Munich (and I’m not talking about the World Cup)
By sheer coincidence, we had a group viewing of (in ’s words, “Steven Spielberg’s latest ‘Big Important Movie’”) on the same day that the 2006 World Cup opened in Munich. Maybe we should have watched soccer/football instead. It might have actually contained more insightful political commentary.
In all the glowing reviews I read when Munich was released in theaters last December, the word “political” dominated. I knew it was about the assassins assigned to avenge the deaths of Israeli athletes slain at the 1972 Olympic Games—but somehow, knowing that the screenplay was mostly by Tony Kushner, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright of Angels in America, I expected more politics and less assassination. As Kushner himself says, “Nothing ever happens in my plays. People sit around and talk.”
Would that there had been more talk, or at least more narrative impetus. At two hours and 44 minutes, the movie was at least an hour too long. Did we really need to see every single assassination? I think we could have gotten the message “violence begets more violence” after just a couple. Oddly, before Kushner took over the screenplay, some of it had already been drafted by Eric Roth (Forrest Gump), but somehow I have a hard time attributing Munich’s bloodfest to the Master of Saccharine. I think I mostly blame Spielberg. I mean, all the gore was effective once—in Schindler’s List—but when he keeps basing every film around shock-inducing violence, it gets a little old.
At least for me, was more interesting as a story than Munich because it portrayed a dissolute, profit-oriented character who, to his own surprise, manages to do good. (Plus, there’s that one scene in which, after all the horror is over, Schindler breaks down and sobs, “I could have done more.” Uf. Years after seeing the movie, that’s what I remember most vividly (not to downplay the atrocity of the Holocaust events—I’m speaking in narrative terms).) In Munich, we get the far more boring arc of a “basically good” character (Avner, played by a very aesthetically appealing ) who is drawn downward into an accelerating cycle of violence. It’s a classic fall from innocence. Not like we’ve ever seen that story before.
I’m struck here by some similarities between Munich and another well-reviewed 2005 movie that disappointed me: A History of Violence. Both go out of their way to portray their heroes as kind family men who love their wives and children. In fact, each movie frames the violent bloodbath in its center with two contrasting sex scenes between husband and wife. In the first scene, everything is idyllic and pleasurable for both, while, in the second, the “fall” has occurred, and we see the ways in which the hero has brought violence home with him. (There are differences in the way they bring violence home, though. The second sex scene in A History of Violence is borderline, if not actual, marital rape, while, in Munich’s second sex scene, Avner is merely haunted by memories of the murders of the Israeli athletes. Which seems odd, by the way, because he wasn’t there. And yet he keeps having “flashbacks” to that event throughout the movie. It seems far more psychologically plausible at this point in the film that he would have been remembering the murders he himself had committed.)
The way these sex scenes are used bothers me, and I’m still trying to put my finger on why. Maybe it’s just that their narrative purpose—showing the change in the main character—is so blatantly obvious. But I think it also has something to do with using women—and the male protagonist’s interaction with women—as the primary gauge of that character’s corruption.
For me, the most disturbing scene in Munich was not the bloodiest (I wasn’t looking at the screen for most of those scenes anyway) but rather the most personally vengeful. One of Avner’s group of secret operatives has been seduced and killed by a female assassin. In spite of the fact that this woman had nothing to do with the Munich situation, they then track her down and kill her. They seem more ruthless with her, not just because she killed their friend and associate, but because she used sex to do so. After each one in the group shoots the woman, they leave her naked in a chair (though I feared that they would rape her, they didn’t—and one operative also expressed regret afterward for not covering her up). It’s not as if the film is glorifying the violence in this scene at all—it’s not. But it still bothers me, for some reason, that violence against a woman is the turning point in the film, the point at which it’s clear that they’ve gone too far. I guess it seems like the filmmakers are using women for easy narrative tricks, rather than letting them be characters in their own right. Plus, it seems like there’s an attempt to manipulate vestiges of chivalrous feeling in the (male) audience: it’s as if the movie assumes that the audience will only fully recognize the horror of violence when they see it enacted against women. Yet, ironically, “we must protect our women” has actually been an excuse for violence for, let’s see, how many millennia now?
Of course, “we must protect our women” used to be (and still is, only sometimes now it’s “we must protect their women”) a rallying cry for nationalistic violence. And this brings me to something else that troubles me about Munich. Avner learns, by the end of the film, that nationalism is no answer. He has killed in the name of Israel, and yet, in the end, the Israeli government betrays him. So he retreats to private family life in the U.S. (as does Tom Stall at the end of A History of Violence). There’s nothing in between, no larger community in which he can participate. It’s either corrupt nation or private family life. It’s not like it would make sense for Avner to go off and join the Peace Corps or anything, but it does bother me to see individualistic retreat portrayed as the only option to violence.
Stick to soccer, gentle readers. Trust me.
7 comments June 11th, 2006