Munich

Munich was a long movie, a really long movie. At three hours it feels more like a miniseries than a film. This award nominee length wouldn’t be so unbearable if the film wasn’t so tedious, but it is. Considering that this film burst abruptly onto the radar after War of the Worlds was released the hype of this awards contender has been considerable. But the film falls into the category of gratuitous awards baiting and highmindedness and leaves audiences cold during the experience of the film itself. Unless you have a high tolerance for tedium and a burning desire to immerse yourself in the endless political Catch-22 of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict you should probably pass up this film.

Munich has been described as a taut action thriller which is surprising since the film is none of these things. The film aspires to be an action thriller by a well known director but it is bogged down in a repetitive find-the-bad-guy-kill-the-bad-guy formula used not once, not twice, but five or more times. If Munich wanted to be taut it should have clocked in an hour shorter, it also should have limited the trailers to avoid diffusing the most tense point the ‘little girl answering the bomb laden phone’ scene. The lack of tension in these supposed tension filled scenes made me wonder what Hitchcock, the king of building tension, would have done with the material.

In 1972 at the Munich Olympics a group of Palestinian militants took 11 members of the Israeli Olympic team hostage resulting in the deaths of all of the hostages. The most impressive parts of the film Munich are at the beginning where Spielberg interweaves the video and audio footage from that spectacle with live action. Best of all was the scene where the terrorists are watching the news footage and then one steps out onto the porch and he is visible on the black and white television footage. It is a magnificent way of blurring the distinction between the fantasy world of the film and the real life events.

The film Munich is less about the events that unfolded there than it is about the aftermath of that event and how it changed the life of a small group of people. The film admits that it is loosely based on real life events. It is true that Israel sponsored groups to hunt down noted Palestinians in the aftermath of Munich but the rest of the film is an extrapolation of how those events may or may not have unfolded and the kinds of people who might have been involved. The political repercussions and the personal tribulations are entirely from the imaginations of Spielberg and screenwriter Tony Kushner.

Eric Bana plays Avner a family man who works for the Mossad and is tasked with leading up the team though he has no field experience to speak of. He is joined by a team of four patriots whose histories are not clearly mentioned and whose roles in the group are nebulous at best. Mathieu Kassovitz plays Robert, a toymaker tasked as the team’s bomb builder. The others, Daniel Craig, Ciaran Hinds, and Hanns Zischler, appear to be a driver who rarely drives, a passport maker never shown making passports, and a cleanup man who picks up a bullet casing once. The group is given a list of 11 names of Palestinian people hiding in Europe with supposed ties to the Munich attack and told to eliminate them preferably with bombs since they make a greater statement.

Avner leaves behind a pregnant wife whom he tries to keep in contact with during this multiyear ordeal but the other four seem to have sprung out of the earth. There are brief mentions of what these characters did before but with all of Bana’s little moments with his wife and daughter there is little character development time leftover for the rest of the group. The scenes where Avner goes to see the birth of his daughter or talks to his wife on the phone add background to his character and help to highlight the battle for his humanity that is going on over these assassinations, but they also slow down the film and remove it from its sphere a little too often and a little longer that the film can successfully sustain.

The next few hours follow the team’s attempts to eliminate these targets while limiting the damage inflicted upon innocent targets. They shoot the first man fairly unceremoniously and then go trotting across Europe attempting to blow up a number of others. The film takes its time following the men making connections and following up leads to get to these men and the crafting and carrying out of these attacks in great detail. The problem is that after the first attack or two this becomes extremely tedious for the audience. It would have been much more effective had the middle hour of the film been contracted into a The Godfather-like montage. By the time the third act begins fidgeting is inevitable since it seems like the movie is almost over but there is still nearly an hour to go.

The third portion of the film is perhaps the most interesting but since one has already been getting steadily bored by the slow paced proceedings it really takes concentration to appreciate it. First the hunters become the hunted as their toll on the Palestinians makes them targets of another group. Of course the heroes never try very hard to find out who is hunting them, but they do die one by one in various ways in scenes which are again too long and drawn out to be of serious interest. In fact they continue trying to finish their list attempting to carry out assassinations with two people that they failed to do with five. The problem is that since no characters were really developed besides Bana’s these deaths have little effect on the audience.

It is the last part of the film where the work takes its toll on Avner that shows that Eric Bana is a better actor than he was able to illustrate in either The Hulk or Troy. Here he is a man on the edge of madness seeing assassins around every corner and struggling to understand his role in the political activities of the day. Arriving back in Israel he is lauded as a hero and then berated for not revealing his sources. He finds that his actions made little difference in the Palestinian organization, he is fighting a hydra whose many heads just multiply when he lops one off so there is no satisfaction to be gained from his job. In addition there are questions as to whether these assassinations were righteous, each man may have been guilty of a number of atrocities, but did they have anything to do with the raid at Munich?

The one thing that Spielberg does successfully do in this film is to provide a surprisingly evenhanded approach to the puzzle that is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. His characters are awash in a sea of violence and blood but they do not find that their actions have made a significant difference in the world. They are pawns of a much larger political game in a way that evokes memories of the colossal film Lawrence of Arabia. Here an honorable man is left to reconcile his life with the actions he has committed without the reassurance that what he did was the right thing or the people he destroyed were indeed the right bad guys. This film would seem to have current relevance with the issues in Iraq and the US decision to invade though there is no evidence that they were at all involved in the September 11th terrorist attacks. Of course instead of brooding and emoting and self destructing the way O’Toole’s Lawrence did. Bana’s Avner takes to paranoid ramblings, attacking people, and thinking about assassinations during intimate moments with his wife.

There is too much action and too little reflection in a film supposedly about character development and too much repetition and meandering to be a successful action film. Thus Munich is stranded between genres and left incomplete on so many levels. It is not a satisfying film ideologically or emotionally or cinematically. There is no resolution to the conflict, the bloodshed, the characters, or the storyline. Perhaps that was Spielberg’s point to show that things cannot be wrapped up neatly and that life and the tensions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are not easily resolved, in which case he succeeded, but it doesn’t make for a great film. What it does make is a ploddingly paced, self-important soup of action and angst guaranteed to leave the audience disgruntled, dissatisfied, and somewhat suspicious of everyone’s ulterior motives including those of the filmmaker.