Canter Bridge

It is poignantly fitting that the man who directed Schindler’s List should book-end that tale of Jewish pain with Munich, a film that tells another side of this people’s struggle to survive in a period when the Jews have a state and the ability to answer with something more than simple suffering.

Spielberg claims that the good storyteller exercises ’empathy in every single direction’, a project that raises howls whenever it is applied to the Israel-Arab conflict. Or, as this film styles it with historical accuracy, the Israeli-Palestinian dispute over the same dry grove of the fathers’ olive trees.

Supported by star turns from Eric Bana, Moshe Ivgy, and Michael Lonsdale and a haunting sequence in which Lynn Cohen plays an anguished Golda Meir – forced to the conclusion that ‘every civilization finds it necessary to negotiate compromises with its own values’ – Spielberg’s MUNICH manages to focus on the human drama played out by the soul of avengers everywhere. In the wake of the massacre of eleven Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, Bana’s Avner is drafted as the unlikely lead agent of Meir’s decision to prove that Israel must ‘forget peace for now … we have to show them that we are strong.’

Avner carries out his role with taciturn determination, yet his eyes go moister and home calls the more compellingly as he scratches names off the list of eleven Palestinians who must be eliminated in order to show just how costly it is to mess with Israel.

That ‘family matters’ is an affirmation of relative priorities kept by all parties in this film is a theme that Spielberg returns to at measured intervals. In the meantime, Avner and his team of avengers find themselves increasingly struggling with ‘the mice inside your skull’. Resolution comes in the end through family itself. But it is a resolution that leaves stained, limping men, not the ‘neat, durable men’ whom Prime Minister Meir confesses to admiring in the film’s early minutes.

This is a film that must be seen by those who care about those conflicts that are fought in memory of the fathers, not least the one that still rages and promises to rage on in a small slice of land just to the east of the Mediterranean Sea.

Spielberg has told the tale with astonishing evenness, though it is possible that this conclusion can only be reached from the more or less comfortable distance of this reviewer. Empathy – even that which the director claims to have exercised ‘from ever single angle’ – hardly seems a virtue to the true-to-life antagonists of this particular conflict. For some considerable time more, blood will continue to flow in the name of the fathers. Avengers who rise up to even the score will themselves come to know the salt of their own tears, and trudge home to find comfort in family.