Coming down firmly on both sides: Steven Spielberg's Munich refuses to be bound by the rigours of truth
by Robert Fulford

(The National Post, 27 December 2005)

As you watch Munich, Steven Spielberg's film about Israelis killing the Palestinians who killed 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, a question with ethical and political significance keeps recurring: Is Spielberg trying to tell us the truth?

Moviemakers who base their work on historical events inevitably squirm when interrogated on the issue of veracity. They of course explain that writers must have freedom to improvise. Meanwhile, they do their best to capitalize on the ready-made power of reality. Few of us would care about this often banal movie if the Olympics massacre hadn't happened. Even Spielberg, while interested in the story, doesn't care enough about the film to over-work his imagination: He freely borrows at crucial moments from Hitchcock and Coppola.

Still, he wants this project taken seriously. As he told Roger Ebert last week, "I guess as I grow older I just feel more responsibility for telling the stories that have some kind of larger meaning."

George Jonas's Vengeance: The True Story of an Israeli Counter-Terrorist Team, which first brought this contested narrative to public attention in 1984, is credited as the movie's source. But Jonas, in his recent book, Beethoven's Mask: Notes On My Life and Times, tells us that the film doesn't have much to do with Vengeance. (He says the same about Sword of Gideon, the 1985 film version of the book.)

Layers of fiction have been laid over the few facts known at the start. Jonas dealt with a story that was never confirmed by Israel (in the 1970s, targeted killing was not normal government practice), delivered to him by a dubious source, a man who claimed to be among the Israeli assassins; he's the model for the character called Avner. Jonas travelled with him, checking the story as best he could, but normal checking wasn't possible.

Spielberg has further diluted the "facts" with gallons of basic Hollywood soup stock, swamping whatever hunks of truth were available. Film criticism needs another word, somewhere between documentary and mockumentary, to cover films that claim to be inspired by real events but may or may not tell us what happened. Probably Munich contains as much intimate truth as the average historical film about Napoleon or Caesar, or for that matter John Kennedy.

In other words, not much. Spielberg and his scriptwriters, Tony Kushner and Eric Roth, freely invent scenes or characters whenever the alleged facts don't make sufficient impact. They add a beautiful woman spy who leads an Israeli to his death and insert a ludicrous passage in which the Israelis and some Palestinian terrorists get double-booked in the same "safe house" hotel room. This provides a painfully obvious excuse for a Palestinian to articulate his political position. Spielberg also adds some heavy-handed pathos by making his assassins suffer qualms of conscience. According to the book, the Israelis thought they were doing the right thing and did it.

Spielberg's assassins are wracked by guilt.

As for ordinary credibility: I believed hardly any of Spielberg's film. I didn't believe, for instance, that Israeli intelligence would choose a junior agent as team-leader and then burden the poor young guy with a nerdy bomb specialist whose incompetence leads to disaster. (If you believe Spielberg, idiots were running Mossad in those days.)

Nor did I believe that the fledgling leader, Avner (played by a rather sullen Eric Bana), would kill half a dozen people and only then demand that his boss show him proof that they were really the bad guys. The command level remains purposely out of touch with the assassins for long periods, a bizarre violation of established practice. And the film's credibility also suffers when the Israeli government erases the men from their personnel records, which are confidential anyway. That might hide Israel's involvement but it's too convenient. It means audiences must take the story on faith or not at all. Certainly we can't expect that the archives will one day yield the facts.

An on-screen note at the end provides further bafflement. It reports that most of the people behind the Munich massacre were successfully eliminated but says not one word about what happened to Avner during the last three decades. That's a stunning omission, given that we've just spent about 162 minutes sharing his experience; it raises still more questions about the story's validity. Spielberg leaves him in Brooklyn with his wife and child, still brooding. Malcolm Lester, one of the publishers of the Jonas book, says that as far as he knows Avner still does what he was doing when he told Jonas and others his story but wants that information (as well as his present home) to remain secret.

Politically, Spielberg performs a nimble balancing act on the teeter-totter of opinion. In the old saying, he wants to dance at everybody's wedding. He knows the audience must identify with at least a couple of the five designated Israeli hit men. After all, he's making a melodrama and the laws of popular culture say the plot goes forward only if we can root for one side or the other.

But Spielberg also holds the views of a standard Hollywood Lefty. Given his place and time, he has no choice. If by some miracle hedeveloped an unusual political idea he would certainly have the sense to stifle it. He and his writers inevitably express a distinctly leftish prejudice. They not only have the Palestinian position articulated by a terrorist (who sounds in the 1970s as if he's been reading press releases issued by the Peace Now movement in the 1980s), they also have the hero turn against the assassinations and even Israel, where he was born. Spielberg has said that in this story there are no easy answers. Actually, there is an easy answer: Come down firmly on both sides.

That's what Spielberg tries to do. In the process he falls back on the last refuge of the intellectual charlatan by arguing that, really, he's just raising questions. As he told Ebert, "If this movie bothers you, frightens you, upsets you, maybe it's not a good idea to ignore that. Maybe you need to think about why you're having that reaction." What if it doesn't bother, frighten or upset you? What if it simply appalls you with its coarse, indifferent exploitation of tragedy?

Spielberg's assassins are wracked by guilt.

As for ordinary credibility: I believed hardly any of Spielberg's film. I didn't believe, for instance, that Israeli intelligence would choose a junior agent as team-leader and then burden the poor young guy with a nerdy bomb specialist whose incompetence leads to disaster. (If you believe Spielberg, idiots were running Mossad in those days.)

Nor did I believe that the fledgling leader, Avner (played by a rather sullen Eric Bana), would kill half a dozen people and only then demand that his boss show him proof that they were really the bad guys. The command level remains purposely out of touch with the assassins for long periods, a bizarre violation of established practice. And the film's credibility also suffers when the Israeli government erases the men from their personnel records, which are confidential anyway. That might hide Israel's involvement but it's too convenient. It means audiences must take the story on faith or not at all. Certainly we can't expect that the archives will one day yield the facts.

An on-screen note at the end provides further bafflement. It reports that most of the people behind the Munich massacre were successfully eliminated but says not one word about what happened to Avner during the last three decades. That's a stunning omission, given that we've just spent about 162 minutes sharing his experience; it raises still more questions about the story's validity. Spielberg leaves him in Brooklyn with his wife and child, still brooding. Malcolm Lester, one of the publishers of the Jonas book, says that as far as he knows Avner still does what he was doing when he told Jonas and others his story but wants that information (as well as his present home) to remain secret.

Politically, Spielberg performs a nimble balancing act on the teeter-totter of opinion. In the old saying, he wants to dance at everybody's wedding. He knows the audience must identify with at least a couple of the five designated Israeli hit men. After all, he's making a melodrama and the laws of popular culture say the plot goes forward only if we can root for one side or the other.

But Spielberg also holds the views of a standard Hollywood Lefty. Given his place and time, he has no choice. If by some miracle he developed an unusual political idea he would certainly have the sense to stifle it. He and his writers inevitably express a distinctly leftish prejudice. They not only have the Palestinian position articulated by a terrorist (who sounds in the 1970s as if he's been reading press releases issued by the Peace Now movement in the 1980s), they also have the hero turn against the assassinations and even Israel, where he was born. Spielberg has said that in this story there are no easy answers. Actually, there is an easy answer: Come down firmly on both sides.

That's what Spielberg tries to do. In the process he falls back on the last refuge of the intellectual charlatan by arguing that, really, he's just raising questions. As he told Ebert, "If this movie bothers you, frightens you, upsets you, maybe it's not a good idea to ignore that. Maybe you need to think about why you're having that reaction." What if it doesn't bother, frighten or upset you? What if it simply appalls you with its coarse, indifferent exploitation of tragedy?

Return to the List of Robert Fulford's Columns

Return to Robert Fulford's Home Page
typewriter