I had a lovely time on Friday night in Toronto with Canada's Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms, who were kind enough to present me with the first George Jonas Freedom Award. And so I thought it might be appropriate to have a (sort of) George Jonas film. Unfortunately it somewhat departed from George's source material - and due, I understand, to a bit of carelessness on his agent's part George never made much money from it. Nevertheless:
A third of a century ago George Jonas wrote a book called Vengeance, about the targeted assassinations of various dodgy Arab figures that took place in Europe in the wake of the Munich massacre. According to Terry Lawson in The Detroit Free Press, Jonas "claimed to be the leader of the assassination squad". Er, no. Jonas claimed to be the former husband of Barbara Amiel, which no doubt is a life of highwire thrills in its own way but not to be compared with whacking terrorist masterminds across the Continent.
Instead of killing the alleged plotters of the '72 Olympic atrocity himself, George Jonas got to know the fellow who did - an off-the-books Mossad freelance called "Avner" - and what followed was a taut, lean account of vengeance:
Compared to the mean, elegant sweep of line that characterizes most modern automatic infantry weapons, the Kalashnikov looks squat and solid.
That could be the opening of an Ian Fleming Bond yarn, maybe A View To A Kill or The Living Daylights.
George's book was a bestseller, got sold to Hollywood, and then stalled in development as the years rolled by until eventually it fell into the hands of Steven Spielberg. The blockbuster hit-maker hired as his screenwriter Tony Kushner (Tony-winning playwright of the gay fantasia Angels in America) and then changed the name from Vengeance to Munich — a word that, to Britons at least, evokes not terrorism but appeasement. As things turn out, that's not inappropriate.
Munich opens at the Games themselves, and Spielberg, in an impressionistic montage of old TV clips mixed in with shots of anxious relatives, rapt viewers and camera crews on stake-out, captures very well the fuzziness of a high-profile siege — the kind you follow on TV round the clock without ever knowing what's really going on: glimpses of Black September terrorists, figures piling out of and into airport buses, etc. And then it's all over, and 11 Israeli athletes are dead and just three Black September terrorists are in custody. And back home Golda Meir decides to do something about it. Which is where Avner comes in.
So, for the sake of his country, he kisses his pregnant wife goodbye and heads to Europe to kill the big-league guys behind Munich. As in Ocean's Eleven, The Dirty Dozen and all the rest, he has the usual assorted team members — young, old, wisecracking, uptight, etc. Beyond the fact that they never swim into focus as individuals, they seem to me to convey absolutely no sense of being Israeli — aside from the accents and a curious choice of running joke about receipts and expenses. It's not because the Israeli agents are mostly Anglo-Australian - Eric Bana as Avner, Geoffrey Rush as Ephraim (Avner's case agent), a pre-Bond Daniel Craig as Steve (the driver) - as that their Zionism has been all but surgically removed in the screenplay by Kushner (a famously non-Zionist Jew) to the point where Israel might as well be just some place they're passing through: I happen to be Canadian but nobody "happens to be" Israeli.
That leads to the problem many commentators, although not the full-time film critics, had with the adaptation: George Jonas's book was about avenging evil; Spielberg's movie says instead that in this line of work there's no good and evil, and terrorism and counter-terrorism are merely opposing balls in an endless Newton's cradle of moral equivalence. As an example of what that means in practice, there's a scene drawn from a short almost parenthetical paragraph in Jonas's book about the Israeli team arriving in Athens "to find the safe house in which they spent that first night filled with Arab terrorists". In the print version, it's a booking screw-up which the Israelis turn to their advantage by passing themselves off as Red Army Faction: the PLO guys yak away assuming that their German comrades know no Arabic, and what Avner overhears is not just operationally useful but also "helped reinforce his conviction that his team was doing the right thing". In the Spielberg–Kushner version, it's an opportunity for a terrorist bonding moment, as Avner and an equally fetching young Palestinian lad enjoy their variation on the old "Silent-Night"-on-the-Western-Front routine. Inside, the two groups are squabbling and re-tuning the radio back and forth from Arabic to, ah, less Arabic music until they find common ground and bridge the sectarian divide by settling on... "Let's Stay Together" by Al Green.
"Humanizing" the Arabs is fine, but the film works hard at dehumanizing the Jews, not just because of the thin characterizations but also through the demands of the narrative arc: the Israelis are cold loners living in the shadows coolly observing Arabs taking their little girls to music lessons in Paris or chatting affably to the local storekeeper in Rome; then the Jews move in and clinically blow them to pieces. The Arabs have fully formed lives, the Israelis don't.
Yet, if you've seen any of Spielberg's other films on big subjects, you'll know what his worst sin is. In War of the Worlds, he turned a Martian invasion into an exercise in parental bonding between Tom Cruise and his alienated son and whiny daughter. As I wrote at the time, "Spielberg seems to be reversing the priorities of Casablanca: this crazy world don't amount to a hill of beans next to the problems of three little people." The reductio ad absurdum of this approach, you'll recall, is that Tom Hanks pep talk to his men about how, in years to come when they look back on the war, they'll see that "maybe saving Private Ryan was the one decent thing we managed to pull out of this whole godawful mess". Good to know defeating the Third Reich wasn't a complete waste of time then. Spielberg's limitation as a film-maker is his inability to overcome this ludicrous boomer narcissism. He's utterly incapable of understanding that there are tides in the affairs of men when your levels of self-esteem are less important than just getting on with it. He's lost the big picture — there's just you and your feelings and even in the midst of a critical national mission you can sit around obsessing about your self-doubt as if it's some gabby chick flick.
"When we learn to act like them, we will defeat them," declares Daniel Craig. And so, in Spielberg and Kushner's hands, a textbook lesson in effective counter-terrorism from which all western intelligence agencies have benefited over the ensuing four decades becomes instead a sign of moral degeneration that set the Jews on the path to their present incarnation as the new Nazis. In that respect, the film mirrors the decadent public discourse of the last fifteen years - it's preoccupied not with the terrorism, only with questioning our reaction to it.
All Spielberg's movies are about movies, because the real world has no real meaning for him: thus, Saving Private Ryan is less a war movie than a movie about war movies. In strictly filmic terms, there are memorable moments here, like the strange and unsettling scene with a Dutch hit-woman on a canal boat. And, for all the tedious clichés about the cycle of violence, in the end Spielberg's Jews are better than Spielberg's Arabs — because the former feel bad about what they're doing, and feeling bad, especially about your country, is the noblest of Hollywood virtues.
And so crack Israeli agents gradually morph into the apotheosis of effete western narcissistic moral passivity. Fine for movies, but you wouldn't want to send them on a real job. Much has changed since the Munich massacre, not least numbers-wise - the Charlie Hebdo death toll was bigger, the Ariana Grande concert attack was twice as big, the Nice truck massacre seven times so. But Munich lingered in the consciousness the way more recent atrocities have not, and it deserved a better film.
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Having both read the book and seen the movie, I must agree 100% with Mr. Steyn.
But let me share the good news: Spielberg and Kushner haven't done a revisionist movie about Entebbe. Yet.
I remember seeing Saving Private Ryan in the theater and the main thing that stayed with me was the D-Day landing, which was well done. Oh and the praying sniper as well. The rest of the movie didn't really resonate so much with me. Having said that, I think Spielberg was one of the producers of Band of Brothers which I have seen three times, most recently with my teen son. Though a few episodes are a little weak, it is overall very well done. I subsequently read the memoirs of Dick Winters which gave more insight into Easy Company, and that I enjoyed more than the book Band of Brothers which I never managed to finish.
I remember being interested in Munich, but I do recall the reviews being mixed and skipped it. I think I'll check out the book.
I hope you will gather your film criticism into a book sometime. A Kindle version would be fine. And perhaps you and Jessica Martin could combine and do a related album of songs from some of the films or songs left out of the movies that might have helped them. Just a thought.
You do accomplish what I enjoy in good criticism, you deepen my pleasure and understanding of the film you subject to analysis.
Boomer Narcissism" is the perfect shorthand for a Spielberg film. So is the observation that Steve's movies are all about movies, regardless of the subject matter. Despite his undoubted (and usually dazzling) mastery of film technique his characters often fail to engage and are rarely fleshed-out human beings. Even the great "Schindler's List" featured characters that were nearly all two-dimensional and undeveloped.
As to the subject matter of "Munich", I thought the moral equivalence between terrorists and the Israelis was gruesome. The Israelis reacted with, what used to call, "righteous wrath." The fact that Spielberg and Kushner couldn't understand this concept again demonstrates that neither of these guys understands life or emotions outside of the world of entertainment. I expect it has something to do with the fact that both director and writer despise western civilization and anything that protects that protects it. Oh Well, I always quote Jean Francois Revel in these cases - "Clearly a civilization that feels guilty for everything it is and does will lack the energy and conviction to defend itself."
Yes. After seeing some old serials from back in the day, he doesn't seem as clever as we'd thought.
If you ever wondered what the Left wants, note their continuing insistence that defending ourselves is impossible. Killing terrorists won't work, executing murderers won't work, nuclear deterrence doesn't work....on the other hand "punching nazis" and hounding conservatives on social media does work.
Reasoning from Steyn's exacting dissection I'm able to visualize a Kushner-Spielberg production humanizing a gang of gay-killing Muslims. A gang of gay-disdaining Southern Baptists? Nope. Can't do it. Not working for me.
I suspect that Jonas' work will be appreciated ever more as the years pass. Spielberg, not so much.
Congratulations on your award and headlining a successful, inaugural event Mark. If possible, I hope you will share your speech with us, as well as the remarks by Conrad Black and Maya Jonas. I would have loved to attend but it wasn't in the cards for me this time around and I'm still grinding the gears of my brain trying to think of how I could join the Steyn At Sea cruise, which would take a miracle of sorts, as in a shifting of the calendar. I haven't totally given up hope of a last-minute booking, but chances are incredibly slim and I'm sure it will be sold out before then.
Cheers! Happy Father's Day!
"But Munich lingered in the consciousness the way more recent atrocities have not, and it deserved a better film."
Mark, I think it did have a better film - the 1986 HBO four hour miniseries The Sword of Gideon. The IMDB feature on the film can be found here:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092038/?ref_=nv_sr_1.
In IMDB's trivia section it says "First shown on Canada's CTV network and later on HBO as a four hour miniseries."
It's probably been 30 years since I saw The Sword of Gideon. Since I've never read the book (yet) I can't say whether it is more faithful to it than Munich, but I bet that it is. It's not available on Amazon streaming or Netflix, though the DVD can still be purchased on Amazon. You can even see the entire movie on Youtube if low resolution and Spanish subtitles don't bother you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvemVhD_M3k
The movie, and even more so, the true story, fascinated me when I first saw it 30 years ago. I refused to see Munich out of loyalty to The Sword of Gideon and because the Spielberg-Kushner pairing left me cold. The Sword had a quite respectable cast: Steven Bauer as Avner, Colleen Dewhurst as Golda Meir, Rod Steiger as Avner's handler and the great Lino Ventura in a small but important role.
Before seeing it again (I just bought the DVD) I will read George Jonas' book.
Congratulations on winning the first George Jonas Freedom Award, a much deserved honor!
I agree Mark. The film was a huge disappointment and Spielberg is not a reliable set of hands for anything historically meaningful - only to deliver a solid family friendly movie like 'Ready Player One'.
I was hugely disappointed about the end of the film as well, with Avner in New York and the twin towers of the World Trade Center in the background. It was presented that he had been estranged from Israel and that what they had done had a direct link to 9/11. Both, of course, are falsehoods and slanders - Avner returned to Israel to fight in the Yom Kippur War and if only the West had pursued terrorists with the necessary degree of attention, perhaps the twin towers would remain intact.
At least Spielberg didn't turn the terrorists into Nazis as - painful as it was to see - the bad guys were in Raiders of the Lost Ark. It was the one group everyone could agree was bad.
Spielberg's aversion to moral clarity is like that of politicians and voters on the left, who think the story would be too boring that way. In the story of recent history, as they see it, the same group keeps coming out on top, so, just to make it interesting, they do what the Romans did and release lions to kill Christians for their amusement - only it's fanatical, bloodthirsty Muslims, with special hatred for the Jews, via policies supported by the director of Schindler's List.
In truth, it's just the opposite. The story is better with moral clarity. I skipped Spielberg's movie doubting he would approach the extraordinary commitment to justice Aaron Klein described in his account of Israel's methodical and sustained response to the Munich massacre in his book Striking Back.
My impression of the film (or at least, my memory of it, from years ago) wasn't nearly so unfavourable, and I have to disagree with Mark on the alleged "dehumanising of Jews", based on "the" unfolding scene inside and outside the Paris apartment. The sheer desperation of the Israelis in aborting the targeted assassination of one of the Palestinian terrorists, which would have otherwise resulted in the collateral death of his young daughter (something the Palestinian terrorist, in his line of work, would have been far more accepting of than his Israeli assassins) portrays the truth about the stark contrast in morality (and the absence of it) between the two sides.
The documentary film "The Gatekeepers" (interviews with former Shin Bet leaders) explored this difference. In one instance, the Israelis meticulously planned a bombing, based on the most precise calculations, to take out a meeting of "most wanted" Palestinian terrorists, but intentionally limited the scale of the attack for fear of collateral damage— and in doing so, failed in their primary objective. Are there any calculations ever made by Islamic terrorists, other than maximal and indiscriminate carnage, whether in Munich or Manchester?
Kate, I remember that scene as well, it is one of few scenes I do remember really, and I also had the impression that the Israelis were shown as the more human, compassionate people, if not just a bit weak even. But as usual, I was watching the movie on an overseas flight while having dinner and by the time the cheese plate was served the work laptop was cracked open and my interest was elsewhere. Needless to say, but I will anyway, all subtleties of the movie were lost on me.
It would be a blow to the cause to show any mercy. I look forward to seeing The Gatekeepers. From the trailer, it's refreshing to look at real security services at work compared to our own.
I've forgotten a lot of the detail too, but it was one of the few scenes I remember clearly, as well Avner on the phone to his wife (and his young child, whom he barely knew), unable to disclose where he was or when he would next see them, which was absolutely heartbreaking. The depiction of Avner having to forgo his life and exist only in the shadows in the pursuit of terrorist murderers who were living out theirs seemed very believable to me, and not dehumanising at all; on the contrary, vengeance was entirely righteous.
Mark didn't mention what George Jonas thought of the film; presumably he agreed that it was not at all faithful to his book (...which I've just ordered, and look forward to reading).
Mark replies:
George did not care for the film.
From an operational perspective, it's an interesting documentary worth seeing, though there are definite moments of moral equivalence offered up (as to be expected, based on various prestigious awards etc); I read the Norman Podhoretz book "Why are Jews Liberals?", around the same time.
Some great recommendations in the comments here to follow-up on, including "Striking Back". And some day I will work out how to italicise using a smartphone.
Suitably chastened, and shall read his book.
Recently, Tony Kushner was overheard agonizing how he, as a mere gay Jew, could possibly complete his "remake" of "West Side Story" without having been a Jet or a Shark.
Is there anything they will not ruin?
I think the time for that being edgy came and went. He would have to play Big Deal.
Bravo review (yet again)! Thanks for putting into words what I often feel when I watch Spielberg movies but am not smart enough to articulate myself. I want to love them, I root for them, and I come away about 80% satisfied when I am finished viewing them. I sometimes wonder what I am missing, and this review has helped me come to grips with the 1/5 I don't fully "get."
Yes, I feel the same way and thank Mark for saving 2 hours of my time by not watching. Seems it would be better spent reading the book.
Vengeance is a perfect word for a book, movie, for anything. The desire for vengeance is primal -- who can forget Nevada Smith? It's even divine -- "'vengeance is mine', saith the Lord; 'I will repay'". Not for nothing did Golda Meir name the Israeli operation Operation Wrath of God -- which means the Israelis at least thought they had right on their side. So, too bad vengeance morphed into "Moralequivalunich".
What about Operation Wrath of God, in which Israel delivered justice to the murderers of innocent athletes, was equivalent to those murders?
Nothing. I was referring to Jonas' Vengeance morphing into the equivalence-laden Munich.
Excellent take on Spielberg -- another boy film maker, full of mawkish childhood fantasies. Compare him to Ford, Hawks, Wellman, Wyler, Houston .. I could go on. In fact compare Hoffman, Nicholson, and Beatty to Gable, Stewart, Cooper, and Peck. Hollywood has gone from men to boys without realizing it or, if they do, caring about it. Thanks, Mark
'Munich' certainly compares unfavourably with the fine 2004 film 'Walk on Water', which tackles the same theme, although the latter film suffers from the irredeemable flaw of making Israelis more sympathetic than murderous anti-Semites.