Buckeye Road

Avner's List

So last night we saw Munich. It was that or Brokeback Mountain -- which I was finally ready to see again, but the bro wasn't up for. (He did, however, insist on taking me to the Short North so we could go to the gay smoothie place and then a gay bookstore. I told him next time we come home, I'll take him to Akron and we can get a straight smoothie and go to a straight bookstore.)

I was reluctant to see Munich because, quite frankly, I really can't stand Tony Kushner. I know you are definitely not supposed to say that, since he is the one who supposedly single-handedly saved American drama with Angels in America. And that play (or, rather, those plays) certainly has its (their) moments of high theatricality. There's some powerful stuff in those six-to-seven hours of stage time. And there's a whole lot of chatter. Actors talking a lot on stage does not equal drama. Actors talking a lot on stage about politics (or, Kushner's favorite, Marxism) does not make for political drama. It's more a matter of politically-themed rambling in between the sexy scenes with the angel.

Which is my backhanded way of complimenting Kushner for his talents, for creating some mind-blowing stage moments, but taking him to task for grotesquely overwriting. I think Angels in America is a good play, not a great one, an at times lofty, but overbloated epic that is too often not dramatic, too conservative in its narrative (managing to be about both a gay man coming out and a gay man dying of AIDS) and its gender politics, and too irresponsible (I'm tempted to say dishonest) in its uses of history.

We'll have to discuss McCarthyism and its abused representations at some later point (after I break down and see Good Night, and Good Luck. But the point about history is an important one, because in Munich Kushner and Spielberg have reached into the past for a story about how a civilized nation responds to terrorism, with very deliberate implications about What It Means for Today. (The film's final shot, lingering on the Twin Towers as the credits roll, is there just in case you missed It.)

As a historical-political treatise, the film is gobbledygook. Kushner is at his full-throttle worst in scene after scene as characters prattle on and on about, first, why it's good for Jews to kill terrorists, and then, later, why maybe Jews shouldn't kill terrorists, and then, by the end, whether the terrorists the Jews killed were even terrorists to begin with.

The problem with all this chatter is that what happens in between -- the filmic (visual) moments -- makes it all meaningless. Because, along with their tedious historical-political treatise, Spielberg and Kushner have made a tense and thrilling caper film. As the hits just keep on coming, each one presents a new frisson of tension -- what could go wrong this time? -- until it's finally carried out.

And what happens, as Avner's team keeps killing the bad guys, is that the Jewish oddballs become a tightknit group of buddies. It's not so much Saving Private Ryan as Ocean's Eleven with a heroin hit of Hitchcock. And these hit sequences, along with the group's planning and downtime -- except when they get all chatty -- is among Spielberg's best work ever.

I credit Spielberg because these sequences are effective at a gut-wrenching, visual level -- also helped by the pitch-perfect soundtrack. I also credit Spielberg because the great thrills of the hit scenes cut rather harshly against the historical-political treatise Kushner is so tediously drawing out. How can we worry about right or wrong when we're having so much fun?

Kushner's treatise is not helped by the central character, Avner, who in typical Kushner fashion manages to have both Daddy issues -- his father, a hero of Israeli independence, is imprisoned for work he did on behalf of the state -- and Mommy issues -- his mom is an aloof Zionist (of course) so Golda Meir is his surrogate mommy, sending him to kill the bad Palestinians.

His team, in their various ways, come to question what they are doing, but Avner is late to have doubts -- really, until after their work is done and he is trying to return to a normal life with his wife and baby daughter. Avner's rectitude is necessary for most of the film -- it's hard to see how he would continue to lead the killings if he wasn't so certain -- but his unrending afterward is a bit unclear. I'm still not sure why he wouldn't want to live in Israel after all he did for it -- I understand the symbolic use of this (another Jew in exile) but it wasn't clearly set up in the picture.

What did make sense is his total freaking out that the network of informants he'd used to get the names and locations of his targets had now turned against him and his men, selling them out to be killed off one by one. This leads to some more great sequences, one where he hears a noise and proceeds to dismantle everything in his bedroom (mattress, phone, TV) they'd used to hide bombs, one where he catches sight of men in a black car while walking down the street with his daughter -- that's a moment of true terror.

But the historical-political message it sends, when you stop and think about it, isn't Don't Kill Terrorists, but rather, Don't Work with Informal Criminal Networks. There's a fundamental difference between actions taken by terrorists and those taken by a civilized nation. In a civilized nation -- especially in a democracy like Israel or the U.S. -- citizens can hold their officials responsible for their decisions on behalf of the state. The film did touch on this to some extent, drawing out Meir's troubles and concerns with popular view of her actions.

However, for the most part, the film elides the difference between actions of a state (an organized government responsible to its citizens) and actions of terrorists (a criminal organization responsible only to itself). Many reviews have heralded this as an asset, the filmmaker's brave refusal to take sides.

But what the filmmakers have done in Munich is not so much not taking sides as moral equivalence. Kushner and Spielberg depict Palestinian terrorism, and Israel's responses to it, as an endless cycle of bloodshed. As Leon Wieseltier has point out, in his pan of the film, there is a world of difference between state action against terrorism and the brutal acts that precipitate it. It's the difference between democracy and its negation.

This point is lost in Munich. Before we get our final money shot of the Twin Towers, the disillusioned Avner tells his Mossad handler that they should have arrested the Palestinians, "like Eichmann." His handler might have pointed out that, in fact, they could not arrest the terrorists "like Eichmann" because Eichmann was an official of an organized state that was defeated through a conventional war. Terrorists do not have a territory to invade, a government to topple. But that would have been another movie.

posted by BT @ 1:04 PM