackhawk Down,” “Hulk”) is, so far, not so much an actor of enormous range but great self-knowledge. His face is naturally introverted, sympathetic, and always a little sad, and he is wise enough to realize his role in “Munich” requires little else of him than to let this face be the mirror where we project our own conflicts. Future 007 Daniel Craig is among his crew—as ruthless as 007 ought to be—as is “Amelie” co-star and “Gothika” director Mathieu Kassowitz, and each occupy various places on the spectrum of moral certainty.
There’s an English paper in how “Munich” is perpetually linking sex, food, birth, and children with violence; perhaps the link is as simple as a visual representation of the Israeli PM asserting that every culture must, on occasion, step outside its own morality to protect that which it holds dear. Who knows? Certainly no one in “Munich” seems all that convinced.
Finished Monday, January 9th, 2006
Copyright © 2006 Friday & Saturday Night
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