"Munich": Spielberg's thrilling crisis of conscience

"What's going on in that head and that mind?" an American news commentator asks during a montage of media reports on the kidnapping of eleven Israeli athletes by the Palestinian Black September group. The astonished newsman is questioning the Palestinian hostage takers who end up murdering their eleven captors during Germany's botched rescue attempt. But Munich's director Steven Spielberg, for now, is more interested in what's going on in the mind of the Israeli agent in charge of the state's response to the Munich killings.

However, whether we really get into the minds of the unlikely group of Israeli Mossad agents who are assembled by Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir to avenge the killings is debatable. It is mostly Spielberg's moral dilemmas that we access, but not all the questions necessary to resolving his moral dilemma are posed.

Lead by the young father-to-be Avner (played by Eric Bana), the group is furnished with unlimited cash and a list of names of Palestinians to kill, but not much else. The film audience doesn't get much more information on the characters than the Mossad agents give each other when they are carrying out their mission, making it difficult to particularly care what happens to the men in Avner's team - even as they are hunted and killed themselves. Nevertheless, the film succeeds even though it is difficult for anyone to be fully empathetic with the blank Mossad agents that are the story's focus.

The audience doesn't need the rhetorical devices delivered through the Mossad agents' dialogue to come to doubt the righteousness of the mission. Spielberg sets the audience up to want vengeance for the bloody Munich killings by depicting the panicked Palestinian gunmen emptying rounds of machine-gun fire into the defenseless athletes as they sit tied up in helicopters on the airport tarmac. But soon it is the "good guys" that are committing the same violence, without any confirmation that the men they are killing had a hand in Munich, as well as killing people whose names aren't even on the list.

Some of the agents come to question themselves - bombmaker Robert declares that "we're losing it [our Jewish righteousness]; I'm losing my soul" as the group goes over a laundry list of violence that has spun off from their own mission of retribution. And at one point Avner asks the Mossad big-wig Ephraim who acts as the interlocutor between Avner and Meir, "Why can't we just arrest them like we did Eichmann?"

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