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Back Shelf Beauties
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Munich One of the reasons I love Oscar season is the chance to see the very best, dramatic, emotional and moving films the most talented people can produce, and director Steven Spielberg certainly falls into that category. Munich was chosen by the Washington, DC Area Film Critics as the Best Film of 2005, and, while some have worried it might come down too harshly on one side or another of this complicated situation, Spielberg (also chosen my group as Best Director) shows an evenhanded kind of touch only a master can use to still reach the dramatic highs and lows a movie like this needs to connect with the audience. He has created another fantastic epic. Set in 1972, Eric Bana stars as Avner - a former bodyguard for Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir (Lynn Cohen) who has been recruited by Mossad (Israel's CIA) to track down and kill 11 Palestinians accused of plotting the terrorist slaughter of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich. Avner will be working deep undercover only communicating with his handler, Ephraim (Geoffrey Rush), via Swiss Bank safe deposit boxes. He must leave his pregnant wife behind, have no official ties to the Israeli government, will be disavowed if captured, and only has 4 team members to count on (none of whom he has met before). Although they all have signed up to seek vengeance, as the assignment moves forward their moral authority disintegrates, and all 5, especially Avner, start to question the legitimacy of their actions and orders, and find themselves getting deeper and deeper into a war on terror they never signed up for. Are all 11 names on the list actual plotters? Can Avner and the team handle it as they go from the hunters to the hunted? Who can they trust? Spielberg and writer Tony Kushner (based on the novel by George Jonas) have created a complex, emotional story focused equally on the big and small pictures, never letting one overpower the other. We are presented with an awesome tone of questioning safety, motives, the people involved, who can be trusted, who is double crossing whom, and danger at every turn. Spielberg puts us in the middle of this pursuit, and leaves the audience asking the same questions Avner and his crew face. Kushner gives insight into the men carrying out the plan, what they face in battle and at home, and helps us watch them change as they confront new challenges and dangers. They want to avoid killing innocent civilians to maintain moral authority and their belief they are out for vengeance, but that authority starts to wane as they get deeper into the assignment and lose sight of the objective, or has the objective changed? This question keeps the audience looking deeper and deeper as the movie moves to its conclusion. Spielberg wonderfully shows us how the battle escalates over the first several months as we hear about plane hijackings, attacks on Israelis all over the globe, pharmacies blown up and more on TVs and radios in the background, which keeps us apprised of the changing landscape without being to in our face about it. Keeping to the idea that we see what the team members see, all the information the audience gets is from those broadcast and newspaper reports, but don't think this is a movie lacking thrills. Munich is an action packed movie with danger always a step behind. Spielberg also does a great job positioning images next to each other throughout Munich. As the names of the Israeli athletes are read off on TV, we see the faces of the accused plotters. As a terrorist walks out onto the balcony in the most memorable image of the siege, we see him on TV and from behind on screen. Best of all, Spielberg takes the audience down darkened streets and out of the way places to make the hair on the back of your neck stand up as the audience anxiously waits for what might happen next. Bana is fantastic as we see him make Avner grow colder, meaner, more comfortable with violence and more paranoid as the assignment drags on, after introducing us to a kinder, more loving man who seems absolutely wrong for the job early in the film. Soon, we see him becoming disconnected from authority and loyalty to his bosses as he sees himself as judge and jury. Avner becomes angrier and more willing to kill as he becomes comfortable with it and better at it, while Bana transforms the character slowly from assignment to assignment in ways that become more apparent as we move towards the end of Munich, which is exactly the way it should be. He brings out Avner's good qualities (loyalty, fairness, sense of duty and love for his wife and family), but isn't afraid to bring out the bad as the situation becomes tenser. It's a powerful and moving performance from an up and coming star. If I had any complaints about Munich, is would be about the film's length. Spielberg abandons some of the movie's gripping drama and tension with too many scenes of what happens with Avner and his family later on, and sticks us with a silly love scene where our hero aggressively makes love to his wife in a melodramatic intertwining of scenes from the Munich massacre and Avner with his wife. While this technique of mixing images from the Black September attack with action from other times in the movie works well earlier as we learn more and more about what happened on that fateful day and how it motivates our hero, this last sequence is almost ridiculous. Shot in super slo-mo with sweat flying off Bana as if his character is finishing a marathon in a Gatorade commercial, it has an icky feel to it. Of course, Spielberg redeems the length by giving us one last amazing confrontation between Ephraim and Avner that will blow you away with its deeper, underlying drama. Much like Syriana, Munich is a movie sure to start debate about who are the winners, losers, right and wrong, but leaves it all cloudy for us to judge and debate. 4 Waffles (Out Of 4) Copyright 2005 - WaffleMovies.com
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