The poster for Steven Spielberg’s new film Munich (now playing in Charlotte) is simple and stark. A lone man sits gloomily in a dark, heavily draped room, his body sparely illuminated by the light from a street lamp. His shoulders are hunched disconsolately and a pistol dangles from his hand. He seems very much alone.
The legend notes: “The world was watching in l972 as 11 Israeli athletes were murdered at the Munich Olympics. This is the story of what happened next.”
What happened next is at the heart of Spielberg’s most daring, provocative and politically charged movie. Munich, at over two and a half hours, presents a semi-fictionalized account of Israel’s decision to track down and kill the perpetrators of the Olympic massacre — quietly, systematically and ruthlessly.
The film, which is loosely based on Vengeance, the nonfiction book by George Jonas first published in 1984, reflects much of what happened in reality as Israel sought to avenge its murdered athletes.
The Toronto-based Jonas’ book, which has been re-released in December to tie in with the opening of the movie in the US, relates the much-debated, dramatically told tale of Avner, the young Israeli recruited to head a team of five assassins assigned to kill 11 Arabs implicated in the Olympic tragedy.
Jonas’ primary source was Avner himself, who was the crème de la crème of the Israeli military, a young man who as a crack army officer had been unafraid to kill in battle. Turning himself into an assassin, however, almost destroyed him and his family, and it led him to profound moral questioning that eventually prompted him to leave the task unfinished and reject outright the concept of personal vengeance.
In the movie, the lead roles are played by two Australian actors: Eric Bana (Hulk) as Avner and Oscar winner Geoffrey Rush (Shine) as his Mossad handler.
Five years in the making, Munich presents Spielberg, who has pulled off blockbuster productions such as Jaws and Raiders of the Los Ark as well as critically acclaimed dramas like Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan, with a formidable challenge. The subject matter virtually guarantees that the film will satisfy almost no one with deep feelings about the politics of the Middle East.
Universal Studios and DreamWorks SKG are marketing the film as “a gripping, suspense thriller,” but the work represents considerably more than that for Spielberg personally and also for his reputation. Spielberg is a hero to many Jews and Israelis for creating the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, which preserves the memories of 49,000 Holocaust victims. But if he painted the Israeli assassins as avenging heroes, he would invoke the wrath of not only the entire Arab world but the Europeans whose leftist governments and the people they serve hold predominantly pro-Palestinian, anti-Israeli positions.
On the other hand, as depicted in the movie, the sponsors of the Black September killers of the Israeli Olympians are men driven by a cause they believe in. They are not monsters. This depiction is likely to outrage Israelis and Jews around the world, and even before the picture opened, it triggered hot debate.
“Munich for us was comparable to America’s September ll,” explained Reuven Merhav, one-time director of Israel’s Foreign Ministry, who served in Israeli intelligence during the events portrayed in the film.
The movie’s production was shrouded in secrecy, partly to avoid possible disruption to on-location shoots in Malta, which doubles for Israel, and Budapest, which stands in for Munich. In Manhattan, as part of the low-profile approach, the movie was called by the benign temporary title Kings Cross. In Paris (where Holocaust survivor Roman Polanski visited the set) and the rest of Europe, it was Red Wine.
The $70 million film is powerful anyway one looks at it, but Spielberg is acutely aware of its potential to stir up a hornet’s nest. “What I’m doing with this movie is highlighting some of the dilemmas and some of the issues that need to be discussed,” notes the Oscar-winning director, who feels that although the violence took place over three decades ago, the issues remain timely.
“The movie, apart from being a human drama that explores what these guys went through, will hopefully stir that discussion,” he maintains.
Spielberg’s film turns the story into a personal crisis of conscience and attempts to avoid glorifying one side or the other. He believes that the questions he poses — is an eye for an eye the only way to respond to a vicious unprovoked attack on individuals, and is the cost to the avengers worth the results? — are relevant to today’s climate of unending bombings and targeted reprisals in the Middle East.
“I think this film is relevant for today, and it’s not an argument for non-response,” he points out. “On the contrary, what this movie is showing is that maybe the right response is still one that confronts you with very difficult issues, by experiencing how the implacable resolve of these men to succeed in their mission slowly gave way to troubling doubts about what they were doing.”
Adds the director, “I think we can learn something important about the tragic standoff we find ourselves in today.”
To make Munich, Spielberg abandoned his original idea of directing Memoirs of a Geisha, leaving that task to Chicago’s Rob Marshall although Spielberg retains an executive producer credit.
He hired Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tony Kushner (Angels In America) to rework the original scripts of Eric Roth (Forrest Gump) and Charles Randolph (The Interpreter). Kushner’s assignment was reportedly to try to humanize the Black September terrorists and their backers so that the film would show those targeted for reprisals as more than stick villains. Kushner’s job was to allow them to express their viewpoints — however distasteful — and to examine their motivations. And this he does.
In the movie, one targeted Arab is shown as an intellectual poet and translator. A second is a dedicated father who argues forcibly for even-handedness for the Palestinians. And a third target has a friendly chat on a hotel balcony with Avner, the Israeli revenge squad leader, who seconds later blows him to kingdom come.
The weakest part of the movie has an obviously fictional scene in which Avner meets with his Palestinian counterpart, who argues the case for a homeland for his people — not realizing that Avner is his enemy. But without that exchange, Spielberg told Time magazine, “I would have been making a Charles Bronson movie — good guys versus bad guys and Jews killing Arabs without any context. And I was never going to make that picture.”
Although the movie credits Jonas’ nonfiction book Vengeance, Spielberg says he was not making a documentary and felt free to fictionalize where necessary. Speaking from his home office in Canada, Jonas points out that the Spielberg film comes out in a world that has changed radically since his book was published in the early 1980s.
“It wasn’t until the 1990s that some governments actually began to acknowledge that they engaged in covert counter-terrorism,” he said. “Some 30 years ago, the morality of counter-terrorism violence might have been questioned, and governments concealed their actions in that area. By 2005, matters are more equivocal. Terrorists and counter-terrorists came out into the open. Security forces’ assassinations are on CNN. Beheadings of hostages are shown on Al Jazeera [the Arab satellite TV news channel], and now terrorists routinely claim justifications for their acts. Political murder has started to be respectable.”
Spielberg’s retelling used real live footage of ABC television’s on-the-spot coverage of the Black September massacre, complete with Jim McKay’s solemn wrapup: “They’re all gone.” But he also meticulously recreated the scenes that led to the murder of the athletes at the Munich airport. All that is prologue, closely followed by the recruitment of the Israeli secret agent and his team of experts. The agent’s assignment is clear: “You have 11 Palestinian names. Each had a hand in planning Munich. You are going to kill them — one by one,” Avner’s Mossad boss tells him.
In Spielberg’s movie, Prime Minister Golda Meir (played by Lynn Cohen), who sits in her Jerusalem home sipping coffee with the man chosen to lead the mission, justifies the action by noting, “Every civilization finds it necessary to negotiate compromises with its own values.” The revenge squad obsesses about making sure only their targets are hit — and meticulous care is taken to avoid collateral damage although there are casualties.
Retired Israeli diplomat David Kimche, a former Mossad agent following the Munich period, has not seen the movie but is worried about the depiction of the terrorists and their paymasters.
“I find it repulsive to even try to condone the actions of the Black September terrorists,” he notes. “I think there’s been an effort to change the truth and the facts. You cannot whitewash murderers and, as far as I’m concerned, the people who did what they did in Munich were murderers — and no amount of painting them in a humane way can make any difference.”
Spielberg admits he had to tread warily as he made his movie: “One of the things that makes this conflict so complex is precisely that you’re dealing with real people. I wanted to make a very realistic film. I did not want to demonize the targets. To deal with the war on terror, you have to deal with the world as it is — and real people exist on both sides of these issues.”
Spielberg says what drove him to get the movie made was the vivid memory of watching the terror unfold on television back in September l972.
“I remember exactly where I was at the time,” he notes. “I was as riveted as everyone else was. Our film honors that event so that the memory of those athletes will never be lost.”
This article appears in Dec 28, 2005 – Jan 3, 2006.
