It’s worth beginning where a piece like this usually doesn’t, because Munich is the kind of movie Steven Spielberg usually doesn’t make: in a film stuffed to the bursting with globetrotting espionage action, his climax is a sex scene.
Up to this point, for the previous two hours and change, Mossad agent Avner Kaufman (Eric Bana) has been exacting revenge on Palestinian leaders for the deaths of 11 Israelis at the Munich Olympics in 1972. He’s planted bombs in Paris apartments, gunned down old men on the streets in Rome, and narrowly avoided assassination himself in London. He arrives to his new home in Brooklyn, New York, wracked with paranoia and guilt. Following a heated confrontation with a total stranger at the Israeli Embassy in Manhattan, he has sex with his wife for the second time in the movie. The first time, the sex was playful and winsome; this time, it’s pure opera. Avner is sweating buckets. Light slices in at him from outside, then from behind. It shoots all around him like machine-gun fire. He stares out the window like an angry, frightened animal, and all of this is cross-cut with the horrifying attack in Munich. Men are shot. Helicopters explode. There’s weeping and gnashing of teeth, and the whole thing is not very Spielbergian. Tony Kushner, a co-writer on Munich, ends the first part of his play Angels in America in a similar fashion. Prior Walter is in bed, sick. His bedside lamp flashes and thunder claps from above. A messenger angel arrives, ordaining him as a prophet. “Very Steven Spielberg,” he says.
Asking Steven Spielberg to understand sex as such is like asking a toymaker how it works: it’s not compatible with what he does. Yet in making Munich, the toymaker tried to grow up; or, at least, he fell in with the right roommates for a while. Kushner had never written a movie before, and his blend of sentiment and wry truth-telling was born to be matched with Spielberg’s style. His epigraph for Angels in America is informative here: “In a murderous time, the heart breaks and breaks, and lives by breaking.” It comes from American Jewish poet Stanley Kunitz, and it could just as easily have served as an epigraph for Munich, which follows the hardening of the heart of a gentle man. By having his heart broken over and over again, Avner learns the value of a single human life is worth more than any ideology or political program: that, in the end, it’s not a matter of Israeli vs. Palestinian, or even Jew to Jew, but person to person.
The climactic sex scene ends with Avner’s wife caressing his head in her hands. She holds him close and whispers the words, “I love you.” The scene gives us hard juxtapositions of death and life, love and hatred, in order to demonstrate how razor-thin the line between them can be. There is no solution to violence but to return to love, and to the arms of those we care about.
An appraisal of Munich written in 2025 could easily be nothing more than a list of its prescient and politically trenchant moments, but we’re lucky that it gives us so much more to work with. It does something virtually unheard of in political cinema: thread the needle for a human-level response to outsized generational trauma and its whiplash. In doing so, it fulfills the central moral imperative of the movies — to bring people together. It’s a little like when Luke blows up the Death Star by using the force to direct the blaster into its core: so close to impossible that most don’t even dare to try.
Early in the film, Avner is introduced to his team over dinner. One of them, a bomb-maker named Robert (Mathieu Kassovitz), tells him he makes toys. Spielberg is one of cinema’s greatest toymakers — perhaps the greatest. But like Robert, he’s here tasked with creating a bomb meant to destabilize complacency. By 2005, the myth of Israel had been firmly established in the American mind. Spielberg, a prominent American Jew, spent all of his cultural cache to critique an ongoing apartheid state when support for that state was at an all-time high. He brings frazzled, righteous energy to his material out of necessity. If he’s going to do it, he’s going to do it right. And he did it by channeling the ghost of classic political thrillers.
There’s a breathless freneticism to the images in Munich that one doesn’t see anywhere else in Spielberg’s work. Handheld photography, anxious zooms, explicit violence; from shot one, he deploys the full arsenal of ‘60s and ‘70s thriller style. The film opens with the hand of a Palestinian man on a locked gate, which he scales and looks out over, as if into a promised land. Americans, unwittingly complicit in the carnage to come, help him over that gate. It comes straight out of The Battle of Algiers, but Spielberg, with the power of his longtime editor Michael Kahn, sets a decidedly less militant tone for what’s to follow. We get a whirlwind of Israelis and Palestinians watching the action unfold on television. It’s stitched together with great urgency and humility; it tells us we’re watching a movie teeming with life.
It’s during this sequence that Spielberg lays out his thesis through a historical commentator on ABC: “The Arabs and the Israelis are perfectly compatible as far as I can tell… and they’ve been jolted apart again as they were seeming to come just a little closer — a little hope.” From there, he sends us with Avner across the world to end and rediscover life. Once Avner has accepted his mission — or, more specifically, has had the mission accepted for him — he meets with his case officer Ephraim (Geoffrey Rush). They walk along the Mediterranean Sea; Spielberg’s camera glides along with them as Ephraim enjoys Arabic baklava, a woman has her photograph taken with IDF soldiers stationed behind her, and children roam in and out of the frame. It’s beautiful, bordering on utopian. “Nothing better than something sweet by the sea,” Ephraim intones. It shows us the surface-level pleasures of Israeli life — the pleasures Avner is about to forsake for his people.
But the very first assassination gives us a clear indication that Spielberg is taking a different approach to the typical cops-and-robbers formula. In Rome, Avner hunts Wael Zwaiter (Makram Khoury), a translator believed to be connected to Black September. Instead of cutting straight to the chase, Zwaiter is given a full biography — we get a sense of his personal life. He just translated 1001 Nights. He’s got a niece he loves and calls regularly. He’s broke. He’s even gifted one of the movie’s key lines: “I love what [1001 Nights] tells about the power of narrative,” he says to a small crowd. “The relationship of narrative to survival.” This kind of attention is rarely afforded to the enemy in an espionage movie, and none of it slows the movie down. The team kills Zwaiter, of course, but their celebration is undercut with a bitter sense of irony. “And God said to the angels, ‘Why are you celebrating? I’ve just killed a multitude of my children,’” Carl, one Avner’s team members says. Then they go off to kill another man.
Munich moves with extraordinary grace and fluidity — there are no lower thirds announcing where the team is going, nor any master shots to establish the portent of the next leg of their mission. The characters do what they set out to do in one place, and then they go to the next place. This is also in keeping with the spirit of the political thriller, which achieves its effect by giving us a sense of being close to the action. Except for when the team stops to eat.
Eating — the sharing of a meal — is one of the Munich’s most powerful motifs. Business is usually done over drinks, such as when Avner meets his first contact. We’re treated to a The Conversation-type overhead to generate tension, but what’s so great is that Spielberg can’t help but get closer to his subjects. He’ll give us the all-seeing, paranoid shot, but he must establish further intimacy. It’s this empathy that sets Munich apart from other political thrillers. Eating, however, is done for its own sake. It’s a means through which to communicate love and solidarity. For Avner, whose soul is blasted away with each Palestinian he kills, it becomes the last connection he has to his essential humanity. Nation, ideology, and political orientation melt away when a meal is shared. All we’re left with is the man, and nowhere is this more potent than when Avner travels to the French countryside.
Avner eventually finds a second, more reliable contact through which to hunt Palestinians: Louis (Mathieu Amalric), a Frenchman. About midway through the movie, Louis “kidnaps” Avner, who betrayed Louis’ trust to give information to the Israeli army. We arrive in the French countryside and adopt Avner’s POV, and he’s greeted by a golden, diaphanous Eden and a gaggle of gregarious French children swarming around him. Their faces are so bright, so warm, and so innocent that they remind us of the richness of human life. It’s the most sacred image in the Spielberg canon.
But every Eden must fall, and Avner must go to Greece. After the film’s midpoint, Spielberg effectively abandons any pretense of warmth and immerses us full-throttle in Avner’s decline. Colors are desaturated. Blood and dust fall as freely as rain. Spielberg blends Z’s careful blocking and The French Connection’s ugly verisimilitude in a grotesque hotel bombing. Yet he still makes the time for an Israeli and a Palestinian to have a dialogue — certainly the most open, honest dialogue an American movie has ever had about the problem between Israelis and Palestinians: “Home is everything.”
Surging underneath all the action in the movie is a subtle attack on America’s involvement in increased destabilization in the Middle East. Avner takes American money to fulfill his mission. He claims, early on, to be working on behalf of a private interested party in America. Finally, America herself intervenes in his mission. Avner is on the heels of Ali Hassan Salameh (Mehdi Nebbou), his highest profile target, in London. Avner walks by a theater playing American Graffiti and prepares to pull the trigger, but he’s stopped by a drunk American who mistakes him for someone else. The drunk American turns out to be a CIA agent, protecting Salameh for his value as an inside asset.
The role America plays is hinted at throughout the film, but it doesn’t take center stage until the final scene, which takes on the epic, ruminative quality of Judgment at Nuremberg, turning the island of Manhattan into the empty Zeppelinfield Grandstand. It does something more revolutionary than mere agitprop: it offers catharsis. Avner asks Ephraim to break bread with him, but Ephraim declines. Avner walks away, and the camera pans to a wide shot of lower Manhattan: in the distance, the World Trade Center.
“We’re supposed to be righteous,” Robert says earlier in the film when he refuses to continue murdering Palestinians. “That’s a beautiful thing. That’s Jewish.” Munich is the ultimate movie about blowback because it understands the domino effect of doing the wrong thing for the right reason. Avner returns briefly to Israel after a second botched assassination attempt on Salameh. He’s offered a pat on the back by an Israeli general, his mother sings his praises for the sacrifices he’s made, and Ephraim encourages him to get some rest then come back to the field. Avner offers a simple “No,” framed against an out-of-focus Israeli flag, waving gently in the wind. It takes him a while to get there, but Avner too learns that the only way to end war — the only way to be authentically Jewish — is by putting down the gun.
Every now and again, a movie comes around and gives voice to the full constellation of inchoate feelings scrambling around in one’s head. For this writer, Munich is one of those movies. More than any other in Spielberg’s widely hailed filmography, it serves as a testament that mainstream entertainment can — and should — be a prism through which to engage with the outside world. In doing so, Spielberg made his strongest argument that movies can be a force for good.
Munich is the movie for right now because of the way it depicts the moral fallout of using violence to get what you want for your country, and its sly implication of America in that violence. It’s a movie for all time because while there are other Spielberg movies that are more dazzling, more imaginative, and more technically refined, there are none more fundamentally alive. As long as there is an Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Munich will be relevant. As long as there are any people on Earth who have suffered a great tragedy, Munich will be relevant. As long as there’s bread to be broken.
Comments are closed.