Munich (film)

Plot

Munich begins with a depiction of the events of the 1972 Munich Olympics and then cuts to the home of Prime Minister of Israel Golda Meir, where Avner Kaufman (Eric Bana), a Mossad agent of German-Jewish descent, is chosen to lead an assassination mission against 11 Palestinians allegedly involved in the massacre. To give the Israeli government plausible deniability and at the direction of his handler Ephraim (Geoffrey Rush), Avner resigns from Mossad and operates with no official ties to Israel. His team includes four Jewish volunteers from around the world: South African driver Steve (Daniel Craig), Belgian toy-maker and explosives expert Robert (Mathieu Kassovitz), former Israeli soldier and "cleaner" Carl (Ciaran Hinds), and a Danish document forger named Hans (Hanns Zischler). They are given information by a shadowy French informant, Louis (Mathieu Amalric).

In Rome, the team shoots and kills Wael Zwaiter, who is broke and living as a poet. In Paris, they detonate a bomb in the home of Mahmoud Hamshari; in Cyprus, they bomb the hotel room of Hussein Al Bashir (Hussein Abd Al Chir). With Israel Defense Forces (IDF) commandos, they pursue three Palestinians to Beirut—Muhammad Youssef al-Najjar (Abu Youssef); Kamal Adwan; and Kamal Nasser, a Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) spokesman—penetrating the Palestinians guarded compound and killing all three.

Between hits, the often-reluctant assassins argue about the morality and logistics of their mission, expressing fear about their individual lack of experience, as well as ambivalence about accidentally killing innocent bystanders. Avner makes a brief visit to his wife, who has given birth to their first baby. In Athens, he has a heartfelt conversation with a PLO member who is sharing the same safe-house; the man is later killed during a hit on target Zaiad Muchasi.

The squad moves to London to track down Ali Hassan Salameh, who orchestrated the Munich Massacre, but the assassination attempt is interrupted by several drunken Americans. It is implied that these are agents of the CIA, which, according to Louis, protects and funds Salameh in exchange for his promise not to attack U.S. diplomats. Meanwhile, attempts are made on the assassins themselves. Carl is killed by "Jeanette," an independent Dutch contract killer. In revenge, the team tracks her down and executes her. Hans is found stabbed to death on a park bench, while Robert is killed by an explosion in his workshop. Avner and Steve finally locate Salameh in Spain, but again their assassination attempt is thwarted, this time by Salamehs armed guards. It is implied that the amoral Louis has sold information on the team to the PLO.

A disillusioned Avner flies to Israel, where he is unhappy to be hailed as a hero by two young soldiers, and then to his new home in Brooklyn, where he suffers post-traumatic stress and paranoia. He is thrown out of the Israeli consulate after storming in to demand that Mossad leave his wife and child alone. In the final scene, Ephraim comes to ask Avner to return to Israel and Mossad, but is refused by Avner. A final intertitle notes that 9 of the 11 original targets were eventually assassinated, including Salameh in 1979. The World Trade Center is seen in this last shot before the film ends.

Cast

Critical reaction

The film garnered a 78% rating from critics (per Rotten Tomatoes). Roger Ebert praised the film, saying that "With this film [Spielberg] has dramatically opened a wider dialogue, helping to make the inarguable into the debatable." and placed it at No. 3 on his top ten list of 2005. James Berardinelli wrote that "Munich is an eye-opener – a motion picture that asks difficult questions, presents well-developed characters, and keeps us white-knuckled throughout." He named it the best film of the year; it was the only film in 2005 which he gave four stars, and he also put it on his Top 100 Films of All Time list. Entertainment Weekly film critic Owen Gleiberman said that Munich was the No. 1 film of 2005. Rex Reed from New York Observer belongs to the group of critics who didnt like the film: "With no heart, no ideology and not much intellectual debate, Munich is a big disappointment, and something of a bore."

Variety reviewer Todd McCarthy called Munich a "beautifully made" film. However, he criticized the film for failing to include "compelling" characters, and for its use of laborious plotting and a "flabby script." McCarthy says that the film turns into "...a lumpy and overlong morality play on a failed thriller template." To succeed, McCarthy states that Spielberg would have needed to implicate the viewer in the assassin squad leaders growing crisis of conscience and create a more "sustain(ed) intellectual interest" for the viewer.

Chicago Tribune reviewer Allison Benedikt calls Munich a "competent thriller", but laments that as an "intellectual pursuit, it is little more than a pretty prism through which superficial Jewish guilt and generalized Palestinian nationalism" are made to "... look like the product of serious soul-searching." Benedikt states that Spielbergs treatment of the films "dense and complicated" subject matter can be summed up as "Palestinians want a homeland, Israelis have to protect theirs." She rhetorically asks: "Do we need another handsome, well-assembled, entertaining movie to prove that we all bleed red?"

Another critique was Gabriel Schoenfelds "Spielbergs Munich" in the February 2006 issue of Commentary, who called it "pernicious". He compared the fictional film to history, asserted that Spielberg and especially Kushner felt that the Palestinian terrorists and the Mossad agents are morally equivalent and concluded: "The movie deserves an Oscar in one category only: most hypocritical film of the year."

Writing in Empire, Ian Nathan wrote "Munich is Steven Spielberg’s most difficult film. It arrives already inflamed by controversy... This is Spielberg operating at his peak — an exceptionally made, provocative and vital film for our times."

In defense of the climactic sex scene, critics Jim Emerson of the Chicago Sun-Times and Matt Zoller Seitz of Salon compared it to Lady Macbeths suicide in Shakespeares Macbeth, interpreting the sequence as representing the corruption of Avners personal life as a result of his being conditioned to kill others in order to avenge Munich.

As of January 2015 the film has a rating of 7.6 out of 10 on the Internet Movie Database, based on 159,000+ votes.

Controversies

Some reviewers have criticized Munich for what they call the films equating the Israeli assassins with "terrorists". Leon Wieseltier wrote in The New Republic, "... Worse, Munich prefers a discussion of counter-terrorism to a discussion of terrorism; or it thinks that they are the same discussion".

Melman and other critics of the book and the film have said that the storys premise—that Israeli agents had second thoughts about their work—is not supported by interviews or public statements. A retired head of Israels Shin Bet intelligence service, Avi Dichter, formerly the Internal Security Minister, likened Munich to a childrens adventure story: "There is no comparison between what you see in the movie and how it works in reality," he said in an interview with Reuters. In a Time magazine cover story about the film on December 4, 2005, Spielberg said that the source of the film had second thoughts about his actions. "There is something about killing people at close range that is excruciating," Spielberg said. "Its bound to try a mans soul." Of the real Avner, Spielberg says, "I don’t think he will ever find peace."

The Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), describing itself as "the oldest, and one of the largest, pro-Israel and Zionist organizations in the United States", called for a boycott of the film on December 27, 2005. The ZOA criticized the factual basis of the film, and leveled criticism at one of the screenwriters, Tony Kushner, who the ZOA has described as an "Israel-hater". Criticism was also directed at the Anti-Defamation Leagues (ADL) National Director, Abraham Foxman for his support of the film.

David Edelstein of Slate argued that "The Israeli government and many conservative and pro-Israeli commentators have lambasted the film for naivete, for implying that governments should never retaliate. But an expression of uncertainty and disgust is not the same as one of outright denunciation. What Munich does say is that this shortsighted tit-for-tat can produce a kind of insanity, both individual and collective."

Illano Romano, wife of an Israeli weightlifter slain in the Munich massacre, pointed out that Spielberg overlooked the Lillehammer affair, although Spielberg seems to have been conscious of the omission; the films opening title frame shows Lillehammer in a montage of city names, with Munich standing out from the rest. The Jewish Journal said that "the revenge squad obsess about making sure only their targets are hit and meticulous care is taken to avoid collateral damage. Yet in one shootout an innocent man is also slain ... The intense moral contortions the agents experience as the corpses pile up makes up the substance of the movie."

Christopher Hitchens dismissed the film as "laughable" and criticized Daniel Craigs portrayal of Steve, a character which Hitchens perceived to be "a hopelessly sinister and useless South African Jew."

Historical authenticity

Although Munich is a work of fiction, it describes many actual events and figures from the early 1970s. On the Israeli side, Prime Minister Golda Meir is depicted in the film, and other military and political leaders such as Attorney General Meir Shamgar, Mossad chief Zvi Zamir and Aman chief Aharon Yariv are also depicted. Spielberg tried to make the depiction of the hostage-taking and killing of the Israeli athletes historically authentic. Unlike an earlier film, 21 Hours at Munich, Spielbergs film depicts the shooting of all the Israeli athletes, which according to the autopsies was accurate. In addition, the film uses actual news clips shot during the hostage situation.

The named members of Black September, and their deaths, are also mostly factual. Abdel Wael Zwaiter, a translator at the Libyan Embassy in Rome, was shot 11 times, one bullet for each of the victims of the Munich Massacre, in the lobby of his apartment 41 days after Munich. On December 8 of that year Mahmoud Hamshari, a senior PLO figure, was killed in Paris by a bomb concealed in the table below his telephone. Although the film depicts the bomb being concealed in the telephone itself, other details of the assassination (such as confirmation of the target via telephone call) are accurate. Others killed during this period include Mohammed Boudia, Basil al-Kubasi, Hussein al-Bashir, and Zaiad Muchasi, some of whose deaths are depicted in the film. Ali Hassan Salameh was also a real person, and a prominent member of Black September. In 1979 he was killed in Beirut by a car bomb that also killed four innocent bystanders and injured 18 others.

The commando raid in Beirut, known as Operation Spring of Youth, also occurred. This attack included future Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Yom Kippur War and Operation Entebbe hero Yonatan Netanyahu, who are both portrayed by name in the film. The methods used to track down and assassinate the Black September members were much more complicated than the methods portrayed in the film; for example, the tracking of the Black September cell members was achieved by a network of Mossad agents, not an informant as depicted in the film.

Atlantic Productions, producers of BAFTA-nominated documentary Munich: Mossads Revenge, listed several discrepancies between Spielbergs film and the information it obtained from interviews with Mossad agents involved in the operation. It noted that the film suggests one group carried out almost all the assassinations, whereas in reality it was a much larger team. Mossad did not work with a mysterious French underworld figure as portrayed in the book and the film. The assassination campaign did not end because agents lost their nerve but because of the Lillehammer affair in which an innocent Moroccan waiter was killed. This is not mentioned in the film. The targets were not all directly involved in Munich, which Spielberg only acknowledges in the last five minutes.

As mentioned above, the film notably ignored the Lillehammer affair, where Israeli assassins killed a Moroccan waiter, Ahmed Bouchiki, mistaking him for Ali Hassan Salameh. As Bristol University History professor Stephen Howe says: "one major puzzle has gone almost unremarked. If... the key (and in itself laudable) impetus for the films making was the moral questioning prompted by Israeli counter-terrorist actions, why focus on these particular episodes? The film doesnt even include the most glaring and notorious failure, which was also perhaps the most indefensible act... This was the killing in Norway of a hapless and harmless Moroccan waiter, mistaken for alleged Black September boss Ali Hassan Salameh." The agents who were responsible for the killing were tried and convicted in Norway of murder. Israel compensated the victims family although never took responsibility for the assassination.