The movie, written by playwright Tony Kushner (Angels in America) and Eric Roth (Forrest Gump -- be warned), is based on the book Vengeance, by George Jonas -- the same book that provided the basis for the made-for-HBO film Sword of Gideon nineteen years ago, in which Steven Bauer played Avner Kauffman, an Israeli soldier appointed by Prime Minister Golda Meir to the task of killing Arabs responsible (and, in some cases, not) for the Munich massacre. In fact, Munich is very much a remake of the forgotten Sword, which likewise assembled a team of five to avenge the deaths of more Jews on German soil, twenty miles from the site of the concentration camp at Dachau. Whole scenes and sequences and even dialogue from the 1986 movie appear again in Munich, rephrased in the elegant, kinetic cinematography of Janusz Kaminski, a Spielberg collaborator since 1993's Schindler's List.
But most important, Sword, too, wrestled with that most Jewish of themes: guilt. Spielberg and his collaborators are careful not to revel in the revenge wrought by the Israeli government, which created a special branch of its Mossad intelligence agency, called Caesarea, to assassinate the planners and plotters responsible for Munich. They suggest, as have others who have written about this subject (including Aaron Klein in his stark new book Striking Back: The 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre and Israel's Deadly Response), that not all of the targets chosen for elimination were members of Black September, the group responsible for the Munich killings. Some were PLO sympathizers or financial backers leading quiet lives of respectability throughout Europe, where they hid in plain sight; indeed, many of the Black September agents survive to this day.
At first that doesn't bother the Caesarea agents, especially their leader, Avner Kauffman (played by Hulk Eric Bana). Kauffman, whose father was a military hero, is a bored soldier with a beautiful wife and child on the way; who is he to turn down Meir (Lynn Cohen), who rationalizes assembling a death squad by insisting that "every civilization finds it necessary to negotiate compromises with its own values"? Only after they've blown up or gunned down a few folks does Kauffman come to have a crisis of conscience, demanding to see evidence from the secretive superior (Geoffrey Rush) who keeps his proof locked away.
This is not, despite the hullabaloo surrounding Munich's release, Spielberg and his writers' novel invention; in Sword of Gideon, Bauer, like Bana, begs out after finding himself knee-deep in blood, insisting that the longer countries insist on resorting to eye-for-an-eye justice, the more likely they are to go blind. Spielberg, perhaps, has received so much grief because Munich is far more wishy-washy about its intentions than was Gideon: It wants to be a tense, terse blow-'em-up thriller, but also show its remorse for having such a good time. Throughout most of the film, Kauffman merely shrugs off his colleagues' protestations that Jews "are righteous" and that to act as terrorists do is to lose one's soul. But, suddenly, Bana grows pale and gaunt, the sure sign a movie hero's no longer into his job; his transformation is so sudden, we don't quite believe his penitence.
Munich also has the grim pleasure of containing perhaps the most misguided sequence Spielberg's ever filmed, and it comes near the very end. The movie has shied away from revealing too much of what actually happened in Munich; it shows us only brief though grisly scenes from the Olympic Village, and much of what we see and hear comes in snippets from ABC's coverage with Jim McKay and Peter Jennings. (Sword of Gideon, too, was structured similarly.) But at the end, Spielberg puts us on the runway at Fürstenfeldbruck military airfield, where the German police botched a rescue effort and killed only a few terrorists, but not before members of Black September executed all of the Israelis. And he intercuts these grim, grisly flashbacks with scenes of Kauffman violently screwing his wife, soaking her in spit and sweat as he roars a silent, slow-mo orgasm. It's a disquieting moment -- and not a little sickening -- because whatever the filmmaker's intentions, whether it is to show us Kauffman's need to connect with his wife or disconnect from his actions, it plays only as overwrought and foolish. You'd be tempted to laugh, if not for the bile rising in your throat.
