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, which is that nobody feels better and the list gets longer.

It is 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, which explains a great deal about why the dialogue is as good as it is and why the film is willing to be talky.

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

Every name crossed off the list is replaced by somebody more capable. The team notices this progressively and cannot stop, because stopping was never one of the options they were given.

That is the film’s argument stated as a mechanism instead of a speech. The operation is not failing. It 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 itemised 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 are warm and generous hosts, and they will locate anybody for money. The market is neutral and it is 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, which is why it was attacked from both directions 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 are 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 is 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 is psychological. He stops sleeping. He checks rooms. He tears apart a hotel mattress looking for a device that is not there. He puts a bookcase against a door. The film gives him no monologue about his soul.

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

The team’s dissolution is handled without drama. They are killed off individually, in unrelated ways, and the film declines to make their deaths meaningful. Carl is killed by a woman he was flirting with. Robert dies because a bomb he built failed.

Ephron, the handler played by Geoffrey Rush, is the film’s most quietly frightening figure. He is affectionate toward Avner, entirely sincere, and will not acknowledge that anything has gone wrong, because acknowledging it is 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 to be finished by hand. Another is overpowered and takes out more of a building than intended, with a child nearly killed. A phone bomb is answered by the wrong person. The team spends the film discovering that a man who is good at mechanisms is not the same as a man who is good at killing.

That is the film’s most practical argument and its least discussed. Competence does not transfer. These are not soldiers, they are specialists conscripted into work adjacent to their skills, and the adjacency is where the horror lives.

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, which is 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, which is either the most obvious gesture in Spielberg’s career or the necessary one depending on who you ask.

I think it is a mistake. The film has spent two and a half hours demonstrating 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 is intended to show that the operation has colonised his intimate life, which is a legitimate idea, and the execution is close to unwatchable.

Spielberg has defended both and I have never found the defense convincing. What is odd is that a film so disciplined for so long loses its nerve twice in the last twenty minutes.

The scene that should have ended it is the one before, on the bench, where Avner asks Ephron to come and eat at his house and is refused. That is the ending. Everything after it is decoration.

Why It Was Attacked From Both Sides

The film was criticized in Israel 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 does not 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 did not make.

What the film will not 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, which was not the initial view.

He made it in the same year as War of the Worlds, which is 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. Stop paying attention in the last ten minutes if you want to keep the argument intact. The bench scene is the real ending.

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