Munich and Spielberg

When the Muse goes out of town, I tend to try to rent a movie that I know she doesn't want to see. You know, with shooting and guts and stuff. Sometimes this works very well, like the time that I saw Saving Private Ryan. Sometimes it doesn't work so well, like the time that I watched Femme Fatale. Wow, that one was bad. The Muse is out of town this weekend, so I rented Munich. The Muse pretty much told me straight out that she had no interest in seeing that one.

As you probably know, Munich is Steven Speilberg's movie about Israel's supposed program to track down and kill the Palestinians responsible for organizing the killing of 12 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, West Germany.

[SPOILER ALERT: I AM GOING TO TELL ABOUT THIS MOVIE, SO, IF YOU DON'T WANT TO KNOW WHAT HAPPENS, JUST STOP RIGHT NOW. I'M TELLING YOU, STOP, BECAUSE I'M GOING TO TALK ALL ABOUT THE ENDING.]

This movie was pretty darn great. The whole thing was very believeable. Given Israel's history of awfully audacious military operations -- kidnapping Adolph Eichmann from South America and bringing him back to Israel for trial, destroying the whole Egyptian air force in an preemptive strike at the beginning of the Six-Day War, flying a whole military unit into an Ugandan airport to take over a hijacked airliner full of Israeli in 1976, preemptively bombing Iraq's nuclear reactor in 1982 -- I completely bought the idea that Israel would send out a group of secret-agent guys to assassinate the Munich organizers. It was very tense for much of the movie, with the group of five guys undertaking various frightening operations. It was completely believeable how the operations never seemed to go quite right.

What the movie is really about, though, is how the leader of the group, played by Eric Bana, basically loses it as he keeps killing guys in cold blood and almost getting killed in the group's operations and having guys in his group get killed and realizing that other people out there apparently have found about him and are now trying to kill him and the people in his group. When it becomes clear that his group isn't going to be able to much more -- three of the five guys have died and the Palestinians they are trying to kill basically are on to them -- he is brought in from the cold. He then goes off to Brooklyn, where his wife and baby have moved to get away from Israel. (His wife was pregnant when he started on the operation and he only saw the baby when she was just born and hadn't seen her for another year or so.) Once he gets to Brooklyn, he basically thinks everyone is out to get him. Finally, his Israeli handler comes and asks him to come back to Israel, but he decides not to. Anyway, it's really good movie.

But it could have been better. Basically, Spielberg just couldn't help going over the top to beat us over the head right at the end with, first, perhaps the single strangest scene that I have ever seen in a movie and, second, one of the most blatant closing shots ever. I found these things to be really interesting because they were really similar to the kinds of things that Spielberg did in Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan that kept those movies from being really brilliant, at least to me.

First, the climatic scene of the movie is one where Eric Bana is laying in bed, unable to sleep, in Brooklyn and his wife comes on to him. They end up having sex. Bana is on top and starts looking all possessed, like he's taking out all of his problems on his wife. Now, Spielberg intercuts this scene with the climax of the Munich situation, where the Palestinians realize that the airplane that was supposed to fly them and their hostages out of Germany has no pilot and that they are surrounded by the German military on an open tarmac. Basically, what they did as they were being shot was kill all of the Israeli athletes by hand grenade and machine gun. So the climatic five minutes or so of the movie flip back and forth between Eric Bana having rather disturbing sex with his wife and Israeli athletes being slaughtered. At the end, when Bana's done, his wife tells him softly that she loves him. O-kaaaaayyyy.

Second, the very last scene of the movie -- where Bana's handler comes to Brooklyn to ask Bana to come back to Israel -- takes place in a park right on the river in Brooklyn across from Manhattan. So the Manhattan skyline is the background of the scene. When Bana tells his handler that he's not going back to Israel, the camera follows Bana as he leaves the park, thus panning across the Manhattan skyline. As Bana leaves the park, the camera centers on the World Trade Center. And stays there as Bana leaves the park and some verbiage about how nine of the 11 Munich organizers eventually were killed. Oh, I get it, Spielberg's trying to tell us that killing only leads to more killing -- see Munich, then assassinating the Munich organizers, then eventually Sept. 11 -- or something. Thanks, Steven, nice use of Sept. 11, wouldn't have figured out that terrorism and killing is bad without that last shot.

Don't get me wrong, Spielberg is a very, very good director. Jaws is a brilliant movie. Raiders of the Lost Ark is one of my all-time favorites. My Dad swears that Duel -- the TV movie that really got Spielberg going -- is one of the best things that he has ever seen. And, as he has gotten older, he has taken on really interesting and difficult topics. Schindler's List, Saving Private Ryan and Munich all are great movies, some of the best of their various decades.

But Spielberg always seems to find some way to take them just over the top in schlocky ways that really detract from them. In Schindler's List, it was the little girl in the red coat. You do a whole, very difficult movie very, very well in black and white and then you stuff a little girl in color in there just to make sure that we get the point that the Nazis were killing lots of innocent people and were pure evil. Lame. Even the scene at the end of the people going to Oskar Schindler's grave was more tolerable than that. In Saving Private Ryan, you have to have the scenes at the beginning and end with Private Ryan visiting the graves of the guys who saved him and crying about it and hugging his grandkids. Really, that was necessary? (I'll bet if you polled the Oscar voters who didn't give Best Picture to Saving Private Ryan, they point to those scenes.) Then those last couple of scenes of Munich. I mean, really, did you really just hit us over the head with Sept. 11? Come on.

It's very unfortunate. As Spielberg has gotten older and so freakin' powerful that he basically can get any movie made -- I kind of doubt that Munich would have gotten made if Spielberg hadn't been involved -- it is great that he making movies about these difficult and fascinating issues. The flip side of having that kind of power, though, is that no one is going to edit your stuff. You can see that with George Lucas, who seems to have had no editing at all in the second Star Wars trilogy (I mean, he let his kids name characters, thus leading to one of the big bad guys being named "Count Doo-koo" (phonetic)). That seems to be going on with Spielberg, too. You have to give him credit that the movies he's making are great, with these schlocky problems, and not bombs like Phantom Menace.

But, God, Steven, get someone to help you make brilliant movies out of your great movies.