Munich, 12/27.

I need to start checking rogerebert.com more often. Cinematical's Karina Longworth points to Roger Ebert's Christmas Day interview with Steven Spielberg in the Chicago Sun-Times. Her own comments questioning "this so-called controversy" sparked by Munich draw an angry (but civil) response Steven Awalt, who runs a Spielberg fan site. Whether the current flurry of words constitutes a controversy or not is a question about as foggy and perhaps as ultimately trivial as trying to sort out whether this far-flung, wide-ranging discussion is really about the film or the events it's inspired by or even simply (and if so, pitifully) reaffirming old stances. Regardless, as you may have noticed, I'm personally anticipating Munich more than any other film this season (it opens here in Germany on January 26).

"He has been attacked on three fronts, for being anti-Israeli, being anti-Palestinian, and being neither - which is, those critics say, the sin of 'moral equivalency.'" Ebert, introducing the interview, pretty well maps the tight spot Spielberg's willfully put himself in with Munich (and here's Ebert's review). The confidence with which Spielberg responds to each criticism is a clear sign that, though it may have been a quick shoot, whatever he's gone through that's led him to decide to make Munich in the first place has not been quick at all: "From the day I became morally and politically conscious of the importance of the state of Israel and its necessity to exist, I have believed that not just Israel, but the rest of the world, needs Israel to exist."

As for "moral equivalency," this is one of the hardest yet most necessary arguments to make: "Understanding does not require approval. Understanding is not the same as inaction. Understanding is a very muscular act."

After Ebert and Spielberg hang up, Spielberg calls back with a few comments on rogerebert.com editor Jim Emerson's refutation of attacks on the film by Jack Engelhard and David Brooks. Frankly, the first hardly seems worth a response, but the second appeared, of course, in the New York Times, and for those of us not doing the TimesSelect thing, Emerson's point-counterpoint breakdown is especially interesting. His bottom line: "Engelhard and Brooks would like to throw up the phony 'moral equivalency' penalty flag and stop the deadly game right there. To them, it's so easy: 1) just find the essence of undiluted evil in the world; 2) then, anything you do to eliminate it is unquestionably and unambiguously good."

Posted by dwhudson at December 27, 2005 7:26 AM