False hope in Munich
Although Munich has received mixed reviews among film critics, and a strangely mixed reception among the political factions involved with the Middle Eastern conflict, the truth is: Munich as a film largely plays lip service to the arguments.
I don’t mean this as an insult, but as the literal truth.
Despite its amazing action sequences and its wonderful visual images, Munich lacks depth. While it asks the questions here and there, it never really comes to grip with the conflict its director hoped to address.
While we eventually get to see the slaughter of the athletes as visual proof of the viciousness of the terrorists – giving the film reality some basis upon which to judge the terrorists, we never really get to “see” the impact of Israeli bombs, water cut off and other aspects of the perpetual war that fuels the Arab anger. We get only people talking about these things.
So in many ways, Munich is really not about Arab-Israeli relations at all, but a moral argument on the Jewish-Israeli side about whether a nation has the right to kill people (Arabs in this case) believed to have been behind the assassination of the Jewish Athletes.
Even much of this comes as talk, not visual representations.
This is a weakness of the material Steven Spielberg used as his source. Because Spielberg remained so loyal the book Vengeance – a tale told by one of the Israeli hit men – he never presents us with convincing or emotional arguments.
The film raises questions, but only if fitful stops and starts, as dialogue between action sequences.
Even the most remarkable talking scene in the movie between the Arab and the Israeli at the safe house is devoid of real issues – vaguely talking about taking back worthless chalky soil that makes up the footprint of historic Palestine and contemporary Israel. We get talk, little emotion, and less evidence for one side or the other.
Although hyped as a film that intended to present both sides of the conflict – which had many in Israel up in arms – the fact is we know very little about the Arab plight at the end of the movie as we did at the beginning, except for the fact that Arabs died often by the hundreds each time Israel retaliated for an attack. We never see the faces of the women and children, the way we do the dying athletes
Here and there, we get pat phrases that seemed dedicated more to providing the film with defense against criticism than actually defining the issues as they really exist.
Based on a largely paranoid ex-Israeli assassin’s account, the movie presents us with vague threats at the end towards and agent that is suffering from shell shock. We vaguely get the impression that the agent believes that the Israeli’s might be out to get him for his refusing to continue his work with them.
The agent asked finally in the closing scenes why the Israelis chose to kill the terrorists from Munich rather than arrest them and bring them to justice as the Jews did after World War Two.
In Spielberg’s great films, he asks a fundamental question: “What if?” To make this film work emotionally, Spielberg needs “Why?”
Why did Black September kill those Athletes? Why was this outrage so much worse to the Jews than the Nazi, who they gave benefit of trial?
Spielberg doesn’t ask these questions, because his source material doesn’t. Because to answer them would be to raise the fundamental questions about whether or not Israel had the right to take over Palestine in the first place and whether or not as caretakers of that state, the leadership has done right by all the people concerned, or just the Israelis.
No Jew is going to ask them – and no matter how generous at heart Spielberg is, he won’t question such a fundamental element of faith.
This is not to say that an Arab film maker could be trusted with such a loaded gun.
A non-Jew film maker, of course, would ask the right questions, but would get branded as anti Semite for his or her efforts, even when the goal is pursuit of truth.
Munich is an adventure film, a good tale of troubled heroes struggling to get vengeance for a wrong done.
All the rest of the claims amount to hype.