The Pagan Agenda

Rating:

Halfway through my viewing of ‘Munich’ I found myself already assessing its value: Munich is a perfectly good film. Not great, but perfectly good. By this I meant insofar as conventional cinematic storytelling constitutes the spectrum of ‘good’, Munich is perfectly good. Greatness tends to be reserved for another kind of storytelling, one which disorients so that the experience is directly affecting and bypasses any subsidiary conscious appreciation of artistry; I prefer to be transported to another place rather than be admiring a product from the outside with hypothetical value. As per my movie-going ritual I was already interpreting the film of Munich as it was happening before me, and once I had determined that yes I was watching a Spielberg film and that certain salient aspects of his style and of the genre were in place than I continued largely on auto-pilot taking in the pleasurable experience of the film as a film.

Three quarters of the way into Munich that autopilot was jarred out of position forcing me to experience the film in a more desirable way, as a human story. I have not felt this affected by a Spielberg film since ‘Schindler’s List’. In a rare instance of restraint Spielberg was able to shake off the stigma of paternal melodrama that crops up throughout his career, ruining many a fine movie (i.e. Minority Report, A.I., Saving Private Ryan). There is one overtly corny line in the film that is immediately undermined, in what is a consistently solid screenplay. There was a moment near the end of the film that I had thought was the end only to feel apprehension seeing the fade to black cut to another scene, concerned that what was to follow was another dreaded ‘happy resolution scene’ Spielberg has a tendency to tag on. My fears were unwarranted, Spielberg got it right, ending Munich with an even better ending than I originally envisioned. Not to give anything away, but I felt there was a missed line of dialogue in the last scene that could have made it better: the final line should have been “we are not Jews here”.

I could not help thinking about two other films while I watched ‘Munich’: ‘One Day in September’ (for obvious reasons) and ‘Paradise Now’. Kevin MacDonald is one of the best documentary filmmakers around, and his ‘One Day in September’ is an essential double bill with ‘Munich’, and ‘Paradise Now’, the fictional account of Palestinian suicide bombers, a high potential triple bill. For the same reasons mentioned above regarding my aesthetic tastes, ‘Paradise Now’ rates above ‘Munich’ in my opinion. While each does perfectly what needed to be done in their own modes of storytelling, the mode chosen in ‘Paradise Now’ was more satisfying to me. It is like comparing apples and oranges with these two films, despite the similarity in subject matter. And for most of my time watching ‘Munich’ I felt the absence of the human immediacy at the center of ‘Paradise Now’, the restraint from speech-making so that minute actions speak for themselves. But as speeches go, those in ‘Munich’ balance that difficult line between gravitas and pretense. At the midpoint of the film, There is a great (albeit obligatory) speech between Avner (Eric Bana) and a PLO soldier which does just that.

Munich is a rare blend of escapism and realism, where the allure of secret agent espionage in exotic locales titillate on the one side only to be jolted by periodic doses of reality on the other, touching on the ethical consequences of action both on a political and a human level. I do not think Spielberg hit every note perfectly, but the music as a whole was pleasurable to the ear and stirred something I had expected to be dormant during this coma-inducing holiday season. His ‘climax’ of sex and violence near the end of the film is one of the high points not only of the film, but in my opinion, of Spielberg’s career. For some insane reason there were young kids at the showing of Munich I was attending, and I want to make this clear, this is not the safe Spielberg many are accustom to, but the darker one, and one not suitable for young children. Munich is my vote for best picture in the Oscars (on the basis of reality), I think the significance of the subject matter and the success of its execution despite the complexity of its story will sway the votes against the quiet simplicity of Ang Lee’s admittedly beautiful ‘Brokeback Mountain’.

With respect to the philosophic question at the center of the film, I am reminded of Michael Ignatieff’s seemingly profound statement I had quoted previously from his ‘Lesser Evil’: “A necessary evil cannot really be an evil at all, since it is a characteristic of evil that it is not necessary but gratuitous” (p. 17). Is this a sophist trick or profound wisdom, I am just not sure. The question with respects to the Israeli-Palenstinian conflict is: are terrorist and counter-terrorist acts necessary in this sense, or gratuitous?