Spielberg's Munich Stuck on Rewind

A man sits in a darkened room alone, hunched over, head down, a gun nestled gently between his legs. The room is a mess, ravaged and destroyed beyond any and all rational thought. With no place to rest, nowhere to lay his head, the man rises from his seat, grabs the last remaining pillow, huddles inside the closet and gently closes the door. This is the price for the man; the price of fear, the price of bloodshed, the price of murder. Most of all, it is the price of vengeance.

A person cannot come away from Steven Spielberg’s “Munich” and not think about this scene. Of everything that goes on within the picture, this moment is the one that haunts you, the one that grabs a viewer by the throat and refuses to let go. There are stark images here, people being gunned down like dogs or being blown to smithereens by bombs hidden within the recesses of their mattresses, but this one, this sad, lonely, quiet moment, is the one I remember. It is the one that symbolizes the director’s point the most eloquently, the one that states clearest of all that eye-for-an-eye justice, no matter how righteous the color it is painted in, can’t help but fail.

Unfortunately, this time out the rest of Spielberg’s aim is a little bit off because “Munich” is an overlong, flawed and remarkably didactic thriller that becomes more and more tedious the further a person gets into it. Essentially, this is the story of Israel’s response to the September 1972 massacre of eleven of their athletes by Palestinian terrorists during the Munich Olympic Games. But what should be a classic 1970-style policier like Fred Zinnemann’s “The Day of the Jackal” or William Friedkin’s “The French Connection” with complex moral underpinnings instead becomes a repetitive saga of excess, Spielberg simply unable to show anything close restraint as he brings the movie home.

Not that “Munich” doesn’t have its merits. A master filmmaker like Steven Spielberg makes few outright disasters (“1941” comes to mind), and this one isn’t remotely one of those. Once “Operation Wrath of God,” the name given to the covert hit squad assigned to assassinate Arab terrorists hiding in Europe, begins and the first kill is made the director unleashes one bravura sequence after another. The script, co-written by Angels in America author Tony Kushner and based upon the book Vengeance by George Jonas, continually asks tough, uncompromising questions, questions Spielberg – to his credit – refuses to shy away from.

But after the team, led by former “Hulk” Eric Bana and featuring new James Bond Daniel Craig and “The Crimson Rivers” director Mathieu Kassovitz, deals with its first target it soon becomes readily apparent “Munich” has nowhere to go. It is a forgone conclusion what all this bloodshed will lead to, and the fact that it takes Spielberg almost three hours to get there is inexcusable. Violence begets violence, revenge doesn’t work, fear is a double-edged sword; these aren’t new concepts and as nice as it is for the director to remind us all of them again he could have done so without the overly-excessive detailing. Each killing is methodical, each layer of the trap shown so minutely that after a while they can’t help but become numbingly repetitive.

Bana is very good in this, delicately building his performance to a place of reasoning and uncertainty it might be nice to see decision makers in the Middle East actually reach themselves. There is a moment, completely fictionalized but utterly absorbing, where Bana’s Mossad agent comes face-to-face with his Palestinian doppelganger. What is most remarkable about the exchange, aren’t the truths dripping from their mouths, it is each man’s complete inability to process or hear what the other is saying. Dialogue can only come from understanding, and with differences so ancient and complex it is hard to think peace, at least peace in our time, will ever be possible.

I only wish that there were more moments in “Munich” like this one. Instead, it’s back to the planning, back to the killing and back to the weighty moral questioning. Long stretches of the film reek of déjà vu, scenes in act three unavoidably recalling ones we just watched an hour earlier back in act one. It’s enough to drive a person crazy, and as well put together as all of this is it is still hard to keep your interest focused upon the piece when it begins to feel like your watching the same scene stuck firmly on rewind.

I don’t want to say Spielberg is running on autopilot, he’s taking too big a risk (conservative and Jewish hardliners are nailing him to the wall right now and their disgust is downright appalling and completely misdirected) to have that said about either him or the film. He has, however, dropped the ball, if only just a little bit, and the director’s dogged pursuit of trying to make something big and important has kept him from noticing his film is so much simpler than that. Revenge is bad after all, and as recent events have clearly shown violence does indeed breed much more of the same. And while facets of our ongoing war on terror have probably made us safer, I can’t exactly say with a clear conscious that makes them justified.

But these are obvious points, clear visions of humanity even the most blind amongst us can’t help but see clearly. “Munich” says this with clarity and passion again and again, but after a while it all just starts sounding like the filmmaker is beating a dead horse. And, after all, beating a dead horse – no matter how noble your intentions – still leaves you with only one thing: a very dead horse.