Munich

Yesterday, I watched Steven Spielberg's Munich. A synopsis for you: a group of Palestinian terrorists kills a group of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. The Israeli secret service, the Mossad, sends a group to kill those responsible for the massacre.

I shall go mainstream and say that I really liked the movie. I was expecting some politically charged piece of propaganda about how good Israel is and how evil the Palestinians are, even though I'd read reviews praising Munich as fairly objective and more human in approach. Still, being the eternal sceptic that I am, I had trouble believing this. I was thus very pleasantly surprised when Munich lived up to the positive reviews.

The acting was great. Pan and I spent a good part of the movie drooling over Eric Bana's perfectly toned physique. I also fell in love with the French informant, played by a certain Mathieu Amalric (see photo). Pan and I also engaged in the overly distracting activity of trying to remember where we'd seen certain familiar-looking faces before. To our eternal shame, we did not recognize Geoffrey Rush. I still don't know how that happened. Only when we saw his name at the end credits did we finally manage to get rid of that nagging feeling. Oh, and 'the blond guy', as we referred to him during the movie, is the new James Bond. Again, we were really embarrassed at our inability to recognize him.

OK, I know, famous and hot doesn't necessarily make the acting any good, but in this case, it all worked very well. Eric Bana crying was truly heartbreaking and definitely not overdone. Unfortunately, the movie was dubbed, as all movies are in Italy, but the Italian voice actors were surprisingly good this time. I really don't know what could possibly have happened to make them competent.

Now to more serious matters. I don't know how Spielberg did it, but the whole tragic storyline was populated by genuinely human characters. No-one was a killing machine, not even over-zealous blond guy. Skip the rest of this paragraph if you don't want spoilers, but it's not a major spoiler, so you might as well read it. Well, there's this scene where Avner (Bana) is on the balcony of his hotel room, having a conversation with one of the men his team has to kill. Shortly after the conversation, the man goes to bed, and Avner has to switch off the light in his room so that his team can detonate the bomb they've placed under the man's bed. Now Avner has just talked to this guy, who's turned out to be polite, and nice, and decent. How can he just switch off that light and kill him without second thought? It's a beautiful scene, one where the humanity of both men is so strikingly obvious that it's really terrible to watch Avner having to make that decision, and even worse to think of how he'll feel about it later (the other man gets blown to pieces, which is rather gruesome, and sort of makes you forget to feel sorry for him in your attempts not to feel sick).

I also loved Mathieu Kassovitz as the toymaker turned, er, bombmaker. The humanity of that character too was beautifully protrayed, as was that of Palestinian terrorist Ali, played by Omar Metwally, whose justifications for his actions seem to be as valid as Avner's. That's where the film manages to be balanced. You get human beings telling each other their motivations, ignoring the fact that their reasoning might be flawed, because it's the feeling that's important. The movie never really answers the questions that one would expect it to answer, but instead focuses on the human tragedy of it all.

Now to the violence. There were very few instances in which I thought Spielberg would have done better to tone it down a bit (man hanging off ceiling fan, anyone?). Apart from that particular incident, I thought the rest was all meaningful. I guess we have to see what really happens in the world if we want to understand what state it's in. But then, does seeing to much violence reverse that effect and make us less sensitive to it? I'm not sure what the answer to that is, but anyway, I thought the violence in Munich was needed, if not essential.

For example, I thought the juxtaposition of the last sex scene with the airport terrorist killing scene was a masterpiece. It sort of reminded me of A History of Violence, where the two sex scenes are completely different, and you really understand how the characters have evolved.

One last point. Munich could have been shorter, like ten-fifteen minutes shorter. In that respect, it sort of reminded me of the ending of The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King which was so over-long that I could almost see Peter Jackson crying over the end of his huge project and saying: 'Just one more scene! Please! Waaah!' Of course, you might not agree with that. Suit yourself.

All in all, it was a positive experience. We saw the 22:15 screening, which meant that we got out at one in the morning, all bleary-eyed and tired. Poor Harry was expecting, quote, 'a nice, historical movie,' but got a traumatizing gore-fest that actually happened in real life. Marry, poor thing, was so tired she almost fell asleep. Random Italian woman made us move seats and went on about it for ten minutes. But really, Munich was really good.