Munich: Good idea, bad film

DAN ROTTENBERG

Jonathan Tobin, editor of the Jewish Exponent, is upset because Jews who were so upset over Mel Gibson’s crucifixion film The Passion of the Christ aren’t more upset by Stephen Spielberg’s Zionist-revenge film Munich. The latter, Tobin suggested in his December 29 column, is “an offensive film” that “goes out of its way to portray Palestinian terrorists in a flattering light, and whose conclusion centered around the rejection of Israel on the part of a disillusioned member of that country’s intelligence services.”

I agree that someone should be outraged by both of these films, but the group I have in mind is neither Jews nor Christians nor Palestinians nor Zionists— it’s the audience. With The Passion of the Christ, oppressed moviegoers of all creeds paid for the dubious privilege of watching an actor get beaten up repeatedly for two hours. With Munich, they watch actors shooting and exploding each other for two hours and 45 minutes, pausing only occasionally to spout clichés like, “Officially, you do not exist!” and “I could have you court-martialed!” (The dialogue, from Tony Kushner, is enough to make you wonder whether Angels in America was really all that good.) In Passion, a single well-paid actor got nailed to a cross; in Munich, an entire audience gets beaten over the head with Spielberg’s heavy-handed message about the pointlessness of violent vengeance.

Say this much for Spielberg: In Munich he and Kushner reject the conventional formulaic Hollywood notions that moviegoers must have heroes and villains, and that revenge is always sweet. But as with Spielberg’s equally leaden Schindler’s List (1993), Munich is a case of “When bad films happen to good ideas.” I once fantasized that I could make my fortune in the Middle East by designing a simple T-shirt emblazoned with the slogan, “We’ll show them,” and peddling it to all parties. Spielberg, it seems, has beaten me to ithe punch. His wholesale spies and counterspies, regardless of allegiance, all seem to be the same disposable minions who used to battle James Bond for SMERSH and SPECTRE. Now they’re working for Spielberg instead of Goldfinger, but then as now, the boss can’t be bothered with them as individuals because he’s preoccupied with his grand world-changing vision. The more things change….

Munich’s only potentially involving characters are a French father-son team who make their living selling confidential tips to all sides in the terror war. How, you wonder, did they get into this line of work? Where do they obtain such valuable information? How do they stay in business if their customers keep killing each other? How come nobody kills them? But this is the wrong film for such introspective speculation. Will you stop with these niggling questions already and just appreciate Spielberg’s lofty rhetoric, his glamorous locations, his heart-rending score and his expensive pyrotechnics?