Munich.

Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of the New Republic, is so deeply and thoroughly incensed by Munich you can't help but hope for an equally vehement counter-argument, running in, say, the Guardian, just so we can hold the two up next to each other and admire the symmetry. [Update: This was a free read yesterday; now it's available to subscribers only, which means I can't go back and re-read it, either. Sorry.]

Wieseltier rails first against Spielberg: "Why should I admire somebody for his ability to manipulate me? In other realms of life, this talent is known as demagoguery." But as for Munich, "its tedium is finally owed to the fact that, for all its vanity about its own courage, the film is afraid of itself." The real culprit, then, must be screenwriter Tony Kushner, who is "not an anti-Semite, nor a self-hating Jew, nor any of those other insults that burnish his notion of himself as an American Jewish dissident (he is one of those people who never speaks, but only speaks out). He is just a perfectly doctrinaire progressive."

For the New York Times, David M Halbfinger talks about the film with Ehud Danoch, the Israeli consul general in Los Angeles, whose reaction is, naturally, more diplomatic: "The attempt to balance between victims of terror and those who killed them, the attempt to balance between a government sworn to defend its people and a terrorist organization identified by the world as a terrorist organization, is to make light of the issue."

And there's more from Calev Ben-David, who, in the Jerusalem Post, takes his old friend "Steven" to task for not "having consulted, or at least taken into account, the concerns of the surviving family members of the victims." In a similar vein is Jochen Arntz's long profile of Ankie Spitzer in yesterday's Berliner Zeitung (and in German). She lost her husband, André, a trainer, in the rain of gunfire between the terrorists and the German police at the airport in Fürstenfeldbruck and is furious that she wasn't contacted during the making of the film.

Halbfinger notes: "Screenings that began this week in Washington and Israel have generated no official Palestinian response." There has been some unofficial response, however. In a somewhat clunky attempt at mixing humor and propaganda, Mas'ood Cajee at alt.muslim, for example, puts forward a list of "ten films - all based on true stories - that are just waiting for Spielberg's magic." Example: "6. Hebron: A story of tragedy and torn loyalties. In 1994, Brooklyn Jewish doctor Baruch Goldstein opened fire on Muslim worshippers in Hebron, killing 29. Palestinian American Mazen Khalili (Tom Hanks) is a State Department official assigned to investigate the massacre who is also in search of his roots. Leah Rabinowitz (Meg Ryan) is a Jewish American journalist who discovers a dark family secret that will change her life forever."

There's no doubt that Spielberg wants this movie to be talked about. For one thing, as Ben-David points out, the parallels between Israel's reaction to Munich and the US's to 9/11 are hardly subtle. Whether the conversation heads in directions he'd like it to, though, is another matter.

Posted by dwhudson at December 9, 2005 1:25 AM