To get the simple questions out of the way right from the start, one must of course come to Steven Spielberg's aid. The filmmaker has made an "incorrect moral equation"! "We have lost Spielberg. Spielberg is no friend of Israel!" These and similarly heated sentiments have been expressed with regard to Spielberg's film "Munich", primarily by political leaders from America. The charge is that the film does not state its position clearly enough, does not distinguish sufficiently between good murderers and bad murderers, and that it denies the existence of absolute evil among Palestinians and Islamists. This reflects the expectation that cinema, too, should jolly well get on with being a weapon in the "war on terror," increasing the military strength of its own camp, and reducing the unsightly complexity of the world a little. For any filmmaker with the slightest trace of artistic ambition, there can only be one response to this accusation: ignore it.



Avner (Eric Bana) and Ephraim (Geoffrey Rush). All photos courtesy of official website

The film is about Munich in 1972, the hostage drama at the Olympic Games, the first live appearance of modern terrorism in the global television village, and the subsequent commando operation by Israel against those behind the attack. It is about the roots of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, violence and counter-violence. And, implicitly of course, it is about September 11 and all the current answers to it. No one is left cold by these issues, quite naturally, and anyone setting foot on this terrain has a responsibility in moral terms, but more still in aesthetic terms. And this is where the simple questions end. Satisfying as it would be to shake the stick of art at Spielberg's critics, it would also be insincere. "Munich" is a provocative and irritating contradiction: wonderful and awfully speculative moments, cliches and originality, wisdom and presumptuousness form a conglomerate which finally seems to be as inextricably tangled as the situation in the Middle East itself.



Avner (Eric Bana), wife Daphna (Ayelet Zurer) and new baby

To begin with, however, one should heed the request of Spielberg and his screenwriters Tony Kushner and Eric Roth not to see "Munich" as a documentary but as a "historical fiction." Or at least to try. But to be quite honest, even this is not easy. One must resist the power of the old television pictures that are included in generous amounts and to great effect; one must abstract from the real shock of the events in Munich that is still very present for all those old enough to remember; and one must mentally transform a historical figure like Golda Meir, who has one very important scene, into a fictional character, the cliche of a mother of the nation with a grey bun who rolls her Rs. If one achieves all this, what remains is the story of an Israeli commando unit with a license to kill hunting for the Palestinian godfather of terror. Acting on orders from the very top, but left to its own devices. Obliged to organize its own weapons, bombs and false papers just as clandestinely as the terrorists themselves.



Robert (Mathieu Kassovitz) and Avner (Eric Bana)

The film's strongest point is without doubt the way these contract killers differ from all the other killers in cinema history. Never have such amateurs been entrusted with such a mission: weapons get stuck in holsters, fingers on triggers are slippery with sweat, hands holding detonators tremble uncontrollably. Nothing goes according to plan, discussion is constantly required to salve consciences, which refuse to be salved. But the targeted individuals do die, the plan of vengeance does progress, via Frankfurt, Rome, Paris, Cyprus, Beirut, London. Months turn into years. The price paid by the hunters for this life is high: spiritual and moral breakdown, paranoia, thoughts of suicide - and in the end, they themselves become the hunted. The old cinema myth of cold-blooded killing for a just cause, the ticking pulse of action choreography, the whole conspiracy-theory legend of the omnipotence of the secret services - Spielberg puts paid to this so thoroughly that we sense a pacifist message. And we also tend to agree with the hero's desperate realization that all this will not lead to victory, and certainly not to peace.

At the same time, however, unable to help himself, Spielberg is gripped by the fever of the movie hunt. Conspiratorial meetings, shadowing the victims, building the bombs, seeing the prey in the crosshairs, a new city for every sequence - all of this, in increasingly repetitive fashion, occupies a huge amount of space in the film. More than seventy small speaking parts wander across the screen, jostling for their split second of attention, including German stars like Moritz Bleibtreu, Meret Becker and Alexander Beyer. With all this busy activity, there is hardly time left for the main characters, with four of the five men in the killer commando remaining extras: other than auditioning as a future James Bond with his pithy lines, Daniel Craig has nothing to do; Hanns Zischler appears totally lost; Ciaran Hinds gets to be a person for five seconds before he dies; and Mathieu Kassovitz loses his nerve twice. Only Eric Bana in the role of team leader Avner is granted an actual life, with an understanding mum and a prolifically fertile, radiantly sensual model wife, although they too are more ciphers than real characters.



Hans (Hanns Zischler), Avner (Eric Bana) and Steve (Daniel Craig)

One is also struck by the increasing clumsiness of the methods used by the authors to insert fervent statements of the Palestinian cause. These statements are what make the film into the thoughtful theoretical work reflecting both sides that it wants to be, but in dramaturgical terms they are often outrageously contrived. At one point, for example, a shady Palestinian character who is about to be murdered speaks in an interview about his convictions. The interviewer is none other that one of the killers, for whom it is clearly no problem to show his face in front of several witnesses. Another time, Avner talks with an apparently Jordanian terrorist who - what a coincidence! - happens to be using the same secret address. With Hollywood nonsense of this kind, the film betrays its main intention, that of finding a new truth behind thousands of cliches about secret agents.

The truth is that viewed purely as historical fiction, "Munich" would be nothing more than a mediocre, theoretically top-heavy terrorism thriller. Spielberg is perfectly aware that only the cruelty of reality can secure him the attention he needs - and in the bizarre final montage, he comes close to throwing away the credit he has gathered over the film's 150 minutes. While in his public statements he distances himself from claims to showing a piece of history, this claim is massively reinstated through the film's images: this was the only reason for going to such lengths to recreate a 1970s look, the only reason for using the authentic television footage, the only reason for including many historical figures with their real names. Once again, cinema operates as a vampire at the neck of reality, sucking meaning out of the dead of Munich and all the deaths that followed - and Spielberg is far too much of a showman to do without this powerful elixir.



Steve (Daniel Craig), Producer/Director Steven Spielberg, Hans (Hanns Zischler) and Avner (Eric Bana) on the set of "Munich"

But none of this means that "Munich" is more or less honest than any of his other historical films, including "Schindler's List" - whose routine elevation to quasi-documentary status should also be revised at this juncture. The relationship between cinema and reality is and remains precarious - and it is not only legitimate to insist on this, it is absolutely necessary. Otherwise, the power of cinematic images to intervene between us and reality is too great. Or, to put it more cautiously, between us and that which can, with endless questioning and revisions, finally be formulated as the most historically plausible version of events. But it is equally legitimate, important and deserving of support to take the kind of risks represented by an undertaking like "Munich". For all the objections one can raise against it, this piece of cinema is certainly more stimulating, more thoughtful and more worthy of discussion than most of what will reach us from Hollywood this year.

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"Munich", USA 2005 - Director: Steven Spielberg. Featuring: Eric Bana, Daniel Craig, Geoffrey Rush, Mathieu Kassovitz, Ciaran Hinds, Hanns Zischler, Mathieu Amalric, Michael Lonsdale.

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The article originally appeared in the Süddeutsche Zeitung on 25 January, 2006

Translation: Nicholas Grindell