Starring: Eric Bana, Geoffrey Rush and Mathieu Kassovitz
Director: Steven Spielberg
Rated: MA15+
MUNICH tells the story of Avner (Eric Bana), a young Mossad agent, who with four others from diverse backgrounds, is recruited by the Israeli Government to track down and execute the PLO terrorists responsible for the murder of 11 Israeli coaches and athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics.
The Munich massacre occurred 24 years after the establishment of the State of Israel, and was watched by the entire world (as well as the terrorists themselves) on round-the-clock television.
More than 30 years later the Middle East has become a snake-pit of retaliatory violence, a serpent devouring itself, and much of the purpose of Steven Spielberg’s film is to show the beginnings of this spiralling descent.
Munich begins with the terrorists being given a leg over the wire fence surrounding the athletes’ village by unsuspecting Americans.
The subsequent massacre and its profound impact on Israelis is shown in low-key, grainy flashbacks throughout the film, which concentrates on the retributive mission that follows, the isolation of the agents from family and friends, the venal brokering of information to both sides by a shadowy Frenchman (Michael Lonsdale), and Avner’s slow slide from patriotic certainty about the justness of the mission to gnawing doubts about the ethical validity of its means.
Eric Bana (Chopper, Troy) gives a mostly strong performance as Avner, the young “sabra” (the name given those born in Israel or in Palestine before 1948) whose estranged father was a hero of the 1948 War of Independence, and a friend-in-arms of then Prime Minister Golda Meir (Lynn Cohen).
Meir (who was memorably played by Ingrid Bergman in the 1982 telemovie A Woman Called Golda) was 74 when called from political retirement to become head of state, and one of the film’s seminal scenes is that in which Avner is invited to the Prime Minister’s home and personally recruited by Meir.
With emotion he tells Avner and her cabinet, “What law protects people like this? Forget peace for now. We have to show them we are not afraid”.
Geoffrey Rush adopts Jewish mannerisms and speech to play the Mossad chief Ephraim, who becomes the Israeli operatives’ sole contact with “home”, and the proxy father against whom Avner eventually rebels.
Daniel Craig (Enduring Love, Layer Cake, and the new James Bond) is impressive as the hawkish, unwaveringly committed South Africa-born Steve, as is Ciaran Hinds (Persuasion, The Phantom of the Opera) as Carl, whose scrupulous attention to all details leads to moral agonising over the means employed to accomplish the mission.
French actor and director Mathieu Kassovitz (Hate, Amelie) plays Robert, a toy-maker who becomes an explosives expert, while Hanns Zischler (Walking On Water) is stolid as the German-born Hans, whose forte is forging documents.
Based on George Jonas’ 1984 book Vengeance, Munich sets out to explore the very notion of vengeance.
But the film succeeds only in part. Scriptwriters Kushner (Angels in America) and Roth (Forrest Gump) have opted for an anecdotal narrative which portrays the unfolding events of the massacre as flashbacks in Avner’s memory.
But this technique dilutes the horror of the massacre, and becomes at times too plodding and predictable.
One begins to count the number of PLO operatives left to kill.
Rather this narrative device is intended to convey both the anguish felt by Israelis at the smashing of a dream – young Jews of a resurrected nation competing at the Games in post-war Germany – and the price of revenge, which the audience explores through Avner’s conflicting emotions as a patriotic Israeli, justly defending and punishing the enemies of his state, and as a Jew, acutely cognisant of the ethical backbone of his religion.
This hardening of the warrior (terrorist/freedom fighter) against the common humanity of his enemy is the centre of the film.
There is tension-filled chronicling of the escalating cold-bloodedness on both sides which culminates in the callous, retributive murder of a prostitute on a barge in Amsterdam, and this objectification and desensitising to the pain and suffering of others is seen as the heart of the conflict between Arabs and Jews.
This is reinforced, during a heated debate among the Israeli agents, by a passing reference to God admonishing the angels for their rejoicing at the drowning of Pharoah’s army during the Exodus of the Jews from Egypt.
If one reads him rightly, Spielberg himself is similarly conflicted, and this attempt at bi-partisanship, while understandable, may prove unpalatable to those with contrary views.
