Munich: All Too Human
Steven Spielberg's Munich is not the kind of movie I am likely to add to my movie collection. I really don't want to watch it again. This is not because it either failed to disturb me--it did--or because it felt emotionally manipulative--it did not. The absence of a coercive score and the liberal use of a journalistic camera style actually created too great a sense of reality for my taste. The film felt less a drama and more a window into the actual cycle of violence that characterized the Munich disaster and its aftermath. There's a reason I don't usually watch the evening news.
This is not to deny Spielberg’s accomplishment, just to note that most of the movie plays less like a piece of art than a horrifying documentary.
I should mention another factor that contributed to this sense of realism. Every Israeli and Palestinian character on screen—even those who appear for only a few seconds—seems fully human. Spielberg accomplishes this not by giving equal screen time to both sides of the conflict, as Toshio Masuda and Richard Fleischer do in Tora, Tora, Tora (1970), nor by allowing the terrorists multiple, dramatic opportunities to voice their own perspective, as Michael Schiffer does in The Peacemaker (1998). Instead, Spielberg almost completely removes any sense of menace from both terrorists and assassins. The act of violence itself always horrifies, but most of the time the assassins and their targets are captured by the camera doing normal things—talking, laughing, eating, and arguing. No two-dimensional, brooding terrorists or coldly focused secret agents here.
This is perhaps the single most important accomplishment of this discomfiting film, that it counts the cost of violence and retribution without narrow-minded recourse to essentializing stereotypes.
Allow me to close by reproducing a poem by Irish poet Michael Longley, a poem about the extreme difficulty but profound importance of forgiving those who have harmed us and ours, instead of responding in kind.
I
Put in mind of his own father and moved to tears
Achilles took him by the hand and pushed the old king
Gently away, but Priam curled up at his feet and
Wept with him until their sadness filled the building.
II
Taking Hector’s corpse into his own hands Achilles
Made sure it was washed and, for the old king’s sake,
Laid out in uniform, ready for Priam to carry
Wrapped like a present home to Troy at daybreak.
III
When they had eaten together, it pleased them both
To stare at each other’s beauty as lovers might
Achilles built like a god, Priam good-looking still
And full of conversation, who earlier had sighed:
IV
‘I get down on my knees and do what must be done
And kiss Achilles’ hand, the killer of my son.’
Posted by Paul Marchbanks at January 3, 2006 8:28 AM