Munich: summing it up
Several people emailed me to ask if I thought Steven Spielberg blew it with Munich.
Blew it is way too strong to describe why Munich isn’t the movie it could have been or has been hyped up to be.
First, the script is a bland retelling of the book Vengeance, far beneath expectations of the internal conflict the character is supposed to go through over his activities. We get a lot of shell-shock images near the end, but no real deeper understanding of the character’s inner conflict. Bana – as remarkable a character as he is – mugs for the camera, pouts a lot, but does not give us any of the inner turmoil.
Secondly, the movie doesn’t present two sides of an argument in a convincing way. We get a couple of scenes in which people talk about their doubts, but no scenes where we see or feel it. Despite claims that the movie will tell in part some of the Arab side, it never does. We get images of slaughtered athletes, but never the dehydrated children in refugee camps or the victims of the Israeli retaliation strikes.
Thirdly, Spielberg failed to make the most out of what was a dynamic story. The script divided the most important aspects of the film so that it lost potency. This was a ploy to manufacture emotions when -- if the tale had been told in full at the beginning as it ought to have been --Spielberg would not have needed to enhance the emotional impact at the end.
Fourthly, the key character is inconsistent. While this appears to be true to the original tale, it makes for poor drama. We needed to see a much more gradual deterioration. Instead, the main character seemed to grow harder and more murderous, and then suddenly become paranoid. The script needed to show this process all along.
The film seemed divided into two trends, one that reflected a Cold War thriller, the other a post traumatic stress film.
The action scenes work and the film has a brilliant air of intrigue. But the human element seems to fall on its face. The film needed more than flashbacks to the murders at Munich or even the slaughter of the terrorists. It needed some symbolic representation to reflect the internal turmoil, the sense of a growing paranoia as a result of the constant murdering of people. We needed something akin to the texture we get with A Beautiful Mind, an external manifestation of the internal that leads us to believe he might be right in his paranoia or leaves us uncertain about his sanity.
The end of the film does not work because of this lacking – refuting otherwise brilliant performance. It is difficult for an actor to expand beyond the script, and since the script is weak, so is the ending. I expected much better from Kushner on this.
Visually, the film is practically perfect, image after image, sweeping me off my feet in a way few films have. Spielberg says much more in image in this film than the script does.
This is basically a summary of the other essays that I have written so far. But when I get to see the movie a few more times, I’m sure I’ll have much more positive things to say about the subtext.