Few things are sadder than a joke that needs explaining. So journalists these days rarely recall Sam Goldwyn’s witty advice to young film-makers — “If you want to send a message, call Western Union” — because you would have to start telling younger readers not only that Western Union delivered telegrams, but also what a telegram was.
Nevertheless, Goldwyn’s bon mot flashed through my mind when I read, with a sinking heart, Steven Spielberg’s comment about his new film, Munich: “For me, this movie is a prayer for peace.” If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, the road to bad art is paved with clunking platitudes about world peace uttered by mega-rich showbiz types.
I have now seen Munich, which is released here on Friday. As with all Spielberg, it’s a punchy piece of storytelling. It recounts the Israeli secret service’s operation to hunt and summarily execute the Palestinians it deemed responsible for killing 11 Israelis at the 1972 Munich Olympics. It also depicts the subsequent moral scruples that supposedly tormented the main Israeli agent. I won’t pre-empt our film critic’s verdict by judging its worth as a movie. But I will say this: Goldwyn was right. Even Hollywood’s greatest modern master (aided by the writer Tony Kushner) comes across as a jejune fifth-form debater when his actors start spouting speeches about the Middle East that sound like tabloid newspaper editorials.
Oddly, the angle that has so agitated the right-wing American press — that the film suggests “moral equivalency” by showing Palestinian terrorists to be as “human” as the Israeli agents — doesn’t worry me. It’s true that the killers on both sides come across as friendly, thoughtful, family types, except when they are splattering each other’s brains over walls, of course — something that happens rather often, considering that this is a “prayer for peace”. But what was Spielberg supposed to do? Show one side as monsters and the other as paragons? It’s certainly bizarre to see the director of Schindler’s List accused of stirring up anti-Israel sentiments.
No, what irked me was the film’s unspoken subtext. Clearly, its message — that a state which combats terrorism with its own brand of indiscriminate violence only triggers more violence — is intended as a savage indictment of the Bush Government’s response to 9/11. Or is it just a coincidence that Spielberg ends a film about a massacre in 1970s Europe with a lingering shot of the World Trade Centre? But rather than directly attack what’s going on in his own country in his own era, which might make life uncomfortable for him, Spielberg dredges up something that happened 33 years ago on another continent. You could call that cunning, or you could call it cowardice.
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Still, I am heartened by reports suggesting that Israeli Mossad chiefs are “furious” about the film’s inaccuracies after getting a private screening. If Spielberg could persuade more terrorists and counter-terrorists to spend their time reviewing movies, rather than killing, that would be a real contribution to world peace.