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Munich
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Steven
Spielberg’s Munich is close kin to Martin
Scorsese’s The Aviator (2004) – a horrifyingly awful film made by an acclaimed,
talented and extremely well-resourced director.
The
title will lead many viewers to expect a dramatisation of the tragic events at
the Munich Olympics in 1972, when eleven Israeli athletes were murdered by
Palestinian terrorists – a topic covered in exacting detail in Kevin
Macdonald’s documentary One Day in
September (1999). But this part of the story is seen only in TV clips and
occasional, overheated flashbacks.
Spielberg’s
saga, written by Tony Kushner and Eric Roth, is about the secret Mossad squad
sent around the world to kill various participants and masterminds of the
Munich massacre. It is based fairly closely on the much-debated, non-fiction
book Vengeance by George Jonas –
right down to the most incredible details, such as the shadowy existence of “Le
Group”, an underground French organisation which funds all terrorists but has
no political program other than to bring down governments.
Spielberg,
of course, is not content to make an action film spiced with the frisson of
some social topicality. At every opportunity, he crams in invented details
which turn Munich into a weird parable
of the modern family. The head of the hit squad, Avner (Eric Bana), mourns his
dead father, and has a baby on the way. Top dog at Le Group, known only as
“Papa” (Michael Lonsdale), has problems with his own stinky kids (played by
Mathieu Amalric and Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi), but acts as a surrogate Dad to
Avner. Our hero even has two mothers to
cope with – his biological one, plus Golda Meir (Lynn Cohen from Sex and the City). And his squad of
merry killers is also a replacement family.
What
does this all mean? It means that Spielberg is scrambling for something to say,
straining for significance – and failing miserably. When it comes to the core
of the story, Spielberg has only a single, guiding thought: that violence is a
bad, bad thing, and that revenge killing merely begets more revenge killing
(aka The Tarantino Alibi). But Spielberg takes his sweet time getting to that
earth-shattering revelation. For a long while, he lets us simply enjoy the
thrilling spectacle of Avner and his men hunting down suspects, planting bombs,
and engaging in street shoot-outs. It is standard Hollywood movie hypocrisy.
Spielberg
is, to put it mildly, an uneven director. He is at his best when he works in a
visceral, intuitive way, from his unconscious, in films such as Empire of the Sun (1987), A.I. (2001) and The War of the Worlds (2005).
And he is at his worst in the string of preachy, message pictures inaugurated
by The Color Purple (1985). But
Spielberg, like Scorsese, is no great political thinker, and his “give peace a
chance” message here is laughable.
What’s
worse, his artistic and storytelling judgement has deserted him almost
completely in Munich. There is no
trick too cheap for this film. Spielberg shows us Avner gaunt, wasting away and
“dehumanised” by the violence he commits – except when the sound of his
new-born baby down a phone line makes him weep. A scene where terrorists of
opposed ideological persuasions bond over American soul music is excruciating.
And
Avner’s personal ”vision” of the truth of the Munich killings, right in the
midst of the worst sex scene in American cinema history, caps off this mess
perfectly.
POSTSCRIPT
(February 2006)
Shortly
after the newspaper appearance of the above review, the World
Socialist Web Site ran a blistering
denunciation, by their Australian correspondent Richard Phillips, of the critiques (and the critics) of Munich. Perhaps to the surprise of Phillips and
his editors, I was, at the time, a regular reader of WSWS. Here is my reply, which they duly published:
Dear
Editors –
Being
an avid reader of WSWS, I was amused
to see myself called out in Richard Phillips’ piece “’Progressive’ Australian
Film Critics Denounce Spielberg’s Munich”
(February 17, 2006). By an uncanny coincidence, I read on the same day Salvador
Dalí’s famous essay on the paranoiac critical method: “It is enough that the
delirium of interpretation should have linked together the implications of the
images of the different pictures covering a wall for the real existence of this
link to be no longer deniable.”
Phillips
practices paranoiac criticism with a fervour that would have pleased old Dalí:
it is enough for him to note that both I (and another critic, Julie Rigg) come
to roughly the same conclusion as the “pro-Israel opponents of Munich” – namely, that it is a very bad
film – to “prove” beyond any doubt that we all share and propagate the same,
sinister, despicable, right-wing ideology.
This
is a laughably absurd conclusion, well below the best journalistic and
intellectual standards (fast receding into the past) of WSWS. The fact that both I and some right-winger declare our
dislike of this movie proves or demonstrates nothing more than that any film –
especially a confused, contradictory one like Munich – is going to give rise to diverse evaluations at every point along the political
spectrum (as, indeed, this film has already done). The “coincidence” of two
negative opinions does not reveal any malign conspiracy of public discourse.
Yet
Phillips keeps banging on in a tone of exposé, comically recalling the
harangues of a Stalinist show-trial. My review of Munich “reveals” my
“political orientation: opposition to any challenge to the current status quo
in the Middle East and any plea for an alternative”. I “have no fundamental
differences with the pro-Israel opponents” of the film. I “reveal”, yet again,
that my “opposition is from the right”. I am apparently “deeply nervous” about
the sea-change in contemporary culture. Mine is a “right-wing denunciation”,
so, of course, I have been “posturing” all along as a “progressive
intellectual” with “left-liberal pretensions”. Cast out as a propagandising
leftie by Australia’s conservative ideologue Andrew Bolt, and cast out as a
closet conservative by World Socialist Web Site: such is the life of a working
film critic.
All that for not liking Munich the way Mr Phillips does? None of
it is true, and here is why: my stated reasons for disliking the movie are not
at all the same as your average “pro-Israel opponent”. Phillips, for his part,
cannot even grasp why many fine, progressive people have attacked or doubted
this movie: its agenda as a thriller, the way it stokes its audience to enjoy the killing (it’s so exciting!)
and then do a moral flip-flop and “criticise revenge killing” is the type of
standard Hollywood hypocrisy my review targeted. Not to mention the barrage of
cheap, dramatic tricks which show how little Spielberg has to say about the
complexities of the issues his film raises (and, I would argue, exploits).
In the course of his smear, Phillips
quotes no other piece I have written since 1979, only that I am an “expert”
(those quotation marks again!) on the Mad Max movies, and hence obviously a supporter/purveyor of “prevailing and debased
social currents”. Actually, my book contains a political critique of those
movies; but, more importantly, I am impressed by Phillips’ certainty that
anyone who writes about an action movie is automatically not-on-the-left. You
just wiped off many great and progressive film critics there, Comrade …
Yours sincerely …
Mr Phillips was granted a further
right of reply by WSWS, which begins: “Fair enough, my polemical
assault on your review was, on further reflection, excessive. In particular,
I’m prepared to concede that your dislike of Spielberg’s Munich does not make
you a defender of the status quo in the Middle East or signify that you share
the political views of the Zionist opponents of the film”. Whew! He then
proceeds to reiterate the terms of his initial critique, claiming that my
approach “smacks of cynicism”. You can’t win ‘em all …
MORE Spielberg: Catch Me If You Can, The Color Purple, The Lost World, Saving Private Ryan, Schindler's List, The Terminal, The Fabelmans © Adrian Martin January/February 2006 |
