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Munich |
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 Release Date: 12/23/05 (Future Release)
Starring: Eric Bana, Daniel Craig, Marie-Josee Croze, Geoffrey Rush, Mathieu Kassovitz
Director: Steven Spielberg
Rating: (R) |
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Genre |
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Drama |
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Running Time |
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164 min |
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Distributor |
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Universal Pictures |
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 Official Website |
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NEW YORK REVIEW
I walked away from the screening thinking that Steven Spielberg had made an artistically cold-blooded movie that glorified Israel’s systematic revenge killing of some of the Palestinian “Black September” murderers who slew eleven Israeli Olympic athletes in 1972. Then I started reading various commentaries about how Munich has been stripped of politics, or that it refuses to take a stand. This is the op-ed version of Adrien Brody: hooey. Indeed, the more I thought about Munich, the more my admiration for its moral complexity increased. Spielberg, along with screenwriter Tony Kushner, does amazingly subtle, daring things here. The early scenes, in which Golda Meir (Lynn Cohen) orders the killings by proclaiming, “Forget peace for now,” are chilling, a bold mixture of righteous indignation and political extremism. The bulk of the movie, which follows a group of five former Mossad agents led by Eric Bana, avoids easy Mission: Impossible–style suspense in favor of something far more serious and worthwhile—an unsensationalized look at what killing, even for what one side deems a worthy cause, does to good people.
The key is that Kushner knows that that concept applies to Palestinians as well as to Israelis. Then too, Spielberg is brave enough to follow through on the notion as Bana, our ostensible central hero, says things like “We can’t afford to be decent anymore,” and suffers emotionally for his loyalty. Anyone who still thinks of Spielberg as merely an ambitious crowd-pleaser—and even after Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan, that label sticks—will be chastened and, I hope, satisfied with the rigor of his filmmaking here. Many reviews have noted the Hitchcockian suspense scene in which a little girl is placed in mortal danger after explosives are planted in a home by the ex-Mossad agents, but even here, Spielberg defies our expectations by undercutting such primal movie pleasure. Refusing to play up the tension for very long, he quickly resumes his focus on thorny moral and political tangles. Coming at the end of a year that included The Constant Gardener and the far less successful The Interpreter, Munich is also a political film, but one that challenges its audience to follow some of the most vexed arguments of our time, as much as it presents a bold historical spectacle.— Reviewed by Ken Tucker, New York Magazine
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