MUNICH Review III
Mathieu Kassovitz, Eric Bana in Munich
A seriously miscast Eric Bana doesn’t help matters any. Bana may look great with his shirt off, but he fails to convey both Avner’s dedication to the fight and his ever-multiplying inner demons. While hunting his targets, the actor seems as hapless as Inspector Clouseau, and each time he gets to kill someone, he looks as squeamish as if he were going to clip his victim’s really dirty fingernails. Worse yet, there’s the accent problem.
As in Schindler’s List, the casting of English-speaking actors as continental Europeans and Israelis robs Munich of some much-needed authenticity. Bana and a horrendously over-the-top Geoffrey Rush (as Mossad officer Ephraim), both Australians, come up with grating imitations of Israeli accents (yes, plural) that are as distracting as they are irritating. Spielberg would have done his film a great service had he opted to cast an Israeli leading man (Lior Ashkenazi of Walk on Water would have been ideal for the part) and to use subtitles for those sequences in which people are supposed to be speaking a language other than English. Americans who will sit through a nearly three-hour political film surely have enough functioning neurons to read subtitles for part of that time.
With the lackluster Bana at the center of the film, the real performances in Munich are to be found in the periphery. Veteran Michael Lonsdale, who had already been entangled with a hired assassin in The Day of the Jackal back in 1973, brings a marvelously subtle flair to his "ideologically promiscuous" French businessman, a respectable family man who sells deadly information to anyone (but governments) for a price. As his meticulously dressed son, Mathieu Amalric is appropriately creepy as the willing pawn in the big-money game. Lynn Cohen creates a crafty though not unlikable Golda Meir, while Israeli grand dame Gila Almagor does beautifully as Avner’s mother in the film’s sole family sequences that ring true.
Mathieu Kassovitz provides solid support as the tortured bomb-dismantler-turned-bombmaker, and so do both Ciaran Hinds and Hanns Zischler. Tony-nominee Omar Metwally, for his part, manages to almost make believable his character’s long-winded declarations about a Palestinian Fatherland. Considering that his lines are as stilted as they are well intentioned, Metwally’s sincere delivery is quite a feat.
But the supporting highlight of the film is Marie-Josée Croze (the heartbreaking heroin addict in The Barbarian Invasions), an international superstar in the making if there’s an iota of justice in the film world. Although she is on screen for only a few minutes — and despite the film’s frequent depiction of spurting blood and mangled bodies — no moment in Munich is as hauntingly disturbing as Croze’s final scene.
In spite of its many shortcomings, Munich is a welcome addition to that all but extinct cinematic tradition, the big-studio motion picture with something relevant to say. At a time when simplistic and simple-minded worldviews are widely hailed as the unquestionable truth, Spielberg, Kushner, and Roth have bravely created a world enmeshed in ideological complexities.
The film’s two basic premises — revenge doesn’t pay; societies that compromise their ethics are in fact compromising themselves — may seem much too mundane to those lofty souls who invoke God while detonating human and car bombs. They may also seem naïve to those worldly types who know that only Guantanamo-style prisons, Patriot acts, extra-judicial murders, and wars to eliminate nonexistent weapons of mass destruction will eradicate tribal terrorism. But the Munich filmmakers know better. (Note: According to U.S. government figures, a record of 655 "significant" terrorist attacks took place around the world in 2004, up from the previous record of about 175 the year before.)
In the film’s memorable final scene, the camera lingers for a few seconds on the New York skyline of the late 1970s. Besides connecting the past, as depicted in Munich, to the present, that last moment also serves as a sobering warning. If we don’t act now to stop the power-hungry ideological zealots currently in charge, in 10 or 20 years’ time how many existing structures the world over will have to be recreated on film through computer-generated imagery?
Whatever happens, the responsibility ultimately lies with all of us.
The terrorism data is from the Washington Post
5 Academy Award Nominations
Best Picture: Kathleen Kennedy, Steven Spielberg, Barry Mendel
Best Direction: Steven Spielberg
Best Adapted Screenplay: Tony Kushner, Eric Roth
Best Editing: Michael Kahn
Best Original Score: John Williams
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Tags: Eric Bana, Film Reviews, Geoffrey Rush, Gila Almagor, Marie-Josée Croze, Munich, Omar Metwally
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