The Chris Moeller Archives

Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Spielberg

When it comes to obsessing about one's legacy, Bill Clinton and Bud Selig ain't got nothin' on Steven Spielberg. Each one of the film director's historical "re-creations" is amped with enough cinematic thrills to excite commercial audiences, enough self-importance and phony esteem to warrant them as museum pieces, and, therefore, just a little something to offend no one. Lest we have forgotten, by film's end, that the entire narrative of "Munich" has been driven by the innocent massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics, Spielberg crudely intercuts the sequence of his lead character's final fucking of his wife with an operatic re-accounting of the bloodletting at the Munich airfield. The Accidental Assassin is tortured by his career choice. Get it?

The concept of vigilante justice in "Munich" is ripe for exploration in the current political climate, and Spielberg knows it. He's the A-lister of all A-listers in Tinsel Town, and he's taken his pick of the litter in movie projects for the better part of three decades. (I wept when I found out that our greatest director, and the consummate cynic, Billy Wilder, had wanted to make "Schindler's List" his last picture, but couldn't get the rights.) "Munich" could have delivered as either an indictment or endorsement of the current U.S. policy in Iraq and Afghanistan, or even as simply a morality tale about conflicted motives, which is what it attempted to be. What it is, though, is another tutorial from Spielberg on how to be all things to all people. An affirmation of his belief that thrilling an audience is the most sacred motive of all, and an overkill reinforcement of the notion that the relationship between Israel and the Palestinians is really fucked up.

For the life of me, I can't figure out how the movie could be interpreted as either anti-Israel or anti-Palestinian, though similar thematic shortcomings in film have never been a hindrance before for special interest groups that want to raise their public profile. Both peoples are humanized and portrayed as victims, and Israel's military policy of vindication is alternately praised and ridiculed. Like I said earlier, the film's only real allegiance is to Hollywood blockbuster traditions. It's basically just a re-telling of other "revenge with a conscience" films, such as "The Untouchables," or 1998's "Ronin" as my theater companion pointed out. Or "Unforgiven." Or, come to think of it, "Batman."

If Spielberg's social ideas always surface as if from the lesson plans of that 40-year-old high school history teacher who wears a denim jacket to class, the personal themes of his films always come straight from the heart of that 14-year-old boy still inside Steven that lives to be exorcised every six to 12 months in your local cineplex. His father issues play out in a couple ways this time, first, between the lead executioner, Avner, and his superior, and then, in a laughable triangle between Avner, his treacherous French source, and the source's pragmatic but noble father. (The patriarch murder profiteer lives out his days, cooking in an elaborate rural chateau surrounded by adoring grandchildren. Think Vito Corleone at his daughter's wedding, but without the U.S. Federal Government taking down license plate numbers.)

Spielberg continues to be the clumsiest major movie director of sexual themes since the lifting of the Hays Code, and maybe even before that. (Recall Jennifer Garner's awkward role in "Catch Me If You Can.") Here, I thought I was experiencing the first truly sexy scene of his lexicon, involving an is-she-or-isn't-she Mata Hari. The problem was it didn't fit the narrative, and then, soon enough, the plot degenerated into a familiar Spielberg arc about how good little boys shouldn't trust their dicks, and then completely collapses with perhaps the most degrading and masochistic film sequence since "Blue Velvet."

The prize for the scene that requires the most suspended audience disbelief goes to the one in which the French source sets the assassins up in an Athens "safe house" with PLO operatives. The Palestinians believe the Jews are just European Socialists, and the two groups bond over Al Green on a vintage radio. Maybe that's the moral of Spielberg's film. "Whether times are good or bad, happy or sad," can't we all just put down our machine guns and groove?

posted by CM @ 8:14 PM