Munich

The massacre of nine Israeli athletes and coaches at the 1972 Munich Olympics was both a tragedy and turning point in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians; whatever else it generated, the world’s perception of the war against israel began to move the country’s enemy from Arabs generally, and the surrounding Arab nations specifically, to the refugees dispossessed in May 1948 and their descendants. Eleven at the time, I have only the barest memories of the TV coverage by ABC and saw little of its effects during my visit in two summers later.

Steven Spielberg is a master moviemaker (consider how well he overcame generic performances by Tom Cruise in War of the Worlds and Minority Report) and realized that a simple retelling of the tense hours at the Olympic Village and the denoument at a nearby airport was not the movie to make in 2005. Instead he focused on the Israeli response–the Golda Meir government dispatched a deniable team to track down and kill the eleven men deemed responsible for the massacre–with the events in Munich shown as a prelude and then occasionally mixed in to remind us why.

Eric Bana plays Avner, the Mossad agent picked to lead the team of Ciaran Hinds (Julius Ceasar in HBO’s Rome), Daniel Craig (derr, the new Bond), Mathieu Kassovitz and Hans Zischler. The movie is nearly three hours long so I can understand Spielberg’s choice to focus all the non-assassination screen time on Bana’s personal life and emotions but it does make the other four, with the possible exception of Hinds’ Carl, just a bit above cardboard level.

The men are supplied with little more than a Swiss safety deposit box filled (and refilled) with untraceable dollars but quickly connect with an anarchistic French clan who specialize in supplying information to all comers, as long as the customer is not working for or with a government. The clan is headed by Papa, the excellent French character actor Michael Lonsdale (Ronin), who takes a liking to Avner despite eventually piercing the wall of deniability.

The problem is that Avner, like most humans not suffering from psychopathy or sociopathy, finally becomes unhinged by the death he’s dealt out and no longer has the coin to continue. Frankly, that he was able to take care of six targets, plus one’s replacement and a contract killer who ended one of his team members, seems huge to me. No matter how greatly I value Israel and the United States I could never do anything like it.

Bana was a great choice for the lead role, which I simply could not imagine, say, Tom Cruise handling. Hinds is very good as are Geoffrey Rush as the team’s Mossad handler, Mathieu Amalric as the information clan’s point person and Gila Almagor as Avner’s Holocaust survivor mother. Guri Weinberg, interestingly, portrays his own father Moshe, one of the Israelis massacred.

Spielberg does not give us a one-sided view, despite the fact that he as well as scriptwriters Eric Roth (Forrest Gump, Ali, The Good Shepherd) and Tony Kushner (Angels in America) are all Jewish. The Palestinians are, mostly, portrayed in their own words and actions, the events in the Olympic Village use lots of actual footage from ABC’s coverage, the Israelis are not perfect nor unemotional in their decisionmaking.

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