Going to Extremes

Robert (Mathieu Kassovitz) and Avner (Eric Bana) in a scene from Steven Spielberg's Munich. Photo Karen Ballard. Courtesy Universal Pictures.

“Spielbergian” was once a byword for brazen sentimentality, but it’s hard to reconcile that the creator of such warm, fuzzy schlock as E.T., Hook and A.I. is even related to the filmmaker behind Munich, a docudrama about the murder of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympic Games in West Germany. While we saw glimpses of a less optimistic Spielberg in Schindler’s List (1993) and the unrelenting battlefield carnage that opens Saving Private Ryan (1998), those pictures finished on a note of hope. Munich is the work of a tormented filmmaker. Grim, ruminative, cynical, consistently shocking and morally conflicted, it’s the most profound and unsettling film experience of the year.

Munich opens in the darkness of early morning on September 5, 1972. With the unwitting help of some inebriated Americans, a group of Arab-speaking men carrying duffel bags gain access to Munich’s Olympic village and burst into the apartment that houses the Israeli athletes. Two Israelis are killed in the initial struggle; another nine are taken hostage. During this terrifying opening sequence, Spielberg artfully cuts between heady reenactment and archival news footage, capturing the assault first-hand and as a breaking news event, the way nearly one billion people worldwide would have experienced it in their living rooms.

Viewers who were living in 1972 will remember the chilling TV images of the masked assailants pacing the balcony of the Israeli apartment. The kidnappers, who called themselves Black September, were a splinter group of the Palestinian Fatah movement. They demanded the release of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli and German jails and safe passage to Egypt. Within 24 hours, the captors and their victims were ferried to a nearby airbase, where the German authorities intended a daring ambush. Due to a number of variables, the plan went awry. The nine remaining Israeli athletes (along with five hijackers and two German policemen) were murdered, thus concluding one of the most horrendous terrorist spectacles of modern times.

Many of the details of the hostage-taking are still unresolved, but it’s the aftermath that interests Spielberg. In the days following the attack, Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, propositions Avner (Eric Bana), a low-level security agent, to lead a team of operatives who will track down and assassinate, one by one, the people responsible for the Munich massacre. Roused by a sense of patriotic duty, Avner agrees — accepting, with a heavy heart, that he must sever ties with his pregnant wife for the duration of the assignment, which could take years.

After meeting the different “experts” on his team (the bomb-maker, the forger, the driver, etc.), Avner makes the acquaintance of Louis (Mathieu Amalric), a petulant mole who, for a price, provides Avner with the whereabouts of various Black September organizers. With the pacing of a John Le Carré novel, the action hurtles through various world capitals (including Rome, Paris, Stockholm and Beirut) as Avner’s team whittles down its hit list.

Fleeing the scene: Bombsetters make their getaway in Steven Spielberg's Munich. Photo Karen Ballard. Courtesy Universal Studios.

Many of the targets are snuffed out with explosives. More than any film in recent memory, Munich captures the mental anxiety involved in setting bombs. These sequences provide the film with its most nerve-wracking moments. But Spielberg isn’t interested in building suspense so much as burrowing into the minds of bomb setters, who must go about their work with emotional indifference — a near-impossibility when you know that you’re about to pulverize a human being.

When bombs do go off in Munich, the results are appropriately horrific: after the assassination of one Black September organizer in a hotel, Avner walks into the room to discover the victim’s severed legs dangling from a hotel ceiling fan. (It isn’t even the most gruesome murder in the film. That occurs towards the end, on a houseboat. The sequence is so utterly misanthropic it almost inspires a perverse respect for Spielberg’s willingness to repulse his audience.)

While Munich is a fraught look at the justifications of violence in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it may also be the last word on spy films. Whether it’s the Jason Bourne movies or the Bond franchise, espionage thrillers generally present good guys as unerringly good and baddies as irredeemably bad. Those demarcations don’t exist in the real world — nor in Munich. On several occasions in the film, Avner meets his unsuspecting victims before killing them, and is struck by their humanity. For the most part, these are men and women with families and career aspirations — who happen to be extreme nationalists. Are Avner and his cohorts much different? More importantly, are they more righteous?

Thanks to a skillfully nuanced screenplay by Eric Roth and Angels in America playwright Tony Kushner, Munich evokes sympathy and cynicism for all sides — even the “ideologically promiscuous” Louis, whose group distrusts all governments and pledges loyalty to the party with the fattest cheque book. (If there’s one party that comes off wholly negative, it’s the CIA, an invisible presence that seems to abet all sides in order to further its own nebulous agenda.)

Part of what makes Munich so compelling is Spielberg’s determination to keep the focus on the story, rather than the telling. Compared to Spielberg’s summer entry, War of the Worlds, the marketing campaign for Munich has been remarkably subdued. The film also eschews A-list star power. Geoffrey Rush gives a marvelously coiled performance as Avner’s Mossad contact. Daniel Craig (the next James Bond) is equally forceful as the macho, impetuous Steve, the most jingoistic member of Avner’s team, while the underrated Mathieu Kassovitz plays Robert, the chief bomb maker, as a man tyrannized by his own expertise. But the film ultimately belongs to Bana, who represents the film’s shifting moral centre. At first dubious about his task, Avner soon grows into his role as avenging angel.

It’s hard to overstate just how gutsy Munich is. Spielberg has taken a tremendous gamble — politically, morally and creatively. The result is his masterpiece.

Andre Mayer writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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