Andrea Levin of CAMERA has a thoughtful and informative take on this latest film fiasco, but so far I can only find it at IMRA.
Steven Spielberg and an army of well-paid consultants and spinmeisters are pulling out all the stops to promote Munich and fend off damaging criticism of the movie about the murder of Israeli Olympic athletes and the effort to track down the crime's masterminds. The campaign has even included courting family members of the slain men for endorsements to blunt a gathering storm of negative commentary from the likes of David Brooks in the New York Times, Leon Wieseltier in The New Republic and Andrea Peyser in the New York Post.
I've read Wieseltier's and Peyser's reviews (all three require registration). Peyser's is worth reading, but Levin's is much more substantive.
Briefly, the movie presents, via pulse-pounding scenes of kidnaping, death, stalking and more death, the message that Israel was brutal, bungling and immoral in its reaction to the massacre. True, the hostage-takers were also brutal; but dispossessing Palestinians, we soon learn, lies at the root.
Cultured Palestinians passionately explain: "We are for twenty-four years the world's largest refugee population. Our homes taken from us. Living in camps. No future. No food. Nothing decent for our children."
In Munich there are no Palestinians clamoring for the destruction of Israel - as all Palestinian groups did then and, regrettably, leading groups continue to do today. On the contrary, in a contrived encounter between Avner, the movie's lead, and a PLO member, the latter insists he simply wants a homeland. He also blames Jews for turning the Palestinians "into animals" and charges them with exploiting guilt over the Holocaust.
In all of this one sees the biases of Tony Kushner, the radical playwright brought in by Spielberg to reshape the script. Kushner has repeatedly called the creation of Israel a "mistake,"blamed Israel for "the whole shameful history of the dreadful suffering of the Palestinian people,"and advocated policies to undermine the state.
For those who've been taken by surprise by Spielberg's approach to this film, I'd like to point out that Jeff at Beautiful Atrocities posted a heads up on this well over a year ago. (Hmmm. The original post seems to be missing. But the Google cache still has it here, for now.)
Anyway, read the rest of Levin's review. It includes some important facts and background, some of which you won't find in too many other discussions of the film.
