There's a moment or three in Steven Spielberg's latest film that recalls the greatness of his earlier pictures and reminds why he's the unquestioned master of the visual medium. Unfortunately, as wonderful as those moments are, they only account for fifteen or so minutes of the film's bloated three hour running time. Most of that time is padded with yet another bombing of a nondescript European house or yet another meal in which the characters discuss nothing much so that the audience may see just how different what they are doing has made these men. It's those scenes, the ones of look-at-me self-importance, that really grate. Perhaps it's that this film was rushed into production and rushed again to release so that it would qualify for the Oscars. Whatever the reason, the magic is just not in those scenes.
But it is there in the extended opening that depicts the capture and murder of the nine Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. Told mostly through shots of televisions, reporters and people watching TV around the world, this sequence says more about the way that we perceive the world in the modern age than most films that are expressly about the subject. It's just really impressive filmmaking.
The magic's also there in a scene in which Avner's group of Jews, basically terrorists without a home state at this point in the film, share a safe house with the Palestinian terrorists they are hunting. The idea (discussed by the two groups) that these people could co-exist were it not for the mere fact that the Jews have a place on Earth to call theirs and the Palestinians do not is certainly an interesting one (and not one shared by either of the two sides in their public rhetoric). It's the only scene that really gets at the motivations behind the commitment these people have to a way of life that turns them into animals and makes them look, to the rest of the world, like savages.
Later in the scene Avner, (the Jew, duh) asks Ali (the Arab) why they are so committed to the destruction of Israel. Ali's answers are simultaneously frightening, completely illogical and totally rational. In the scene's best moment, he asks Avner how long it took the Jews to get a homeland. Avner doesn't answer but the unspoken threat here is that the Palestinians might be willing to wait ten thousand years, too.
The old Spielberg magic's also there in the ending of the film (something rare indeed to be saying about a Spielberg film) when Avner and his handler talk about what they've really accomplished with this little war of theirs. They wonder, since every terrorist they kill seems to spawn five new ones in his place, what the net effect of the whole thing was. And as they wander and talk about this in the shadow of Manhattan's skyscrapers, we get a glimpse of the Twin Towers. And finally the characters part, neither feeling too assured by the other, as the camera pans up on those now gone landmarks. It's as loaded and interesting (and, yes, even depressing) an ending as Spielberg has come up with in years and it's the only thing from this film that might really stick with me. Interesting that with this and War of the Worlds, Speilberg, that benchmark of middlebrow conservatism, is really the first mainstream artist to tackle the thorny issue of 9/11 with some amount of grace.
Of course, the film isn't without Spielberg's trademark squeamishness about sex and family issues. In the film's worst scene, Avner, after meeting a beautiful and willing woman in a bar, decides at the last minute to be faithful to his wife. On the way out of the bar, he bumps into a friend. He tells the friend to beware of the woman but sure enough, later that night, unable to sleep, Avner visits his friend, smells the woman's perfume and finds the friend murdered in his bed. The implication being that unfaithfulness gets you killed. Talk about your Hebrew School reactionary impulse towards sex. It's almost as if, when Spielberg isn't paying attention, the most wonderful things leap forth from his mind but when he's trying to make a point, all he can really say is the most reactionary and simple sort of moralistic nonsense. That's a shame really because he could be our greatest artist. Instead he's just one our most interesting.
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