Munich (2005)Steven SpielbergI don't doubt Spielberg's intelligence, thanks to some of his better films; however, while making a particular film, he needs to decide whether he is making a commercial film or a serious film; whether he is a showman or a serious artist. He often seems to try combining both, and ends up achieving neither. In Munich, the same pattern repeats. It seems confused between a normal action thriller and a predictable political statement (which I agree with, but which need not help make a film better) about violence begetting violence, or an eye for an eye making the world go blind. The structure is interesting enough, too, with gradually rising graphs of the personal rising up to present an opposition to the political, against its simplistic aim of serving 'them' right, or that of the righteous assassins seemingly behaving more and more like the evil terrorists they are supposed to eliminate, and of the existential questioning that arises in any sensitive human as a result thereof. The film fails on two counts: the script is almost mathematical, where even human emotions are delivered in a carefully measured manner, as in a recipe. Then, there is the attempt to make it an edge-of-the-seat thriller, with ploys like the little girl who picks the telephone, or the Dutch woman who turns from seductress to assassin to assassinated, or the car in New York that seems to tail Avner, but turns out to be harmless. Such an action-packed narrative leaves little room for developing the characters of the assassins or the haunted, unless you call one line about the 'narrative of the survival' by a translator of the Arabian Nights just before he gets killed as character development (but it did make me think that perhaps the original book was not so banal). The frequent mini-climaxes also leave little time to reflect on the serious theme the film seems to want to develop. Moreover, taking a cute action hero (used to playing The Incredible Hulk, or Hector in a cloyingly simplistic version of the Iliad) as the central character Avner also mars the film, because he is woefully inadequate in convincing us of the doubts and fissures that develop in his character over the course of the film. I also found it unintentionally funny of Spielberg when he resorted to clichés like the Eiffel tower to show that we are in Paris, or the rain in London, and a French Godfather discussing cheese, all of which create a sense of kitsch instead of lending any dignity to the already predictable narrative.
