Killer Angels: expect a strange and confusing screen play
Unfortunately, for Steven Spielberg’s new film, Munich, Tony Kushner wrote the script.
I’m not Kushner film, despite the fact that part of his epic Angels in America won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, while the second part a Tony.
His work tends to hide too much behind the bushes of fantasy, sniping at social issues without dealing with them head on.
While his work presents some of the most significant issues of the Reagan era including the spread of AIDS, we never get the emotional satisfaction a straight plot line would give us.
We weave through a maze of questionable reality, our view lost in the haze of doubtfully reliable characters both of whom suffer from AIDS, one of whom thinks he’s crazy because he’s visited by ghosts of his ancestors.
Roy Cohn, a historically monstrous character, becomes the play’s villain, who denies his sickness because it doesn’t fit in with his political philosophy – a kind of Rand superman mentality that would be crushed if he was to be infected.
On his deathbed from AIDS, the real Cohn eventually rejected the ultra right wing political philosophy he had promoted for most of his life, though by that time, he could not undo the harm he had caused or repair the lives he had helped ruin.
Although brilliant, Kushner’s work tends to be non-liner, meaning it can easy be misinterpreted, disguising its real message so deep in metaphor and religious dogma that we might never get the real impact from the Mossad story and the ultimate question whether or not morality and justice can be defended by methods that are neither moral nor just.
Spielberg, whose work already tends to be metaphorically intense often at the expense of straight understandable and emotional plotting, may get bogged down in a fog of esoteric arguments that take away from the single element that makes this story so appealing: Can a Democratic society remain Democratic when using methods that are as atrocious and undemocratic as the terrorist they pursue.
The New York Times claimed Spielberg threatens to lose the “good will” of Jews throughout the world by taking on the issue and by possibly presenting arguments behind the terrorists’ attacks.
Ignorance of the enemy’s motives is a good propaganda tool for maintaining the status quo, but hardly one that intelligent people seek out if they actually wish to solve the issues. Answering the question as to why do the terrorists hate Israel as much as they do in a broad medium such as a Steven Spielberg film may go a longer way towards world peace than the billions in bombs dropped on Iraq or the ranks of murder Israeli murder squads spread out through friendly and unfriendly country.
But if the story is couched in the non-liner structure of a Kushner play, many people may not understand the answer to that question, or may get frustrated with the lack of surface appeal that this James Bond like story of vengeance and betrayal promises but does not deliver.
If presented in religious terms rather than in the basic terms of human need and human ambitions, we may find the movie stirring up more questions than it answers. Too much of the conflict in the Middle East has already been shrouded in religious terms, when the Israeli state’s actions are non-religious – but rather purely political in nature.
In choosing Kushner to write the script, Spielberg has made a decision in style that will work against a clear and decisive position, and may give us a film that is as confusing and unresolved as the conflicts in the Middle East are – filled with Biblical references, great language, very artistic visuals, and a lot of religious hot air.