Munich

I had planned to be just about the last person on the planet to write a review of Steven Spielberg's Munich, but now that I've finally seen this bizarre epic, I know that anything I could decently call a 'review' would have to run to many thousands of words, and I have no intention of subjecting my readers to that. But let me try to boil this down to a few hundred:

Munich is unquestionably an utter mess of a film, but one into which so much effort and creativity has been poured - obviously at fever pitch - that I stand in some kind of awe of it. Spielberg is a filmmaker I have often admired for his sheer dedication to getting films out, but this is a case where he and his writers definitely needed to spend a lot longer developing, pruning and refining the script.

Munich has enough material in it for at least three films, and one of Spielberg's problems is that, from moment to moment, he can't decide which film he is making. There's the quasi-documentary straight telling of the Munich massacre and its aftermath. Then there's the Frederick Forsyth drama of international intrigue and assassination. Then, in the third (or is it the fourth?) act, we spin off into a John Le Carre existential nightmare, where invisible assassins begin to effortlessly pick off the previously invincible hit-squad led by Avner (Eric Bana), and it's hinted that absolutely anyone, from the CIA and the KGB, to Mossad itself, might be responsible.

I first felt the film coming unmoored when, during the second assassination, the team wait to detonate a telephone bomb in a Paris apartment, where their target is alone, having just bid goodbye to his wife and daughter. As the team members momentarily look away, the daughter dashes back into the apartment to retrieve something. Will they realize this before they push the button? It's suspenseful, sure, but at this point, I felt the contract between the film and the audience was broken. We'd begun by watching a 'based on true events' story, opening with a sickeningly realistic depiction of the murder of the Israeli athletes: now we're suddenly into the slick but basically empty suspense set-piece that Spielberg does so well.

And so it goes on. One of the detours this film loses itself in, in fact in which it bogs down at the very end, is the psychological question of what a mission like this, of ruthless pursuit and assassination, with an ever-increasing toll of innocent bystanders, might do to the decent man commissioned to carry it out. Spielberg's answer to this is pat, predictable and unconvincing. When one of Avner's comrades tells him a story about an agent who so lost his nerve that he could never sleep in a bed again, and could only sleep in cupboards, the astute viewer knows that before the film ends, we will see Avner doing exactly this, and we do. But it's still an interesting question, and Spielberg inadvertently provides a different and more interesting answer, when he includes authentic television footage of some of the surviving Black September killers being interviewed shortly after Munich. These are men who carried out an horrific slaughter, and yet there isn't a cloud on their faces - they are happy, playful, relaxed. As Avner and his men watch, one remarks in disgust that they 'look like rock stars', and they do. How they do is a question that might have made an even more interesting film.

This post, like Munich itself, is already both too long, and far too short, but I can't end without a few words on the central problem for Spielberg, namely that both sides are attacking him for this film. His characters, both real-life and fictional, agonize and argue about the rights and wrongs of turning Europe into a private shooting gallery for extra-judicial assassinations. These scenes are among the worst, simply because, as rhetoric and dialogue, there is really nowhere for them to go: especially the earliest, in which Golda Meir gives Avner his assignment. When this long, talky scene ends, all the issues have been aired, but you feel the film hasn't moved forward one inch with its argument, if indeed it has one. And this, finally, is Spielberg's problem: these questions, for him, really are unanswerable, because a film-maker doesn't have to solve them, however much he might want to. In reality, statesmen, soldiers, security agents, do have to make these impossible choices between equally unattractive and dangerous options. In the wake of the massacre at Munich, there was no obvious right choice of action, only a range of more or less equally bad choices, including doing nothing, and this is what Spielberg and his writers seem to have missed.