Munich

Directed by Steven Spielberg

Universal Pictures

4 Stars



“Every civilization finds it necessary to negotiate compromises with its own values,” says Israel’s then Prime Minister Golda Meir (Lynn Cohen) in Steven Spielberg’s controversial new film, “Munich.” She utters these words immediately before authorizing the assassination of the Palestinians her Secret Service hold responsible for the Black September terrorist attack against Israeli athletes during the 1972 Olympics in Munich.

Her pronouncement raises a philosophical question that the remainder of the film struggles to answer: to what extent does the need for national security legitimize violence?

Israel responds to the Munich massacre by assembling a team of covert operatives, headed by ex-Mossad agent Avner Kauffman (Eric Bana), to locate and kill Black September’s Palestinian backers. Kauffman is given a list of targets, an amply funded Swiss bank account, and free reign to dispatch the terrorists according to his discretion.

Kauffman and his team approach their task with a sense of righteous purpose. When the team’s “clean-up specialist” (Ciarán Hinds) remarks, “It is strange to think of one’s self as an assassin”, Kaufman replies, “Then think of yourself as something else.” In their minds they are not hit men, but Israel’s angels of vengeance.

However, their seemingly secure self-perception within their moral high ground is really a slippery slope.

Kauffman and his team gradually become overwhelmed by the enormity of their actions, and their guilt alienates them from each other and induces resentment of their mission.

Spielberg’s expert use of espionage-thriller genre conventions prevents the film from becoming ideologically burdensome. The coincidence of casting Daniel Craig, the newly appointed successor to Pierce Brosnan as James Bond, as the team’s impetuous driver links “Munich” to a rich tradition of spy cinema (and the team’s Rube Goldberg-esque bombs are more than a little reminiscent of Q’s gadgets).

Taking a cue from David Cronenberg’s recent film “A History of Violence”—which similarly explored the toll violence exacts on its practitioners—Spielberg depicts gun violence in all of its goriness: exit wounds, blood splatters, and charred flesh. This verisimilitude, combined with the knowledge that the depicted events are historical, make “Munich” an unsettling film to watch in its bloodier moments. Its battle sequences are expertly realized, but they are not presented for the viewers’ entertainment, as they would be in lesser films.

Unfortunately, “Munich” also shares one of Cronenberg’s film’s weaknesses: it belabors the psychoanalytical connection between sex and violence. In one particularly egregious scene, Kauffman suffers from vivid flashbacks of the Munich massacre while making love to his wife. Spielberg cuts the scene so that Kauffman climaxes coincides with the terrorists executing their hostages—I doubt even Freud would invite such a literal correlation. Thankfully, such missteps are few and far between.

Impressively, Spielberg is able to maintain the film’s momentum even after the protagonists have ended their assignment. Kauffman’s reflection on the psychic cost of protracted violence is even more engaging than the beginning action.

Near the film’s end Kauffman is sucked into a debate with his Israeli Secret Service handler (Geoffrey Rush). Kauffman argues that Israel’s retaliatory course will not achieve peace, only an endless cycle of bloodshed and recrimination. The mission has made paranoia, rage, and guilt permanent fixtures of Kauffman psyche, and he predicts a similar fate for his homeland if it makes vengeance state policy.

In these last frames Spielberg makes the connection between Israel in September of 1972 and the United States in September of 2001 explicit: as Kauffman and his handler part ways, their dispute still unresolved, the Twin Towers loom over the horizon. The distance between New York and Munich is shorter than we imagined.

Spielberg provides no easy answers for the questions he raises in “Munich,” only a reformulation of Prime Minsiter Meir’s dictum: every civilization finds it necessary to wrestle with the problem of violence to define its values.

—Staff writer Bernard L. Parham can be reached at parham@fas.harvard.edu.