Spielberg Climbs Another Mountain

Munich Directed by Steven Spielberg

How do you show the effect murder has on the cosmos? Steven Spielberg essays that question in an awesomely expressive moment of his new film Munich. A scene depicting the massacre of Israel’s athletic team by the Palestinian Liberation Organization’s “Black September” terrorists at the 1972 Olympics in Munich, Germany, contains a shocking, matter-of-fact portrayal of slaughter. During the mayhem, a young man is riddled by bullets and blood spurts out of his body, spraying the wall behind him. Spielberg dissolves from those pink and red gore patterns to the fiery sunlit tint on clouds being viewed through an airplane window by Avner (Eric Bana), who’s employed by Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence. Avner’s what Saul Bellow would call a dangling man: suspended—airborne—on a mission to track down and kill the engineers of the Munich slaying.

Avner’s imagining of the Munich horror suggests a flashback, yet it isn’t; it’s both historical recall and spiritual recoil. When that bloodshed blurs into the heavens, it creates a stunned realization unlike any other aftermath of violence seen in the movies. Battle scenes may typically break up, soak and despoil the earth, but this transition abstracts mortal combat. By showing the celestial imprint of murder, Spielberg suggests that it disrupts one’s consciousness. So Avner’s nightmare wakes him—not at sunset as a banal filmmaker might literalize the shift from red-to-red, sadness to depression, but at dawn. That’s Spielberg’s singular, personal vision in one image. He isn’t interested in the cynical politics of doom but the poetry of humanism which Munich portrays through Avner’s struggle to keep living—and live sanely—despite the world’s horror and the countdown to his own deadly task.

Striving to sustain moral continuity with the virtues taught in Judaism, Avner feels obligated to act on behalf of the state. His relation to the cosmos gives Munich depth that viewers of espionage thrillers are unaccustomed to exploring. Assessing Avner’s scruples is Spielberg’s way of elevating the assassin genre so that it contains the moral inquiry of the highest forms of drama. You have to compare it to Greek tragedy because Hollywood has inured most viewers to the intricacies of consciousness, of violence-with-consequence, of moral certitude. In both aesthetic and political terms, Spielberg has taken the high road.

But that doesn’t mean Munich peddles lofty bromides. The sun doesn’t rise over a happily united Holy Land. Actually, Munich may be the most down-and-dirty espionage movie ever made—more moving and exacting than any film produced during the Cold War. Call Spielberg “The artist who came in from the cold,” bringing humane standards to a medium that regularly earns profit by the cool exploitation of man’s inhumanity to man. Scenes of killing, and the moments of cunning that lead up to death, are done here with absolute, graphic realism. (Nothing is cheaply ironic like blood splashing on a portrait of Jesus in Capote’s massacre scene.) Spielberg’s almost casual, reportorial observation of murder is intimate, shocking and reverberates long after the movie is over. Watching the savagery in the Israeli athlete’s dormitory feels so much like an existential trap that it has dull, dreadful terror. That refusal to “wow” proves Spielberg’s respect for history; it is shown through his exquisitely subtle technique that calls on our imagination and thus moves one to utter sorrow.

Unfortunately, some people consider themselves beyond such feeling. Their objections to Spielberg’s sensitivity (suspicious that it is manipulative and opportunistic), shows nothing more than their emotional detachment from human experience. Accessing compassion used to be the basis of moviegoing. Munich’s power comes from Spielberg’s insistence that audiences once again feel a basic repulsion about killing; that they be willing to rethink the political and artistic conventions that offer bloodlust as an acceptable solution for moviegoers, terrorists or avengers.

Virtually reversing the axiom spoken in Schindler’s List (“To save one life is to save the whole world entire”), Spielberg uses Avner’s story, inspired by the Mossad’s actual—rarely admitted—mission of taking lives in revenge, to mourn the degradation of mankind entire. His focus on Avner and the stealth team of killers who help carry out his gruesome errands invites contemplation of our civilization-wide depravity.

Each man in Avner’s murder squad has individual feelings about responding to the Black September group’s Munich atrocity: Steve (Daniel Craig), a blue-eyed embodiment of Sabra spirit, is driven by vengeance; Robert (Matthieu Kassouvitz), a young bomb-maker, shares a sense of mission, even though it takes him outside his expertise; Carl (Ciaran Hinds) is older and resigned to the duty but is ethically split; while Hans’ (Hanns Zischler) quiet maturity masks lethal resolve. Their dedication to Israel, combined with expressed hostility or ambivalence about their targets, makes the movie suspenseful in a more meaningful way than an ordinary action film. Spielberg doesn’t create superficial excitation; every action (Avner casing a Mediterranean honeymoon hotel as a potential bomb site), every violent set-piece (a botched mission that turns into a nighttime street shootout), tests what each of these counter-assassins believes in.

Munich is a reminder of the morality that mere politics would have us forget. It applies principled discipline to acts that have been sanctioned by personal passion in the political world and by slack ethics in Hollywood. Spielberg and screenwriters Tony Kushner and Eric Roth refuse any form of vicious delectation. Their globe-trotting storyline, as Avner’s death team hunt down Black September across Europe, coincidentally takes in an itinerary of Western subterfuge. Something tragically fated emanates from each locale (Italy, France, Greece, England, Holland, Brooklyn), as if the legacy of Western history with its stories of conquest, domination, subjugation and warfare (the pogroms of Russia, the horrors of WWII and the partitioning of Palestine), had led ineluctably to Mossad’s secretive brutality.

There hasn’t been a historical screenplay with such fleet action—ideological discussions paced by momentous events—since Amistad. Spielberg has developed a special sophistication. Note the extraordinary moment when Avner receives his calling from inside Israeli government’s inner sanctum and meets Prime Minister Golda Meir (Lynn Cohen, combining soft guile and iron will—an uncanny performance). The presence of recognizable real-life figures evokes those scenes of Angels in America where historical personages intersect the modern plane of the living protagonists. Meir tells Avner, “Every civilization finds it necessary to renegotiate compromise with its own values.” Politics, the past and prophecy converge on Avner’s head through Golda, their sly agent. He is immediately launched into future history—which becomes the forward movement of the film we watch.

How do you convey what murdering does to a person’s soul? That transformation, that damnation, is what Avner’s personal agony reveals. Before receiving his assignment, news of the Munich massacre is broadcast to the world through a montage of intercutting TV news images of the dead Jewish athletes with dossier photos of the dead Palestinians—a two-sided media eulogy, a double-edged tragedy. Avner takes on this bifurcated awareness; being both a Sabra and a young husband with a pregnant wife, Daphna (Ayelet Zurer). This son of Israel experiences the average man’s overwhelming confrontation with political obligation. His youth, sexual avidity and casual assumptions are all put in doubt. Eric Bana has a good face for this—boyish yet virile. His simple, dark eyes seem to get darker the more he kills (he acts with his irises)—the face of a man who’s seen too much. Through the enormity of Avner’s pain, Munich addresses that of  the conscientious world. It even enfolds the young Palestinian men’s similar crisis in Paradise Now. And when Avner holds his newborn baby in his arms, fortunate filmgoers may recall the scene in Bellocchio’s Good Morning, Night when a politically-conflicted young radical cradled an infant: both images suggest the personal caretaking of a country’s future (Italy’s, Israel’s), but they also depict a young soldier’s confusion about his innocent self.

Spielberg gets so deep into the psychic tortures of his conflicted protagonist (Avner warns Carl, “Stop chasing the mice in your head”) that the simultaneously meditative and pell-mell narrative of Avner’s journey in hell may confound viewers who want a routine action-thriller—a James Bond movie, a Dirty Dozen update, a Usual Suspects correction, probably even The Delta Force. But Munich makes no attempt to satisfy such juvenile taste. It is the film’s soulfulness, not simply its narrative efficiency, that makes it compelling. While showing the forces that cost Avner his peace, Spielberg undertakes to revise the genres that have distorted or trivialized our understanding of politics and morality.

Most action films never require us to think beyond the gears clicking in a killer’s head; Munich achieves multileveled postmodern analysis by paralleling Avner’s killing mission to the recent cinematic history of political distrust. Elaborate sequences, such as the plan to install a bomb in the Parisian apartment where a Palestinian lives with his wife and daughter, hold us in a moral, negotiating vice—like those daring, suspended-time sequences in Peckinpah’s The Killer Elite and Demme’s The Manchurian Candidate. Avner’s deliberation becomes our own—that is, if we don’t simply hunger for bloodshed. It’s as if Avner becomes our moral surrogate when he and his men feel unaccountably besieged. They’re suspicious of the boat they rent for a journey; Avram dismantles a bed (looking for a bomb) when fear prevents him from sleeping. He—and we—enter the paranoid world of The Conversation where the not-innocent are overwhelmed by their own guilt.

How brave that Spielberg calls the U.S.A.’s alliance with Israel to such moral account—but does so through the familiar codes of filmwatching (and more rigorously than the trifling Syriana). Munich’s amazing subplot of Avner’s collusion with a family of French mercenaries (Michael Lonsdale as Papa and Matthieu Almauric as the son, Louis, who supply weapons plus the names and locations of PLO agents) rewrites Francis Ford Coppola’s political oeuvre (from The Godfather to the French colonists’ dinner sequence in Apocalypse Now Redux). Coppola’s deluxe panoply of American family- and social-consciousness informs this concise story of political and familial corruption. The baroque intrigue of hideously complacent bourgeois operatives and the tension of father-son competitiveness taunts the severe lack that fatherless Avner feels in his own life. Engaging such a well-defined Oedipal myth reflects Avner’s tribal guilt. We’re brought inside the terrible unofficial network of international politics without overlooking the way personal inclinations affect political activity.

Next, Spielberg and Kushner boldly shift from Papa and Louis’ demoralizing seduction to Avner being praised by his mother (Gila Almagur). “A place on earth,” she intones. “We have a place on earth at last.” Her land-poor satisfaction recalls the avarice and selfishness the bourgeois French family exhibited. The tenets of homeland venality contrast Avner’s visionary insight of blood in the clouds—the intuition that man is part of everything, as is God. By this point, Avner’s disgust with the worldly aims of war allows us to see through his mother’s exultation—to see it as morally pathetic. This moment reflects back on the Meir scene of the mother as politician and, again, Avner is pressured by his love for everything this woman represents. Nothing in even Jean Renoir’s great oeuvre matches this ambivalence. Avner is stretched between devotion and uncertainty. When Louis tells him, “We don’t like any governments. We’re ideologically promiscuous,” his bad example only facilitates Avner’s sins.

Today’s movie culture has so thoroughly written off the concept of sin that any movie ridiculing it (from Hellboy and My Summer of Love to Squid and the Whale) is guaranteed to be widely praised. This fondness for transgression might explain the trouble Spielberg has run into with Munich. He explicates a grievous sense of wrong-doing that communicates best to those who are open to an Ecumenical view of life (or if that term scares you, Judeo-Christian). Munich’s vision is truly Judeo-Christian in that it doesn’t confuse morality with politics. It uses one to test the other.

Surely it is the concept of sin that angers Spielberg’s current detractors. They don’t want any selfish or transgressive actions to be judged. The fact that Munich won’t settle for memorializing Israel’s revenge offends some propagandists’ self-justifying nihilism as surely as it also spoils (but enlightens) the action-movie party. Bloodseekers simply can’t get off on Munich’s complexity. Munich doesn’t arouse vengeance; it isn’t about “fairness” or even-handed allocation of blame. It’s about how retribution (eye-for-an-eye politics) unbalance the universe, how Avner unquiets his soul. Throughout his killings, Avner carries a consciousness of heritage and the weight of history; plus, a sense of justice challenged by a sense of responsibility—burdens. Miraculously, this story of mankind’s moral burden becomes the perfect summary for Spielberg’s 9/11 trilogy—the most significant event of 2005 cinema.