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Munich December 18, 2005 |
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1993 was Steven Spielberg’s year. In the summer of ’93 he released “Jurassic Park”, one of the biggest Sci-Fi action adventure pictures of all time, and for my money, one of the best, and in the fall he was back with his most prestigious, deeply personal film to date, “Schindler’s List”, an Oscar-winning masterpiece that for the first time graphically presented the holocaust to a mainstream audience. To say that the two movies are different is a remarkable understatement – one a strict popcorn adventure about the downside of man’s need to scientifically explore that what shouldn’t be explored (namely, reinventing dinosaurs), and the other a heartbreaking black and white study of one man’s obsessive quest to save as many lives as possible in the face of Hitler’s unforgiving murder machine – but it proved that the world’s most famous director could wear two hats at the same time; entertainer, and scholar, and not even the likes of the brilliant “Saving Private Ryan” could quite match the heights at which he was performing in ’93. Twelve years later, Spielberg is having what looks like another 1993 type year, with a Sci-Fi blockbuster in the summer (“War of the Worlds”) that garnered favorable reviews and good box office, and a late season, nearly three-hour long Big Important Film Project that, like “Schindler’s List”, examines a Jewish massacre with graphic, sometimes philosophical intensity, but where the similarities between the two time periods ends, even if the new film, “Munich”, picks up steam and draws some Oscar consideration, is that, unfortunately, the product just isn’t as good. Spielberg is a great director, with a finely honed visual sophistication that few directors can match on such a consistent basis, and sure, “War of the Worlds” was great fun, obviously, and I loved every minute of it, up until the sappy ending, but it was pretty much just a big budget remake of an old, much copied story, hardly the inventive, thrill-a-minute mastery of “Jurassic Park”, an original and downright frightening family adventure yarn. Now “Munich”, as near great as it is at times, striving to understand a stalemate Middle Eastern quarrel with ideologies sympathetic to both sides, can’t help but pale in comparison to the overwhelming atrocities that were so brutally realized in “Schindler’s List” because, though no fault of the director’s, the already built in sadness of the concluded holocaust makes for a more gripping tale than the tragic, yet often confusing struggle for Jerusalem. It’s an important struggle, and Spielberg uses his considerable talents to best articulate why it’s such a seemingly impossible one to resolve, but that lack of a conclusion ultimately leaves a viewer, who has invested two hours and forty-five minutes of their time to the dense and complicated story, with a sense of emptiness. Of course one can take that as a symbol of the whole messy situation (and the main character’s own conflicted emotions towards his end purpose), but if the film is positioning itself as the Israel vs. Palestine “Schindler’s List”, than unfortunately there’s nothing in it as powerful as that final ten minutes in ‘Schindler’ where survivors gather in a procession to place stones on Oskar Schindler’s grave, thanking the long dead man for giving them the life the Nazi’s would have been all too quick to take away. That moment might be the crowning achievement of Spielberg’s brilliant career, and though “Munich” ends with a gorgeous shot of the late ‘70’s New York skyline, complete with a gloriously restored World Trade Center reminding us, intentionally or not, just how dangerous terrorist fundamentalism can get (be it 9/11 or the Munich Olympic massacre), it’s a vaporous capper to a film that has much weight, but regrettably too many weightless moments. Spielberg has done little promotion for “Munich” because he wants the viewer to judge the picture on its own merits, and sticking to that same philosophy, I won’t get into a detailed point-for-point analysis of the plot, for it’s kind of self explanatory after one sentence (five nationally diverse Jews take on an under cover mission for Israel to assassinate 11 Palestinian leaders who had a direct hand in planning the 1972 Olympic kidnapping that killed 11 Israeli athletes and further escalated the rift between the two nations for the rights to Jerusalem) of exposition, but it’s worth mentioning that it’s an entirely difficult story, often bloody and unforgiving, that blends political ideology and historical recreation with the kind of dangerous action filmmaking Spielberg employs so often, and so well. The film stars Eric Bana (of “The Hulk” infamy) as Avner, a Mossad agent who is hand picked by Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir to lead a European string operation (very hush-hush, and very illegal), with the help of shady French informants, to weed out and assassinate powerful Palestinian factions, as a kind of retribution for the Munich disaster, despite the moral conflictions it might have with Jewish religious teachings. “Every civilization finds it necessary,” she says in a powerful monologue, “to negotiate compromises with its own values.” Whether that’s a justification for vigilante justice, or a further declaration of war in an ongoing, confusing religious struggle that seems to get nowhere as the years progress, depends upon where your own sympathies lie, but for Spielberg, it’s the film’s basic ethical dilemma, one that haunts, and fuels, the characters as they jet around Europe, one murder at a time. The intense plotting of the murders is fascinating, and the effects the assassinations have upon the minds and souls of the men, especially Avner, a family man whose father was a hero in the Israeli army, is a great study in the psychology of murder and war, but as the running time ads up, and the murders keep piling on, the political importance of the story becomes less hard hitting, and confusion begins to set in as to who exactly the film is suggesting is the enemy (the PLO, the revenge happy Mossad, the shifty French informants, the American CIA), making the thrill of the action sequences, and the drama of the psychology, feel oddly baseless. The script by famed Jewish playwright Tony Kushner (“Angels in America”) becomes something almost akin to Film Noir mystery as the deeper Avner and his crew get in their mission, the more dangerous it becomes, with paranoia setting in at every step as to who exactly is pulling the strings, and more importantly, who wants them to cease, permanently, and Spielberg is savvy enough to know how to create a sense of paranoid urgency with complex moving camera setups and darkly lit nighttime streetscapes, but ultimately the film runs 40 minutes too long, and in a story that you know already has a stalemate waiting for you at the end, length becomes a major problem. As a whole, I think “Munich” is visually stunning, with a great cast, which includes fine performances from “Rome’s” Ciaran Hinds, newly anointed James Bond Daniel Craig, Mathieu Kassovitz as the group’s bomb maker, and the always interesting Geoffrey Rush, and a sobering script that takes a famous piece of televised history and stretches it into a broad examination of the Jerusalem debate, but it’s finally a pretentious, overlong, and uneven epic, so for that, I give it a cautionary, mild recommendation. Other’s have suggested that it’s Spielberg’s best film since ‘Ryan’, and maybe politically it is, but if “Schindler’s List” is the gold standard of what a powerful Jewish director can do with his craft in presenting his people’s long struggle, than “Munich” is its bronze equivalent, technically beautiful and haunting, yet unfulfilling just the same. by Adam Suraf
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