director
Steven Spielberg
screenwriters
Tony Kushner
Eric Roth
based on
the book Vengeance by
George Jonas
producers
Kathleen Kennedy
Barry Mendel
Steven Spielberg
Colin Wilson
cinematographer
Janusz Kaminski
music
John Williams
editor
Michael Kahn
cast
Eric Bana (Avner)
Daniel Craig (Steve)
Ciarán Hinds (Carl)
Mathieu Kassovitz (Robert)
Hanns Zischler (Hans)
Ayelet Zurer (Daphna)
Geoffrey Rush (Ephraim)
Michael Lonsdale (Papa)
Lynn Cohen (Golda Meir)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 164m
u.s.
release: 12/23/06
video
availability: TBA
official
website
other steven
spielberg films
reviewed on this website:
- a.i.:
artificial intelligence
- amistad
- catch
me if you can
- close
encounters of the third kind
- e.t.
(special edition, 2002)
- jurassic
park
- the
lost world: jurassic park
- minority
report
- saving
private ryan
- schindler's
list
- the
terminal
- war
of the worlds
|
Steven Spielberg has always
known how to tell a story, but I remember a time when he also
knew how to end one. In recent years, his work has been marred
by flailing last-minute attempts at redemption, meaning, depth.
It started, I'm afraid, with that awful "I could have sold
this pin" scene near the end of Schindler's
List, and at the finish of Spielberg's new film
Munich we witness the conflicted hero Avner Kaufman (Eric
Bana) envisioning the slaughter of Israeli athletes while performing
husbandly duties atop his wife. It reminded me of a Morrissey
lyric, "In the midst of life we are in death, et cetera,"
from a Smiths tune whose title could also describe Avner: "Sweet
and Tender Hooligan." The scene is embarrassing. Is Spielberg
too powerful now to allow anyone in his sphere to tell him his
fly is open?
Spielberg's Saving
Private Ryan was an old-school war movie that strove
to say something larger; Munich is a traditional spy flick
that has similar designs on significance (and Oscars). When Spielberg
gets down to business, there's no director more economical. The
movie runs two hours and forty-four minutes but goes smoothly
and swiftly. In a whirlwind of media, we learn that nine Israeli
Olympic athletes have been kidnapped by Palestinian terrorists;
Spielberg and his longtime editor Michael Kahn turn it into a
global nightmare collage, with people all over the world reacting
in horror. It's the first of several parallels to 9/11, which
seems to have haunted Spielberg's work in 2005 (War
of the Worlds capitalized on the imagery, Munich
considers the wounded, affronted, vengeful aftermath)
Avner Kaufman, an Israeli Mossad
agent, is picked to lead four other men in an unofficial campaign,
blessed by Golda Meir, to hunt down and kill those involved in
the Munich massacre. Avner's crew includes the pugnacious Steve
(future 007 Daniel Craig), the dyspeptic Carl (Ciarán
Hinds), the forger Hans (Hanns Zischler), and the nervous toymaker
Robert (Mathieu Kassovitz), whose talents are put to more brutal
use building bombs. When the men plot and scam and pay their
way towards their targets, and when not one of the assassinations
goes as planned, Spielberg is in his pure-cinema element, working
with sheer movement and suspense. There's about an hour's worth
of greatness in Munich.
As has been pointed out elsewhere,
Spielberg also genuflects toward the film classics of the period
(1972-1973), right down to the naturalistic color scheme out
of a William Friedkin thriller. Francis Coppola gets a substantial
nod: a thwarted attempt on a terrorist bigwig recalls Vito Corleone's
stalking of the vicious Mafioso in The Godfather Part II,
and when Avner rips his phone apart looking for bugs (or worse)
it's right out of The Conversation. Spielberg can still
stage violence so that it brings you up short: assassination
here is a sticky, ugly business, and when Avner and his men close
in on a half-naked Dutch hit woman the movie willingly crosses
the line into sickening. What makes the scene all the more hideous
is the incongruous humanity of the dying woman reaching for her
cat, for a final snuggle.
Munich presents terrorism and vengeful retaliation
for terrorism as two sides of the same nasty coin, in perpetual
spin. Spielberg knows there are no pat answers and offers none,
other than that the Arab-Israeli conflict is foul and unresolvable.
He gives voice to all sides and takes none, though there's more
than a hint that America's retaliatory violence after 9/11 is
on Spielberg's mind as well. (An image at the end shows us the
New York skyline circa 1973 -- with, of course, the World Trade
Center still standing.) In the end, Munich is a chastened
and inchoate work, atoning for the very spy-movie gambits it
has thrilled us with. Perhaps the world weighs too heavily on
Spielberg for him to be a simple entertainer anymore (his 2002
Catch
Me If You Can is about the closest he's come lately to
the fanciful touch he used to have). He has the power and skill
to get these muddled, clenched historical films made, but that
doesn't mean he's the right director to make them.
|
