Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times, who found the alien invasion lacking in logic and the tripods a “clumsy retro design,” described War of the Worlds as “a big, clunky movie containing some sensational sights but lacking the zest and joyous energy we expect from Steven Spielberg…. What happened to the sense of wonder Spielberg celebrated in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and the dazzling imagination of Minority Report?” In a sense, War of the Worlds marked Spielberg’s regression to his youthful view of aliens, one that was heavily influenced by 1950s sci-fi/horror movies. Before he became celebrated for his refreshingly benign view of aliens in Close Encounters and E.T., Spielberg had shown hostile aliens attacking humans in his little-seen first feature, Firelight (1964), and he had flirted with doing the same in his unfilmed project Night Skies before reconfiguring it as E.T. War of the Worlds producer Kathleen Kennedy claimed that “the edgier, darker story has always kind of been somewhere in there, and now he’s telling that story.” While discussing the film in a 2007 interview, Spielberg claimed, “I thought, ‘Oh, my God, what a hypocrite—I’ve been making these movies declaring that I’m kinda like the ambassador of goodwill between them and us, and I started out my whole life making a movie about aggressive aliens.’” Perhaps the truth is that it bothered him to change course again so late in his career and wallow in the prevailing xenophobia of the Bush era. There’s no getting away from the fact that the humane qualities Spielberg brought to interplanetary encounters in Close Encounters and E.T. are sorely missed in the coldly formulaic War of the Worlds.
Nevertheless, because of Cruise and its nonstop action, and no doubt because it tapped so viscerally into the Zeitgeist, War of the Worlds became a box-office hit, grossing $591.7 million worldwide. Spielberg’s viability as a popular filmmaker had been thrown into question by The Terminal’s lackluster performance in the United States ($77 million), although the film did almost twice that business overseas. His resounding success with War of the Worlds enabled the fifty-nine-year-old director to continue reigning as Hollywood’s most crowd-pleasing filmmaker, canceling out the aura of disappointment that unfairly surrounded such superior films as Amistad and A.I.
TWENTY
“400-POUND GORILLA”
BEING able to make a film such as Munich, which confronts the audience with difficult, if not intractable, moral questions, is one of the major reasons Spielberg values his commercial success and jealously guards his independence. He fully anticipated the firestorm of animosity the film provoked. Before committing to direct it, he repeatedly turned down the project, which had been developed by producer Barry Mendel and brought to him by Kathleen Kennedy. He said, “I’ll leave it to somebody else, somebody braver than me.” But he has earned the ability to speak his mind on subjects that concern him and to delve into controversial themes as he sees fit. His willingness to risk his capital of audience goodwill and critical approval is one of his most admirable traits.
“I couldn’t live with myself being silent for the sake of maintaining my popularity,” he concluded. “And I’m at an age right now where if I don’t take risks, I lose respect for myself. And this was an important risk for me to take. … I just could feel that somehow this story had my name written all over it and I couldn’t deny that. It just stirred up all these questions and arguments inside me.” “Steven knew he was putting his head above the parapet,” cast member Ciarán Hinds commented. “He must have been aware what that might cost him personally. It’s as brave as you can get—because he absolutely doesn’t need to.” Though Munich (2005) does not reach the sustained level of artistic achievement achieved by Schindler’s List, it approaches the themes of terrorism and retribution responsibly and respects the moral complexity of the subject, even while presenting the material in the framework of a political thriller.
Spielberg remembered watching with horror (in the company of his father) the televised coverage of the massacre of Israeli athletes by Palestinian terrorists at the 1972 Munich Olympic Games. (That event, depicted in Munich with television footage and fragmentary recreations, is covered fully in Arthur Cohn and Kevin Macdonald’s 1999 Oscar-winning documentary One Day in September.) At the time of the massacre, Spielberg had never heard of terrorism, but felt “rage and frustration” over “Jews being murdered on German soil again.” Over time, his growing interest in world politics and involvement in Jewish causes would make him a passionate supporter of Israel. His involvement in Schindler’s List and the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation from the 1990s onward brought him in frequent demand for public commentary on Middle Eastern political issues. His liberalism made him skeptical of the more hardline approaches of the Israeli right to the issue of Palestinian independence. It is a bitter irony that making Munich would cause Spielberg to be denounced by some writers as an enemy of Israel, when the film was actually made out of his deeply felt involvement with Israel. “If it became necessary,” he told the German magazine Der Spiegel, “I would be prepared to die for the USA and for Israel.” The Munich project enabled him to explore his conflicts and concerns about Israel’s troubled role in the Middle East and over the issue of how a nation should respond to terrorist attacks.
Israel’s targeted assassinations of those responsible for the Munich massacre, and others it linked (sometimes tenuously) to terrorism, began as a secretive program, authorizing one or more hit squads to roam Europe for years, hunting down targets. Eventually the program became public knowledge, although its details remain shadowy and controversial. It is no coincidence that Munich was made at a time when the United States was grappling with similar issues: Is a nation justified in breaking international law when it believes its survival is at risk? Are targeted assassinations morally wrong? What does vengeance do to a nation and to a person’s soul? And where does the ultimate responsibility lie for political violence? In the screenplay for Munich by Tony Kushner and Eric Roth, Israel’s Prime Minister Golda Meir (Lynn Cohen) defines the essential moral dilemma when she asserts, “Every civilization finds it necessary to negotiate compromises with its own values.”
Munich’s subtext is the American response to 9/11. The film implicitly questions the Bush administration’s response as both excessive and damaging to the country’s moral standing in the eyes of the world as well as a provocation of further turmoil in the Middle East. The surprising presence of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center as Avner (Eric Bana), the leader of the hit squad, exits the film’s final shot brings the subtext to the surface and asks the audience to consider whether the “eye for an eye” mentality is wise, destructive, or even efficacious. “Did we accomplish anything at all? Every man we kill has been replaced by worse…. There’s no peace at the end of this, no matter what you believe,” Avner tells Ephraim (Geoffrey Rush), his Mossad superior in Operation Wrath of God. Through that far-reaching conclusion and with its many other moral ambiguities, the film raises questions it is not able to answer. For some critics, that is a flaw, but a work of art, even one that deals with such hot-button political issues, exists precisely to make the audience think and feel more deeply about its subject matter, leaving the solutions for political pundits, historians, and philosophers.
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MUNICH is based on a 1984 book by the Hungarian-born Canadian journalist George Jonas, Vengeance: The True Story of an Israeli Counter-Terrorist Team. Although presented as a factual account, the book is based largely on the recollections of a source with the pseudonym “Avner.” Jonas claims he verified many of the details in Avner’s account, but it has to be taken largely on faith. Israel has maintained official secrecy on the subject, but two Israeli generals publicly confirmed the existence of such hit squads, and Aaron J. Klein, a captain in the Intelligence division of the Israel Defense Forces as well as a writer for Time, provided a variant account of the reprisal killings in his 2005 book Striking Back: The 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre and Israel’s Deadly Response. Klein contended that those killed by the Mossad’s Caesarea unit were
not the hard-to-target top-level leaders of Black September but “low-level, easily accessible activists…. Yet they were profiled in ways that implied direct culpability,” which satisfied Israel’s desire for revenge and caused fewer problems with European nations. Avner has been identified as Juval Aviv, now a writer and security consultant, but his identity and his story have been called into question by the Israeli government and others. “Can such tales be believed?” Jonas wrote in 2006. “I think so, though always keeping in mind many spooks possess the imagination of the Baron Munchausen…. Fact-checking clandestine operations is virtually a contradiction in terms—if a government agency reveals anything about a covert operation, it’s likely to be disinformation…. I’m satisifed that ‘Avner’ described a string of operations of which he had first-hand knowledge. Whether or not he exaggerated his own role, I couldn’t say.”
Spielberg’s reliance on this text, like his use of Frank Abagnale’s questionable memoir for Catch Me If You Can, places Munich in the realm of speculative docudrama (“INSPIRED BY REAL EVENTS,” as an opening title puts it). And when the director turned to Kushner, best known for his play Angels in America and an outspoken critic of Israeli policies, as the final screenwriter for Munich, that decision helped position the film to the left in the philosophical debate over Israel’s relationship with the Palestinians while ensuring that Munich would take a vigorously dialectical approach in its dialogue. In a 2004 interview with the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Kushner called the founding of Israel a “mistake,” though he supported its right to exist: “Zionism aimed at the establishment of a national identity is predicated on a reading of Jewish history and an interpretation of the meaning of Jewish history that I don’t share. Insofar as Zionism is an idea that the solution to the suffering of the Jewish people was the establishment of a Jewish nation, I think it is not the right answer. I don’t think that a minority group has a lot of hope in surviving entirely on the basis of its own force and power, because by definition a minority is outnumbered substantially…. Establishing a state means fucking people over.”
The central dramatic and philosophical thrust of Munich is that the coldblooded acts of vengeance committed by Avner cause him second thoughts and, eventually, moral anguish, making him doubt the righteousness of his cause and turning him against his own country. Such qualms are also expressed by another member of his team, the bomb maker, Robert (Mathieu Kassovitz), who says, “We’re Jews, Avner. Jews don’t do wrong because our enemies do wrong.” Avner says, “We can’t afford to be that decent anymore.” Robert responds, “I don’t know that we ever were that decent. Suffering thousands of years of hatred doesn’t make you decent. But we’re supposed to be righteous. That’s a beautiful thing. That’s Jewish. That’s what I knew. That’s what I was taught. And now I’m losing it. And I lose that … that’s everything. That’s my soul.” Avner finally emigrates to the United States, believing that the Israeli government is a threat to himself and his family because of his questioning and defiance of official policy. An earlier adaptation of Jonas’s book, the 1986 HBO miniseries Sword of Gideon, which attracted far less critical scrutiny, also depicts Avner (played by Steven Bauer) as conflicted over his role, though he appears less distraught and frantic than the character in Munich and in the end rejoins the Israeli military to serve in combat.
Spielberg and Kushner met with Juval Aviv for many hours of discussion while preparing the film. Insisting that the character’s conflicts in the film are based on reality, Spielberg also said, “I trust my intuition and my common sense: the man is not lying, he is not exaggerating. Everything he says is true.” Jonas contended that “Avner” may have “told the left-leaning movie-makers what they wanted to hear.” The author and others objected strenuously to Munich’s emphasis on Avner’s moral qualms, as if that violated a taboo against challenging Israel’s right to defend itself against terrorism and even called into question its right to exist. “With due respect to pop culture and its undisputed master,” wrote Jonas, “one doesn’t reach the moral high ground by being neutral between good and evil.”
Another of the film’s most vociferous detractors was Leon Wieseltier of The New Republic, whose contempt for Spielberg had earlier been expressed in an article on Schindler’s List entitled “Close Encounters of the Nazi Kind,” in which he wrote, “No figure in American culture has worked harder to stupefy it, to stuff it with illusion, to deny the reality of evil, to blur the distinctions between fantasy and fact.” Wieseltier wrote that there are “two kinds of Israelis in Munich: cruel Israelis with remorse and cruel Israelis without remorse.” Wieseltier argued that “for all its vanity about its own courage, the film is afraid of itself. It is soaked in the sweat of its idea of evenhandedness. Palestinians murder, Israelis murder. Palestinians show evidence of a conscience, Israelis show evidence of a conscience…. Palestinians kill innocents, Israelis kill innocents. All these analogies begin to look ominously like the sin of equivalence…. Munich prefers a discussion of counterterrorism to a discussion of terrorism; or it thinks that they are the same discussion. This is an opinion that only people who are not responsible for the safety of other people can hold.”
J. J. Goldberg, the editor of the newspaper The Jewish Daily Forward, defended the film: “The debate as it unfolds on screen is an Israeli disputation, framed almost entirely in the words and deeds of Israelis…. What’s important about Munich is that it portrays one of the essential truths of Israeli society. Whatever went on among the agents chasing down the Munich terrorists in 1972 and 1973, the fact is that Israelis do debate the rightness of their actions. They do so endlessly, and they have done it for years…. It is one of the noblest aspects of the reborn Jewish state. Friends of Israel everywhere should be proud to see that moral sensitivity portrayed on the big screen…. Killing corrodes the soul, even when it’s necessary. Israelis know that. If their friends have forgotten it, then it’s time to be alarmed.”
Michelle Goldberg of Salon put the argument in a wider political context: “Spielberg, ironically, is accused of being insufficiently Manichean…. The analogy to our own time is obvious, and in some ways the argument about Munich is really one about America. Post-9/11 political correctness, which demands that stories about terrorism and counterterrorism be limned in starkest black and white, seemed to have dissipated these last few years. In the debate over Spielberg’s movie, though, it’s returning with a vengeance. The result is not just the mischaracterization of a movie; it’s the resurrection of the taboo against depicting the war on terror in shades of gray.”
The film’s emphasis on the moral ambiguities of the situation does leave open the question of whether Israel’s policy of retaliatory violence (which has continued in recent years) is justifiable or, indeed, efficacious. But Spielberg violated Stanley Kubrick’s advice never to offer the media a definitive statement of his thematic intent, telling Time, “I’m always in favor of Israel responding strongly when it’s threatened. At the same time, a response to a response doesn’t really solve anything. It just creates a perpetual-motion machine. There’s been a quagmire of blood for blood for many decades in that region. Where does it end? How can it end?” Munich also makes a gesture at evenhandedness by giving Avner an exchange with a young member of the Palestine Liberation Organization, Ali (Omar Metwally), who, thinking Avner is a member of the German Red Army Faction, makes the case for his own people’s right to their homeland: “We can wait forever. And if we need to, we can make the whole planet unsafe for Jews…. [T]hen the world will see how they’ve made us into animals…. It will take a hundred years, but we’ll win…. You don’t know what it is not to have a home…. We want to be nations. Home is everything.” But the accusation by Wieseltier that Munich commits “the sin of equivalence” by drawing no distinction between the Black September terrorists and the Israeli hit squad is simplistic and misleading (the dramatic emphasis is largely on the Israelis and their complex moral debate over the issues of violence), and there is not
hing in the film to indicate that the filmmaker is anti-Zionist. The film’s attempts at political balance are, at most, mild, even if they outraged some neocons and other commentators. Munich’s chutzpah is that it devotes itself to examining the gray areas of the subject.
In an interview with the British newspaper The Observer, Spielberg said with “a note of irritation” in his voice, “I find it kind of astonishing that people who don’t like this movie are saying that I’m trying to humanize terrorists, as if it was ever acceptable for me to dehumanize anyone in any of my pictures. Some political critics would like to see these people dehumanized because when you take away someone’s humanity you can do anything to them, you’re not committing a crime because they’re not human. This film clearly states that the Black September of the Munich murders were terrorists. These were unforgivable actions, but until we begin to ask questions about who these terrorists are and why terrorism happens, we’re never going to get to the truth of why 9/11 happened, for instance.”
Calling Munich “the most European film I have ever made,” Spielberg drew stylistic inspiration from Costa-Gavras’s quintessential political thriller Z (1969) as well as from such 1970s films as The Day of the Jackal, The Parallax View, The French Connection, and Three Days of the Condor. He and Kaminski filmed Munich with a semi-documentary feel in natural locations (Malta, Hungary, France, and New York, with high security in place), employing the long lenses and zooms typical of the period. But Munich largely avoids the jazzy, propulsive rhythms of Z and devotes much of its running time to philosophical discussions among the characters. Spielberg’s understandable attempt to treat the issues dispassionately rather than to stir the viewer melodramatically renders the film somewhat emotionally distant.
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