Munich (2005) Review

After eleven Israeli athletes were killed at the 1972 Olympics, a team was assembled to find and kill the men held responsible. The film follows that assignment through to its logical end: nobody feels better and the list gets longer.

It’s the least characteristic film Spielberg has made. No sentiment, no rescue, no child in the frame to soften anything, and an ending that offers nothing. Tony Kushner rewrote Eric Roth’s script. That explains a great deal about why the dialogue is as good as it is and why the film is willing to be talky.

Spielberg never made anything braver, in my view, and it’s the film of his I find hardest to shake. He takes the thriller machinery he’s better at than almost anyone and keeps refusing to pay out. I admire that enormously, even while I wish he’d trusted it all the way to the last frame.

The 8 is for a picture willing to argue against its own genre while operating fully inside it. The suspense set pieces work, and the film keeps subtracting the satisfaction those set pieces would normally provide. It runs two hours and forty minutes, the final sequence overreaches badly, and the last shot is the worst decision in it.

The Arithmetic Never Balances

Somebody more capable replaces every name crossed off the list. The team notices this progressively and can’t stop, because stopping was never one of the options they were given. That’s the film’s argument stated as a mechanism instead of a speech. The operation is succeeding, on its own terms, target by target, and the success is producing the opposite of what it was meant to produce. The bookkeeping is literal. Avner is given a bank account in Geneva and reimbursed by receipt, and the film keeps returning to the money: the accountant’s disapproval, the receipts, the cost of each death itemized and filed. A killing has a price and the price is recorded.

Papa’s family in France, who sell information to anyone, are the clearest statement of it. They have no politics at all, they’re warm and generous hosts, and they’ll locate anybody for money. The market is neutral and it’s the only thing in the film that works properly.

The one conversation with a Palestinian does the same work from the human side. Avner is undercover, neither man knows who the other is, and they talk on a stairwell about home. Both are certain, both are reasonable, neither can be talked out of anything, and the scene resolves nothing.

Kushner has said he wanted the film to refuse both the position that the operation was justified and the position that it was simply wrong. That’s why both sides attacked it on release.

What It Costs the Team

The film is careful to make the men competent and ordinary instead of tormented from the start. They’re good at this, they believe in it, and the erosion is only legible because the starting point was solid.

None of them is a soldier by trade. A toymaker who makes the bombs, a document forger, a driver, a man who cleans up afterwards. That civilian quality is deliberate and it’s why the violence is so awkward. The bombs go wrong, the doses are miscalculated, a man survives a blast and has to be finished, and a woman kills one of them in a houseboat.

Avner’s deterioration is physical before it’s psychological. He stops sleeping. He checks rooms. He tears apart a hotel mattress looking for a device that’s not there. He puts a bookcase against a door. The film gives him no monologue about his soul.

By the end he can’t eat at his own table, and the scene where he lays out food obsessively for a visitor who won’t come inside does more than any confession would.

That table of food laid out for a man who won’t come in is the image I’d point to if anybody asked me why this film deserves an 8. It’s lonelier than any speech could be, and I think it’s the best thing in the picture.

It handles the team’s dissolution without drama. They’re killed off individually, in unrelated ways, and the film declines to make their deaths meaningful. A woman he was flirting with kills Carl. Robert dies because a bomb he built failed.

Ephron, the handler played by Geoffrey Rush, is the film’s most frightening figure, and the least showy. He’s affectionate toward Avner, entirely sincere, and won’t acknowledge that anything has gone wrong, because acknowledging it’s not in his remit.

The Toymaker and the Bombs

Robert makes the bombs and he makes toys, and the film never lets you forget which is his real trade.

Every device he builds is wrong. The first is underpowered and the target survives long enough for the team to finish him by hand. Another is overpowered and takes out more of a building than intended, with a child nearly killed.

The wrong person answers a phone bomb. The team spends the film discovering that a man who’s good at mechanisms isn’t the same as a man who’s good at killing.

That’s the film’s most practical argument and its least discussed. Competence doesn’t transfer. These aren’t soldiers, they’re specialists conscripted into work adjacent to their skills, and the adjacency is where the horror comes from. Mathieu Kassovitz plays him as increasingly appalled by his own products, and his line about being told he was building something clean is the film’s most direct statement of what recruitment sounds like. He dies because of a device that failed. That’s the only ending the film could give him and which it delivers without comment. The contrast with Steve, the South African driver who has no doubts at all, is the film’s way of showing that certainty is a temperament instead of a conclusion. Nothing that happens changes his view, and nothing that happens leaves Robert’s intact.

The Ending Nobody Liked

The final shot places the World Trade Center in frame across the water. That’s either the most obvious gesture in Spielberg’s career or the necessary one depending on who you ask.

I think it’s a mistake. The film has spent two and a half hours showing that the cycle continues, with far more subtlety than a skyline can manage. The image says out loud what the arithmetic already proved, and saying it out loud invites an argument about the specific comparison instead of the general point.

The intercut between the Munich killings and Avner having sex with his wife is a worse decision and the one most people remember. It’s intended to show that the operation has colonized his intimate life, which is a legitimate idea, and the execution is close to unwatchable.

Spielberg has defended both and I’ve never found the defense convincing. What’s odd is that a film so disciplined for so long loses its nerve twice in the last twenty minutes. I’d have ended the film one scene earlier, on the bench, where Avner asks Ephraim to come and eat at his house and is refused. That’s the ending I’d have kept, and I’d have cut everything after it. Rush plays the refusal so politely it hurts to watch, and nothing in the final minutes comes close to that exchange.

Why It Was Attacked From Both Sides

In Israel, the film was criticized for drawing a moral equivalence, and criticized elsewhere for being insufficiently critical of the operation. Both objections are accurate descriptions of what the film does. It opens with the athletes’ deaths staged in full, returning to them repeatedly, and it doesn’t permit you to forget what started this. It also shows the targets as men with families, one of them a poet, and shows a child nearly killed by a bomb the team planted.

The source is Vengeance by George Jonas, based on the account of a man claiming to have been an operative, and the accuracy of that account has been disputed since publication. Spielberg has always described the film as historical fiction and the critics who attacked its accuracy were mostly attacking a claim it didn’t make. What the film won’t do is tell you what should have happened instead, and that refusal is the thing both sides found intolerable.

It made about a hundred and thirty million dollars, was nominated for five Academy Awards and won none, and has aged into being regarded as one of Spielberg’s best. That wasn’t the initial view.

He made it in the same year as War of the Worlds. It’s a stranger fact than it sounds.

Should you watch Munich?

Yes, and be ready for a long, cold, talky film with excellent suspense sequences and no consolation at any point. It’s an 8 because the argument is built so carefully for two and a half hours, and it isn’t higher because Spielberg flinches twice at the finish, with that intercut and that skyline. The bench scene is the real ending, and it’s a devastating one.

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