Vengeance, Munich and the family
With any film Steven Spielberg touches, you have to ask: What will the family make up be?
Will it be a division between father and mother? And what impact will that have on the kids?
In a film where the father is a hit man, rest assured we will see strong repercussions in the family. This will also mean that the character will be pressured to give up his obsession to seek vengeance for his brother’s murder in Munich and to pursue a more normal life as a husband and father.
If Spielberg holds true to form, we can expect our hero to be on the verge of or already divorced, in a similar fashion as to the character in War of the Worlds or Catch me if you can.
Most likely the family will have two or three kids: a rebellious teen, a confused pre-teen and a young child in need of protection.
Not only will our hero have to deal with the memory of his family member lost in the Munich massacre, he will be struggling to keep the respect and love of his still living family.
This will be a struggle between what he owes to the memory of his brother and what he owes to the upbringing on his children, and as the plot evolves, he will feel more and more pressure to serve the living rather than the dead.
This is part of the plot that comes crashing into his life when those who he serves as agent and killer for turn and threaten those who he loves, and he is forced to choose between not only his living family and dead brother, but between his family and his faith or nation. In the end, he must choose to protect those he loves and take whatever action is necessary to keep his family from harm – ironically not harm from the terrorists who he has hunted and who have hunted him, but from those he considered his closest allies, people with whom he had fought side by side.
This subplot shapes for us a large metaphor and possibly gives us the underlying theme of the movie, as the character we named Saul serves as symbol for historic and contemporary Israel – a country and people who cannot rely as Munich has proven even on its closest allies, but must fend for itself, taking whatever action is required to protect its own.
This is a complicated metaphor, but no more complicated than most of those metaphors Spielberg has given us in his better films, having his main character serve as symbol for some greater idea.
Let’s hope, Spielberg can pull it off.