Cinemarati is talking about “Munich” again. Much of the discussion seems to be zeroing in on the third-act tryst between Mr. and Mrs. Avner, a sequence that cuts between the most explicit sex Steven Spielberg has ever directed and the morally conflicted counterrorist Avner’s imaginings of death in Munich, pictures that have plagued him ever since he watched the hostage crisis play out on TV. Other significant conversational threads have to do with Spielberg’s invocation of the Twin Towers in the final shot, and the flagging, even spasmodic rhythm during the 2 hour, 40 minute film’s final leg.
The reactions of the Cinemarati gang are too varied and complicated to summarize here, so I think you’re better off perusing them yourselves. My own take on the issue is that it’s impossible to really engage with and appreciate “Munich” without at least considering the possibility that all three of those flashpoints – the sex scene, the Twin Towers shot and the entropic third act – are connected. I explain why in my own Cinemarati post, excerpts of which are below.
"Munich" isn't simply about vengeance, the whole eye-for-an-eye thing, though that's certainly topic "A". It's also about our own personal response to witnessing violence, either in person or secondhand via the media. The horror of Munich is imprinted on Avner's imagination, and his joining the Mossad counterrorist mission is partly motivated by his desire to master that image, to defeat or counter it, to neutralize it or dismantle it. He can't do it. The image persists no matter how many people he is responsible for helping to kill. Munich is a stain on his memory, a stain on his conscious mind, a stain period, and it won't scrub out no matter how many terrorists and terrorist sympathizers he rubs out.
I think this is what Spielberg is getting at in that sex scene. I understand why some would interpret it as jejune -- how many times have pretentious know-nothing film school kids intercut a sex scene with a killing for no other reason than to shock and impress? -- but Spielberg rethinks and reinvigorates this familiar strategy by connecting it to the notion of violence as emotional stain. By wreathing Avner's home life in his usual nimbus of holy light -- a valid strategy for this movie -- Spielberg establishes Avner's warmth, as expressed through love for his family, as the thing being violated, jeopardized, stained by the Munich massacre and by his decision to participate in a campaign to destroy the killers. Avner becomes numb and unfocused as the film goes on, and the film becomes numb and unfocused with him. As Sean Burns observed, the movie seems to disintegrate as you're watching it, by design!
I think the sex scene is the heart of the movie, the point where it (pardon the language) takes its clothes off and shows you what it really is. Avner truly loves his wife, truly loves having sex with his wife (an unironic expression of heterosexual domestic ardor, one that almost has a hearty peasant quality; only Spielberg would dare be so cornball, and so true to the feelings of men who married well). When he fucks his wife he feels safe. That this sacred moment would be invaded by images of Munich is at once appalling, sad, funny and true to the experience of anyone who has suffered violence or watched powerlessly as it was inflicted on someone else.
How many millions of people have had sex after 9/11 in order to escape the memory of that horror, images the entire world saw and suffered through, only to have the images come flooding back into their heads, poisoning the very act whose tenderness was supposed to afford them refuge? Juxtaposed against Avner's congress with his wife, his soulmate, those images of brutality are like needles jabbing into his brain. To quote Pauline Kael's review of "Casualties of War," it's the ultimate violation. The final shot that reveals the Twin Towers is a secret decoder ring, the shot that tells us what we were really watching for two hours and forty minutes, and what we think about when we try not to think about 9/11.
Friday, February 10, 2006
A stain on the mind
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42 comments:
As most of the Munich detractors I know use the last 10 minutes of the film as an excuse to write off the entire experience, I appreciate the specificity of your defense, especially the academic response to the sex scene (thought I have to admit that while I see what Spielberg is going for with the sequence, I can’t shake the feeling that I’m watching a Gatorade commercial as Avner whips his head back and sheets of perspiration fly from his brow). But what amazes me is the way the shot of the Towers is pointed to by some as Spielberg making a connection between the specific actions of Avner and his team in the film and 9/11. Like the rumored end credits post-script for Black Hawk Down that was quickly added, and just as quickly removed, which allegedly drew a correlation between the military action in Mogadishu and Osama Bin Ladden.
I think you hit the nail on the head though as the towers are a sort of Rosetta Stone, revealing in the closing seconds of the film what we’ve really been watching is a parable about rushing into acts of retaliation before all the facts are in and without knowing who’s really pulling the strings behind the scenes. Nope, no application to our current situation there. I think it was Sean Burns who pointed out (it’s really the in-thing to quote him around here) that the film really isn’t even about Munich beyond using the incident as a stepping stone, making all the misguided attacks against the film for being “historically inaccurate” besides the point.
By the way, been trolling the board for a few weeks now, but as I’ve yet to see New World, I’ve been unable to chime in. Glad I could finally contribute. Great blog man.
While visions of sugar plums of massacre danced in Avner's head during a sex scene that looked like he was being hit by one of those fire hoses they turned on my people during the Civil Rights movement, I had my own inappropriate vision. I envisioned the closing credits would feature one of those Sin City style guest director credits. Instead of Tarantino, though, it would have said guest director: Ollie Stone.
Personally, I found the entire scene distasteful. In fact, the first line of my ten bests blurb for Munich says:
Until Spielberg does that tasteless juxtaposition of sex and massacre, Munich is a fascinating throwback to the paranoid cinema of the '70s.
I can't do a Malick-style frolic in the beautiful, natural wilderness of your explanation this time, Matt. (I've always wanted to run through an endless field of purple flowers, like some deleted scene from Odie Winfrey's The Color Purple. But I digress.) To me, the scene was placed there solely to provoke, not to make a grander statement about life and emotional stains and all that jazz.
Had Spielberg been going for that, he would have had Avner see those visions during the film's best scene (where he breaks down on the phone). We could go lots of symbolic places with it there. Here it's just some guy thinking about massacre rather than sports during sex, and since this is being put alongside a terrible event that really happened despite the fictional fabric of the film, it felt like a provocative device and nothing more.
When Coppola did the famous baptism sequence at the end of The Godfather, which is Spielberg's inspiration here, one could see a soul in the process of being marked by a permanent stain, like viewing Lady Macbeth dipping her hands in Duncan's blood. I didn't feel it during that scene in Munich. In fact, my notes say "OH COME ON NOW! TALK ABOUT MANIPULATIVE!"
Sex plus violence is tittilating and/or shocking, which is why a lot of movies juxtapose them together. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
However, I was paying attention during the film, and I knew that, given the escalating intensity of Avner's visions, they would have to climax somewhere. Spielberg would have to give us the money shot. Little did I know he'd give me the money shot during, um, a money shot.
If you are right, then it's incredibly lazy shorthand on Spielberg's part. Maybe that is why I'm fighting you on this one. I do not want to believe it. Even so, it doesn't ruin the film, as some have been saying.
I love everything about Munich, including the sex scene. I've commented on it a lot elsewhere, but I would like to focus on the one image that seems to really throw people - let's call it the "supermodel" shot - where Avner throws his head back in tortured ecstasy. One friend connected this to the "orgasm" at the end of "The Fury", though I think the De Palma connection is even more pronounced by the final Twin Towers shot: kind of a spiritual bookend to the Staten Island Ferry scene in Sisters.
For me, I tend to agree with the detractors' description of the moment in advertising terms, though I think this is exactly what gives it its power. It gets at Avner's narcissistic relation to the Munich massacre, which has been fostered by outside influences like television (an omnipresent entity throughout), while also illustrating his deep empathy with the events.
If one views sexuality and orgasm, as I do, in terms of the spiritual, it simultaneously lifts you up to the heavens even as it crashes you down to earth (hell, to me, being a highly mortal, purely internalized state of being.) I gather many people view sex primarily in base, animalistic, pleasure-principle terms (understandably so), so I wonder if that is one of the primary things that goes a way toward explaining the divisive reactions.
The whole scene, though particularly this moment, illustrates Avner's revelation (which I personally read as a Judeo-Christian apocalypse where a human conduit is brought back, via benedictive hands, from the abyss.) It risks offense and clearly does offend many, but I'd rather that than averting one's gaze, which Spielberg certainly has done in the past. And maybe still will, who knows?
Mr. Uhlich: Your baptism by punany explanation is so ingenious that I want to print it out and mail 1,000 copies to The 700 Club. That alone might cause a "The Fury" style ending for Pat Robertson. I also would like to use your logic to convince women to save me from the abyss! To quote Looney Tunes "you are a genius, George, and very smart too!"
Interesting that you saw DePalma where I saw Stone and Coppola. Different 70's era troublemakers, to be sure, but I can see where you're coming from with your analogy.
The Twin Towers image at the end of Munich also ties it to Spielberg's overuse of 9/11 imagery in War of the Worlds. That's another discussion altogether, but I briefly invoke the far lousier of Spielberg's 2005 output to support your point about his gaze aversion. Remember the sequence where couch-jumper Mr. Cruise leaves 40-year old child actress Dakota Fanning (she's 40, and you can't tell me she's not! I'm not listening! LA LA LA!) behind so he can deal with Tim Robbins? Why didn't Spielberg show us what was going on back there? Was it because we couldn't deal with the "hero" doing something reprehensible? Perhaps it's because Tom Cruise dealing with the much larger Tim Robbins would be like me fighting Shaquille O'Neal, and Spielberg was shielding us from viewing something unbelievable.
Speaking of unbelievable, off to see Firewall. I always wanted to be Indiana Jones. I never thought he'd want to be me (a programmer, that is).
If one views sexuality and orgasm, as I do, in terms of the spiritual, it simultaneously lifts you up to the heavens even as it crashes you down to earth (hell, to me, being a highly mortal, purely internalized state of being.) I gather many people view sex primarily in base, animalistic, pleasure-principle terms (understandably so), so I wonder if that is one of the primary things that goes a way toward explaining the divisive reactions.
Maybe I'm just being sensitive here because I don't consider my jizz as an endgame to some battle in heaven—or because I fail to see where this connection between the spiritual and the sexual is expressed or pounded out by Spielberg beyond this sequence—but I don't think one needs to orgasm in crash-and-burn paradise-lost terms to "get" this moment? I understand the way the chaos of the Eric Bana character's crimes has seeped into every crack of his being. He's haunted. I "get" that, but my problem with this scene is how inconsistently pitched it seems compared to the rest of the picture, which I rather like. (I imagine the effect, for me, would have been as jarring were I to hear a tribal breakdown in one of Patti Smith's awesomely rockin' Trampin' songs.) I guess you could say I never took Spielberg for being such a flaming drama queen.
As somebody who's written on multiple occasions about my regard for Steven Spielberg's filmmaking, I've remained pretty quiet over Munich. I never took the bait at other times, in part, because the nominations were coming up and I didn't want to influence them (not that my opinion would've done much). It's because I respect Spielberg so much that I didn't say anything. My opinion is that Munich is among the very worst films he's ever made.
This has nothing to do with its themes. Nothing to do with its depictions. This is very reptilian. It simply doesn't function. It's poorly written and conceived. And the direction is so far off the mark that it hit somebody in the stands.
The filmmaker who's been the comparative mark for Spielberg these last half dozen years is Stanley Kubrick -- not just from the revelation that the two were friends and Spielberg took over A.I., but because of Spielberg's shift to an increasingly darker view of humanity. As it stands, both in concept and execution, Spielberg's most Kubrickian outing is and forever will be War Of the Worlds. But that's another discussion.
A dark POV is one thing. Irony is another. But the one central aspect of Kubrick's cinema that Spielberg has been incapable of embracing was his fascination with the banal. Kubrick treated all things equal by reminding the viewer that violence as well as love are both powerful in their effects on lives, yet utterly matter of fact in their existence. Spielberg, on the other hand, too steeped in entertaining, can never detach himself enough to let a moment become mundane. He must always stylize and drive the moment.
Nowhere is this approach more evident and poorly used than in the opening scene of Munich. From the first shot on, we're bombarded with baroque compositions and desaturated, smokey mood lighting. We see these extremely suspicious figures trying to climb over the fence. Something freaky is going on.
So we're left to wonder -- especially audience members who know nothing about the real life events -- why the drunk Olympians who approach help these shady guys over? The ball has already been dropped. Directorially, the way this is presented is so misguided, I couldn't believe somebody of Spielberg's experience would have fucked up so hard.
The whole point of the encounter was that the athletes DIDN'T suspect anything was wrong! That's why they helped the Palestinians over! How do you portray that if you've already established suspicion in your audience?
The scene needed to be approached from a mundane entrance. Drunk athletes stumble upon these guys. Everything is fine and dandy. They courteously help 'em over. ONLY THEN, once over and the athletes gone, should that tranquility have been shattered by showing the terrorists pulling out their weapons! It's a basic set-up and pay off.
Maybe I'll write more later...
Keith: Boy, am I glad you chimed in. I think we're more or less on the same page, except that I agree with Andrew Dignan that the slo-mo Gatorade shot is a bit much.
Odie and MutinyCo: Hoo, boy. Later tonight I'll try to counter your arguments, but I appreciate your not pulling any punches. I have to ask, though, MutinyCo: Where does MUNICH rank on the bottom end of the Spielberg scale? I personally can't imagine you think it's a worse film than HOOK (which for me was the Spielberg equivalent of Krusty the Klown trying to charm the kids by doing a lead-footed soft shoe routine with gigantic feet, then growling, "Huh-huh-HEY, kids!") Odie's idea of putting the stain-of-violence intercut during the phone breakdown rather than the sex scene is an intriguing one, althoug I think you go to far when you say that putting where he did makes it "...Just some guy thinking about massacre rather than sports during sex."
Also, MutinyCo writes: "Spielberg's most Kubrickian outing is and forever will be War Of the Worlds. But that's another discussion." One I hope we'll have sooner rather than later, because the more I watch that movie, the more I think it's one of his five best. And no, I'm not kidding.
I like your defense of this scene, Matt, but I think I'm with Ed G. and mutinyco here. The problem with the sex scene, like much of MUNICH (in my opinion), isn't really its conception but its execution. Spielberg shoots the scene as if it were a grand revelation, complete with tracking shots and climactic music, crescendoing towards the final orgasm/killing. In fact, it goes and goes and builds and builds in such a way that I thought the point of the scene wasn't the connection of Eros and Thanatos or the fact that Avner's love-life has been ireeparably stained or whatever, but something far more mundane and narrative -- that Avner saw something in his memory of the scene that somehow revealed something about who was responsible for what. What I got out of it was Avner realizing that the botched operation to rescue the hostages may have been as responsible as Black September for the final killings. (Remember, we don't actually get all that clear a picture of what happened in Munich until this point in the film.) That may sound like childish narrativism, but that's where Spielberg's style leads the eye in this scene. It may be unintentional, but that's part of the problem with the whole film for me -- that Spielberg's wearying push-pull approach to his action-drama hybrid suggests that the revenge narrative and the story's gradual moral perspective have not been reconciled effectively. In many ways, I consider my response to the sex scene something of a compliment to SS, albeit a back-handed one: It's as if he can't shoot a scene and *not* have it be narratively propulsive and climactic. It's why he'll always be a great filmmaker. And as mutinyco said, it's also why he'll never be Kubrick. If Spielberg had shot THE SHINING, something horrific would have happened during that very first interview at the Outlook. And it would have all been downhill from there.
Ed-
Spielberg's been a flaming drama queen since at least the great "find your smile" sex scene in The Color Purple, though we also shouldn't forget that rainbow at the end of E.T.
Funny, one of Munich's detractors said to me that the sex scene could only have been written by a gay man. He's gay too, so consider that a Mel Brooksian jab ala "The Inquisition" or "Hitler on Ice".
Seriously, though, I wasn't suggesting that the reading I offered is the only way to get the sequence, merely my way of understanding it. I know a few who love the sex scene and the movie and don't slather it in my homo Roman Catholic baggage. Like David Thomson at his best and worst, I was merely pondering if this might explain things, which - of course - it really doesn't and can't hope to. Probably best to just concern myself with myself and let everyone else's opinion fall where it may.
Also, I don't think the scene tonally comes out of nowhere. The whole film has an undercurrent of sexuality to me. For example: the men dancing together after the first kill, the always cramped and close quarters the team inhabits, the abundant closet metaphors (the Kushner/Spielberg pairing makes for an interesting mix), and my favorite being the scene on the stairs between Avner and Ali where the didacticism of their chat is undercut by the way they are clearly fucking each other's minds. (Of course, this probably, in part, comes from my desire to have Ali use that key 'round his neck on me in a few, um, penetrating ways. Call me the dirty-minded cosmo-intellectual. :-) )
As to the spiritual side of things, I think the movie is all about loss of spirit (e.g.: "Wait for Avner's light to go out." or when Avner appears quite pallid and ghostly in the debriefing scene with Rush.) Also, there's a sense of playing god in the first few assassination scenes, then they become mortal and deadening. And the bomb explosions are nothing if not clipped orgasms meant to provide political satisfaction to a few, even at the cost (physical and spiritual) of the individuals who carry them out. The sex scene then reopens Avner's connection to the spirit that he's lost and it is confusing and terrifying, yet similarly elating to confront.
I feel all these tensions (sexual, political, and spiritual) get pent up in Munich and they are released, all together, at precisely the right moment in exactly the right way. In a very challenging way I'd say, and I personally take the divisive reactions to the scene as evidence of its success. Something to place right alongside the third-act of A.I. and also use to slap War of the Worlds' "let the son shine in" climax right upside it's kowtowing little head.
Odie-
I'd love to see Pat Robertson's head explode ala The Fury, perhaps with a bit of Cronenberg's cold, clinical Scanners gaze. Feel free to bombard The 700 Club. I'll always hate 'em for souring the 5am lead-in to my Saturday morning cartoons.
Regarding that Dakota Fanning scene you mention, I hope the little monster was sufficiently ripped apart by her daddy's actions. Didn't matter to me that Spielberg didn't show it, per se, so much as it did when the FUCKING SON SURVIVES!!!!!!!!! Oy. Well, we'll always have "Break bread with me, Ephraim."/"No." as the same-year rejoinder. Steven's such a schizoid, sometimes.
Braving Firewall, ay? You'll never look at dog collar GPS's the same way again, I can tell you that much.
except that I agree with Andrew Dignan that the slo-mo Gatorade shot is a bit much.
Guess I'm alone on loving that one. I should write an extended essay on just those three seconds. :-)
I think it's significant that when Avner gets on the plane leaving Israel, he takes his wedding band off, and at the same time those images of the massacre flood his mind. His marriage and family (both immediate and all of Israel) are the reasons, of course, he is going. The plan is obviously that once he's gone and done this thing, he'll put the ring back on.
When he gets back from his mission, and rejoins his family, and he's making love to his wife -- the same thing the wedding ring symbolizes, a true union -- we see that they're still really separated by those images. It's not as easy as turning them on or off, and Avner's vegeance does not make them go away.
No, not worse than Hook. Or 1941 for that matter. Only this one was more ambitious and serious in its intent that it leaves an unpleasant aroma.
It's hard to un-know something, but I have to have to take issue with mutinyco's comments on the film, which don't seem fully clear to me. Since the only part of the movie you specifically take offense at is the opening scene, I'll go there. An audience member may or may not know ahead of time the story of how the drunk American athletes helped the terrorists over the fence, but (A) it is not at all clear that these guys are terrorists before they remove their guns, and (B) the ominous music and cinematography occurring at this point are surely reflective of something that every audience member must know going in, that this is a film called "Munich" leading off with a terrorist incident. To say that Spielberg dropped the ball here in an elemental way...I just can't agree that this was a problematic scene. If you have further issues with the film, please continue.
I agree that Hook is almost certainly Spielberg's worst film in a teeth-gratingly saccharine way. I have a soft spot in my heart, though for 1941, as a fan of manic ensemble comedies.
Zack's comment above gets at something crucial in this film, indeed in all of Spielberg's movies. Like many a great artist, he has a favorite unifying theme, the family home as the organizing principle for life. Zack's right when he says the movie ties Avner's love for his family into his life for his homeland Israel, and that same love of family informs Spielberg and Kushner/Roth's depiction of the counterrorist team as a band of brothers protecting the mother country.
But here, as elsewhere in Spielberg's work, the love of home and family is depicted not just in a straightforward sentimental-macho way (as in all those 80s/90s/00s films in which Schwarzenegger/Stallone/Bronson/Seagal/Harrison Ford etc can mow down armies of foes with a clear conscience because they hurt the little woman or the kids) but also as a pretext for awful behavior. Spielberg isn't advocating any particular political position in MUNICH, he's only asking that we examine our premises; I think it's amazing and valuable that a filmmaker with his popular reach would make a big-budget, accessible film which essentially critiques the organizing principle of almost all of his films. This movie says, "Hold the phone, people. I know I've been saying over and over throughout my career that there is nothing more important to the human race than the need to have a home and to protect one's family, but let's not forget how that same love can lead us to do evil in the name of protecting good."
You can say that's a "Well, duh" idea, but I think that would be a bit condescending, considering that the majority of mainstream narrative films don't display anything remotely like Spielberg's questioning, critical attitude towards violence and its justifications. I like the "push-pull" of the movie, the way its Hitchcock side fights with its William Friedkin/John Frankenheimer side (dig all the zoom shots!) because it's one more example of how Spielberg encodes the movie's conflict into the very fabric of the film itself. MUNICH is not just a film about conflicted heroes who do evil to do good; it's literally a conflicted work of art, practically schizo.
It's impossible to make a movie like that -- an open, self-questioning, self-critical movie -- and have it be perfect. It's bound to be a highly functioning mess, and frankly MUNICH often fits that description. But I think it's an honest and daring way to go about this particular subject. Spielberg in this mode is like Alfred Hitchcock plus Stanley Kramer, with a dash of Francois Truffaut's melancholy affection for all people regardless of nationality or race. It's a hell of of a lot less tidy than anything he's ever directed, but I think that's a plus rather than a minus, and I find it strange that some of the same critics (not on this blog, mind you) who habitually bash Spielberg for being too neat and tidy and simplistic are coming after him for not knowing what he wants to say and delivering a film that seems to be squabbling with itself and dissolving into incoherence as it goes along (on purpose).
Keith: Did Pat's head explode on this morning's 700 Club? If not, I didn't send enough copies of your post. Drat! Also, the programmer in me was choking the movielover in me at Firewall. I never knew dogs had the OnStar system on them, and I kept waiting for Harrison Ford to down some Geritol with a Viagra chaser. I have been exposed: we programmers didn't want the world to know that, when we're not writing code, we're kicking the shit out of kidnappers! Shhhh!
MZS: There's no possible way that Hook is Spielberg's worst movie! I actually liked it. 1941, however, is one of the worst movies I've ever seen. Thankfully, Spielberg followed 1941 with the movie I widely regard as the best time I've ever had at the movies, Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Regarding Spielberg's "questioning, critical attitude towards violence and its justifications," that's a rather new phenomenon on his part, probably starting around Schindler's List. I always found it amusing that Spielberg was, based on ONE MOVIE, deemed "family friendly." This man is a visual and an emotional sadist! To quote The Waco Kid in Blazing Saddles, Spielberg "must have killed more people than Cecil B. DeMille."
A lot of critics keep bringing up terms like "schmaltz" and "mushy" to describe Spielberg, but I always felt his manipulation of my heart was just so he could find a soft place to stick the knife. Is Munich's sex scene Spielberg's way of saying to those critics "Hey, I can be unsentimental and warped about family activities, dammit!"
This is not a criticism. I love Spielberg's movies. I've only given a negative review to two of them. I even liked The Terminal, though that review may be one of the most anguished, conflicted things I've ever written ("...[a]s hard as I resisted, The Terminal fought back harder, wrenching me into submission...This movie beat my ass and made me call it 'Papi.'") I even forgave the horrible third act of A.I., which should have ended 30 minutes before it did. Talent like Spielberg (and Malick too, dare I say) can make one more forgiving than perhaps one should be.
Howard Hawks, I think, said that a great movie was "three good scenes, no bad scenes." (Please correct me if this is wrong.) Munich is more than three good scenes and one bad scene. I think it still qualifies.
You're wrong. The opening is misguided. It contradicts what Spielberg has always been great at: creating normalcy. You need to create normalcy before you can infect it with the other -- whether it's a space alien, a shark, or whatever. Here, there was no setup. And, as this was predicated on being "true," and its partial goal was to treat the parties with some degree of neutrality, this scene needed to be rooted in an antithetical manner. Needed to be mundane.
As for the rest of the film, well, my complaints could begin with the very spine of it. It's pretty reaching to believe the Mossad would've sent only a single team to assassinate a dozen or so people. One team would've invariably re-crossed its path and used the same sources enough to raise flags and blow its cover. As happened in the movie. Obviously, and by most valid accounts, the Israelis undertook a series of operations to get the Palestinians. I understand that a single team is better suited to drama, but not when it stretches probability. Even more so, why would the Israelis have created a team of such inexperienced people? They're sponsored by a state with the best intelligence organization in the world. Yet even the Palestinians, who were technically refugees, seemed better prepared at times. These guys were way too naive to be assassins.
Furthermore, if I were a Mossad leader putting together an assassination squad, would I use a man with a pregnant wife to head it? Um, no. Obviously, that's a man who's going to be conflicted. Which is what the writers were after -- dramatic conflict -- however, here, it played like manipulative nonsense, and every time he called his wife or thought about his baby it made me cringe.
It takes $100k to find a published author and library owner, who gives lectures at outside cafe's? It takes $100k to find somebody who'll readily let a fake reporter into his apartment to meet his family?
The latter section of those two is so contrived it should've been in Crash. There is absolutely no reason for Kassovitz to have been in that apartment posing as a reporter. If they could just as easily have sneaked into the apartment as they did when they planted the bomb, why give up your shit? You've just identified yourself to both his wife and daughter. Shouldn't take much effort to figure out who did it -- especially after the daughter saw him messing with the phone. Oh...but then we wouldn't have been able to humanize them and the Palestinian struggle (all of which is admirable, only the uses are way too strategically planted). And we certainly wouldn't have had that totally nonsensical suspense scene with the daughter returning as they were about to detonate. So contrived as to be laughable. The moving truck pulls up just then? Avner runs back and forth like a man with a conscience! The daughter answering the phone. The moving truck conveniently driving away at the same moment as the little girl. Yeah...okay... It's so silly that it's NOT suspenseful.
Even the general arc of the story is contrived. The squad celebrating after the first murder: "Don't fuck with the Jews!" Then they're so cocky they initiate the Beirut attack (I thought they weren't supposed to be in touch with Ephraim...), which ultimately blows their cover. Then they become hunted after a team member acts totally unprofessional and charges into a building to detonate a bomb, leading to a shoot-out where a KGB agent is killed. (If I was on that team and a member had done that, he'd be found with a bullet in his head.) And ultimately, I never believed that Avner had developed much sense of guilt over the killings, so much as he became scared when the tables turned. His anxiety was the result of going from hunter to hunted, not questioning his prior actions.
Speaking of the Beirut attack...am I the only one who thought it was a little odd that in the middle of the operation Ehud Barak introduced himself like he's at a cocktail party?
What else was shoddy?... Oh, let's have a horny couple in the hotel room next door just so Avner can show he's got a conscience and help them after they've become collateral...
Crappy visual gimmicks... The airplane window to start/end a flashback... Picking up a casing from the puddle of white milk just as it mixes with red...
What did I like?... the house boat scene. It was the one emotional murder -- a revenge killing -- and it was suitably original and repugnant to show a nude woman getting her head blown off at close range. It was the one truly ugly killing in the movie.
Odie: Don't tell me I have to get all apologist for the last act of AI again. I feel like I spend most of my life in this position. I keep telling myself to hold fast--time will vindicate this movie. I just wish time would hurry up and do it.
Nathaniel: Unless Spielberg is paying you, or Kubrick is issuing you checks from beyond the grave (and I wouldn't put it past Stanley), you've no need to put yourself in any position for my benefit. If you've been in this position most of your life, I, and Dr. Ruth Westheimer, advise you that there are more fun positions to be in than this one.
Why not let time handle the A.I. argument for you? You can find me and say "nyaah! I hope ya choke!" if you're right.
When a great movie gets to a point where it would perfectly end, I start to get religious in the theater. "Oh Lord, please show the closing credits NOW!" It's the same prayer I utter when I'm trapped in an awful movie. Same prayer, different application. My prayer is seldom answered in the first instance, except in rare cases like Before Sunset, and is NEVER answered in the second, although the film DID burn to ashes during The Blair Witch Project. So I guess that counts.
When Haley Joel Osment finds himself face to face underwater with "the blue fairy," I offered up my prayer. "Sure, it's a downer ending, Lord, but it's perfect. END! END!" But no. I get William Hurt doing the same thing he did in A History of Violence: Showing up for no reason. "How could you fuck this up?" I asked Spielberg aloud. William Hurt must have heard me through the screen. He just got an Oscar nomination for mimicking me.
Do you think Kubrick would have allowed the ending A.I. has? Until that point, I thought Spielberg was doing a fine Kubrick homage. My disappointment brought the film down a few notches.
Still, I liked the movie, so you don't have to convince me of its value. I would have LOVED it if it ended where I felt it should have. I had a similar problem with Minority Report, but I rated that higher than A.I.
That was Kubrick's ending for A.I. He dies at the end. Just like a real human.
Yeah, I think it's important to point out that the ending of A.I. is almost to a word Kubrick's ending, and one of the few parts of the script that Kubrick had worked out in detail in advance.
That said, while I like A.I. quite a bit (big huge gaping unconscionable flaws [*cough* johnwilliams *cough*] and all) I think the tone of the ending, as well as the tone of the non-ending fade out underwater that many of us *wish* were the actual ending, is again a case of Spielberg's cinematic style kicking in and overpowering the moment. That *would* have been the perfect ending to Spielberg's A.I. But Spielberg chose to go with Kubrick's ending instead -- which was, in my opinion, an ending for a movie that never existed.
Yeah, ok bilge, but see for me that's the whole point. The confluence of Spielberg's aesthetic approach to Kubrick's original conception is what makes the film great and truly special. Yes, Kubrick's film would have had a far different tenor I'm sure, but I have yet to understand why people think ending with David entombed forever underwater would have been such a perfect choice. Odie, there have been many times for me the likes of which you speak in which I did hope and pray that the film would end NOW on this moment/line of dialogue/ image/whatever (the most satisfying of which was when Todd Haynes somehow took heed of me through the flux of time and space and chose the exact, perfect moment to end [Safe]). AI, however, was not one of those times. I did not know what I was going to get and did not expect what I got but I persist in believing it is one of the most perfect, most profound endings in all of cinema. The ending everyone seems to want would have provided the film with a kind of glib, nihilistic closure that would have been more superficially shattering than what we received but what we received was ultimately far more devastating because it went much further. As with the work of somebody like Beckett, this ending was more deeply nihilist than the other would have been and goes so far beyond the quasi pleasures and satisfactions of easy nihilism that it goes stright through to the other side. I read a piece in, I think, Cineaction that got this aspect of things all wrong. The piece was aware of the devastating quality of the ending as it stands but attempted to present it as simply another variation on the superficial nihilism I remarked on earlier. I actually view the ending as a religious affirmation. The Christian tradition at least is based (or once was) on a serious recognition of death and loss, the Holy Saturday existence of our present lives. But that acknowledgement also includes a place for hope; a hope not dissimilar to that expressed at the end of King Lear--a hope shot through with immense doubt, a hope unable to ever assuage the real world loss. But the hope exists and is rooted in the need to believe that this particular element of our humanity is worth preserving; is, in fact, integral to our humanity. That's what I see at the end of AI. Except in this case hope is replaced with love, which is probably the same thing.
Beyond that, the other major thing that makes this ending great is the fact that it feels so much like a confession on Spielberg's part; it feels like the ultimate Spielberg ending of love and reunion but it is elevated far above the banal by a technique of almost metaphysical deconstruction. It is Spielberg facing up to the raw, primitive and supposedly naive elements in his art which constantly come under criticism and face the derision of sceptics. I have to confess at this point that I have only seen the film twice--such was its tremendous emotional impact upon me that I cannot quite bring myself to return to it. I believe that Spieleberg forces any who are open at all to his themes of restitution and reconciliation to see the truth of our desires (the primitive quality of those desires is presumably what Kubrick liked); and yet he wants us to be moved by the mutuality of our human vulnerability and dependence, to exist in a multitude of places at once. That's what I meant by going through nihilism to the other side; Spielberg's vision here is not complacent and demands that we allow ourselves to be umoored by our own longing and accept a position which validates the depth of our emotional capacity while never denying the fact that its existence, its flourishing, is just a facet of an infinite, prismatic crystal of possibility.
I should add this: the ending also functions as an indictment of misplaced desire, a very particular kind of desire that can only be satisfied by an already set solution, a foregone conclusion of a sloution. This allows Spielberg to take a harsh look at what motivates his tacit inclinations toward stability and comfort at the expense of change and development. In revealing this despair, AI treads a similar path to Sokurov's Mother and Son, which was also about the tragedy of misplaced desire and its inherent limitations. Having said that, neither Spielberg nor Sokurov makes this enlightenment simple. In fact, despite the confusion as to what desire and dependence actually refer to, the characters' pain is our own. There is no false audience omniscience at work here. We are implicated as they are; the understanding and revelation provided by these great artists can not minimize the sorrow of specific attachments and the suffering when they are rended.
On another note, the realization of David's desire in strictly physical terms points up the solipsism at work in our anthropocentric fantasies. Of course such an ending would not go over well in a fundamentalist society. After all, this is a time in which people's limitations of vision are satisfied by an idea of heaven populated by all the comforts of the familiar (what I like to call the SUV/dogs catching frisbees/eternal disco notion of paradise). No one ever seems troubled by consigning grandpa to be 82 forever ("Damnit, that's how I remember him and we'll all live in that same duplex down by the river, except this time it'll be a factory--like in Willy Wonka!"). At least Vincent Ward's What Dreams May Come got this right, if not much else.
And finally, and perhaps not coincidentally, AI's end recalls the end of 2001, which dealt with mortality and the desire to cast dependence as autonomy. Dave (!) was also unable to see beyond his own solipsism and primitive attachments to physicalized form. This is what Malick scuttles so beautifully in Thin Red Line, overturning attachment and false desire in the character of Witt. Is Witt's character the culmination of humanity's? Is Witt the Star Child? Think about it.
Nathaniel: That's probably the most persuasive and concise defense of "AI" that I've ever read. As you might know, I respected but did not love the movie -- in fact I think I consciously resisted it, probably for the same reason a lot of people are resisting THE NEW WORLD, because people like me come off as religious fanatics waving Bibles in their faces -- but your posts make me think it's time to revisit the film with some distance and no preconceptions. There's a lot in your two posts that I am inclined to argue with, but I think I'm going to wait until I can see the movie one more time so I can have clear visual pegs on which to hang my assertions. I will reply at a future date. In the meantime picture me holding a lit Zippo aloft.
I'll offer only this one anecdote for now, as an indicator of Spielberg's ability to stoke astonishingly profound, personal but very, very different responses in viewers. At a TV season preview in Los Angeles last summer, I escaped a boring network party full of pandering actors and publicists and holed up in a corner with one of my favorite people, a pretty important network publicist who is a secret literature, philosophy and semiotics buff. He hates almost every acclaimed American movie of the last 20 years, but he loved "AI," loved everything about it in fact, particularly the last act (or the last movement, as he calls it). He actually got a bit choked up describing it and interpreting it, but his take on it was very different from your intepretation, which is suffused with hope for transcendence, a feeling of total openness, etc. He thought it was a tremendously depressing ending, piercing in its darkness, because the boy got his wish (to have his mother back) but got not his mother, but a facsimile; as he interpreted it, humankind was re-created by the intelligent machines, a whole species/civiilzation raised from the dead by a God force (a Spielberg motif), but in a severely limited form, as all the information came from the mind of this eternal manchild robot. According to this "AI" fan, David didn't get his mother back, he got his own severely circumscribed notion of his mother, a child's sketch of a mother. My friend concluded, "When I read all those reviews and heard all my friends complaining that it was a saccharine ending, I wanted to quit my job and go live on the desert island someplace, because it just confirmed for me that 99 percent of the human race is totally idiotic. That's not a happy ending. That's the saddest fucking ending in the history of endings."
...people's limitations of vision are satisfied by an idea of heaven populated by all the comforts of the familiar (what I like to call the SUV/dogs catching frisbees/eternal disco notion of paradise).
Dear God! If this is what Heaven is--a big Republican and Yuppie fantasy--PLEASE send me Straight Ta Hell wearing a gasoline filled condom!
The technologist in me identified with David as a piece of machinery, not as being capable of all the blatantly depicted and symbolic things you so eloquently described. I took an Artificial Intelligence class a hundred million years ago as part of my undergrad degree in computer science, and I approached the movie from more of a computer geek perspective. I think this is why I find Kubrick's ending so unsatisfying. It made logical sense for the film to end with what provides the terminating clause in David's while loop, not a subroutine that leads me to Kiss of the Spider Woman dude, William "How Could You Fuck This Up?" Hurt.
To me, David was a robot. I know Kubrick gets all gooey over his talking inanimate objects (see Tom Cruise for example) but I like it when he makes them clinically detached, mimicking human emotion while the humans around them mimic a weird machine like coldness. The ending of A.I. makes too much of an attempt to humanize David.
While you wrote a wonderful piece highlighting your points, you haven't convinced me of why I should be more satisfied with the wimpy ending I got, even if it is Kubrick's.
I was, and continue to be very impressed with the way Osment interprets David (whose name Kubrick might have selected as a tie to that other David, the one saddled with the homicidal computer from the East Village). He plays him without a hint of real human emotion. Instead, he plays him as a robot designed to artificially mimic a human boy. His movements are too fluid and he never once messes up. I really bought him.
And Matt, tell your friend that this idiot says "bon voyage, baby" to him. The ending is saccharine. Hope there are scorpions the size of Texas on his deserted island.
I stand by my original statement. It's to Spielberg's credit that he goes so wrong yet manages to keep the movie from self-destructing.
Take it a touch further. David is the last remaining link to humanity. And with his death...
odienator: William Hurt is pre-Coney Island blue fairy. Post-blue fairy, the only recognizable actor besides Osment and O'Connor is the voice of Ben Kingsley.
A must-read on AI:
http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/03/27/ai.html
Sean, you are absolutely right. My brain is scrambled. For some reason, I recalled Hurt's scenes coming after the fairy and before the last scenes with O'Connor. Hazard of getting old, methinks. I haven't seen the movie since its release. Maybe I should check it out again!
Thanks for the correction.
My favorite AI must-read:
http://www.geocities.com/outlawvern/
Brian: Thanks for the Vern link. I really enjoy that guy's site. It's not what I would call criticism, exactly, but there's nothing else like it. It's like "Ain't It Cool News" by way of THE ROAD WARRIOR.
Matt, that’s a great defense of what I too consider the heart of “Munich”—the scene that thematically completes what the botched jobs tell us about Avner’s emotional experience with the Munich massacre. And, ultimately, that’s what it’s all about: the Munich attacks and not his own murderous streak. Sure, we’ve seen the violence/sex juxtaposition before—and a whole lot just in this year—but Spielberg’s exposition is rather shocking. The emotional stain, as we’ll call it, imprints itself not as the result of his revenge, but the events that impel him to enact it. Spielberg not only scrutinizes the retaliation, but also the celerity with which it was executed, the lack of thought Avner and Israel put into their vengeance. The flashback sequences gradually dissipate as Avner’s team gets closer to reaching its eventual goal: the Munich massacre has little effect on them. Even as their intelligence proves faulty, they maintain an unflinching blind patriotism, allowing themselves to press on without considering if the facts substantiate their action. The problem is it won’t all come out in the wash and the tragedy of violence doesn’t adhere to the boundaries of desensitized politics. Avner becomes most affected when he returns home; though he’s supposed to be safe, Munich infiltrates his most intimate encounters. From their first tryst, we see how much Avner enjoys sex with Daphna (“How long into pregnancy are you supposed to stop having sex?”), and the tragedy is how it’s his family life that’s what’s ruined by his failure to come to terms with Munich. Indeed, this is where “Munich” trumps “War of the Worlds” as a 9/11 allegory. The finale to this picture—both this scene and imagery of the Twin Towers—admits the incompetence of Avner (Israel and America) as a father and a lover, an emotionally whole human, as a result of not only the tragedy, but also our denial of its effects.
War Of the Worlds isn't a 9/11 allegory. It's a juxtaposition of cinematic destruction (aliens/fantasy fears) vs. very real threats (human violence/machine violence). It's a horror show. And as many people incorrectly interpreted, it doesn't have a sentimental ending. Not at all. The running joke of the film is in its juxtaposition of movie vs. reality -- the way in which Ray and his family survive and outrun every life threatening situation, not unlike Stallone or Schwarzennegger firing a gun that doesn't run out of bullets. Furthermore, the conclusion, in which micro organisms and bacteria are explained as being the "heroes," if you will, is presented with a thick tone of irony in Freeman's voice. Humans haven't defeated viruses. It's more likely that viruses will get us than any other mass cause of death. Look at the bird flu epidemic gearing up...
Furthermore, the conclusion, in which micro organisms and bacteria are explained as being the "heroes," if you will, is presented with a thick tone of irony in Freeman's voice.
Isn't that how it ends in the book?! If so, isn't this giving credit where it is not due? I didn't hear any irony, either. I just heard Freeman doing what Freeman does best--sincere narration.
The religious right swears Freeman endorses monogamy and creationism in his narration in the Penguin movie, and now he's Alanis Morrissette. His voice has been all things to all people, like a bisexual Santa Claus. (Hey, Queer Duck said that, not me.)
I think his narration in War of the Worlds is extraneous, lazy screenwriting, but he pulls it off as he always does.
And I think the sentimental complaints have less to do with the bacterial ending as it does with Cruise finding his son alive after all that shit.
Oh, boy...
Did you read what I wrote? That's the whole point: the son survives. Is it anymore absurd than Tom Cruise surviving the initial attack while everyone around him is getting vaporized? Or the plane crashing yet sparing them? Or that everybody else on the ferry dies, while they're hit and submerged by a sinking car, then quite easily swim to shore? Or they're the only ones with a functioning car?
That's the movie's plan.
And of course the narration is ironic. Its sincerity is its giveaway. And it's no more lazy than the narration that introduces Dr. Strangelove.
If Kubrick had directed War Of the Worlds everybody would've gotten the ending. Spielberg, however, directed a trilogy of sci-fi movies this decade, each which subverted his patented "happy endings," yet everybody took them literally. Which is more a problem of perception than anything else.
Time will put these films in perspective. He was the single most important main stage filmmaker of the last decade. Even his misses, The Terminal and Munich, were more socially relevant and ambitious than most of the other films out there. He was the only director with the clout and will to make the films he's made.
MutinyCo: I agree almost everythiing you say about WOTW. I don't think anything in it is supposed to be judged by the rules of believability, whatever that means in a movie. It's a dream film structured according to dream logic, less an according to Syd Field three-act script than a succession of things that happen. It's got more in common with FORBIDDEN PLANET or THE BIRDS than to most studio pictures being made now.
Yet I agree with Odie about the final scene being unsatisfying and unworthy of the rest of the movie. I take your point about Spielberg's recent sci fi trilogy subverting the happy endings he's built a career on providing, but no matter how you parse it, the son being alive is a straight up happy ending, a gimme, a feelgood touch in a movie whose overwhelming power rests on its willingness to submerge us in epic images of chaos and massacre that draw equally on Jungian symbols and the history of 20th-21st century historical atrocities, wars and disasters (including the sinking of the Titanic, the Holocaust, 9/11 and Iraq). I think it's possible to admire what Spielberg has done in WOTW while still arguing that the son should have either died or not arrived on the scene at exactly the moment when daddy reunited the family.
To be clear, the gripe is not that the ending is unrealistic, it's that inadvertently or on purpose, the ending reassures an audience that does not need to be reassured in quite that way. WOTW is a nightmare film about the collapse of civilization, a vision of human helplessness, a rare example of the kind of movie in which the hero's son could die, or vanish two thirds of the way through to chase what he thinks is his destiny and not be heard from again, yet still keep the audience's total involvement, appreciation and respect. It's a series of worst case scenarios, an epic horror film; Spielberg's control of the medium is so great that audiences will follow him anywhere and go much deeper into pain than he seems to think. If the ending is unsatisfying is it necessarily because the audience is stupid and misunderstood the filmmaker? Is it not possible for an artist to judge almost everything correctly but one or two things?
Rather than being vindicated utterly, I think the ending will be seen as a fairly minor hitch in a classic, nearly perfect movie. It is heresy to say so, but CITIZEN KANE has a few scenes and moments that feel misjudged or overdone (Joseph Cotten hamming it up old age makeup, for instance) but they don't damage the whole. To quote Kael's CASUALTIES OF WAR review again, great movies are rarely perfect movies.
If Kubrick had directed War Of the Worlds everybody would've gotten the ending.
Doing Bette Davis imitation: "But ya ahrrrre in that chair, Spielberg, ya ahrrrre!" Kubrick was NOT.
Kubrick knows how to give us a ending without cheating. See Dr. Strangelove. (Yes, I know it was supposed to end with a pie fight, but it didn't, now did it?)
With Kubrick at the helm, he might have realized the statement in not letting the kid survive. As annoying as the son was, I thought Spielberg was using him to make a statement about the common good. The son's attitude was used to counter his father's; Cruise was only concerned with himself (and then just his immediate family) while his son wanted to fight in service to avenge civilization.
By having the son show up where he did, and alive, Cruise's character (and this movie) has its cake and eats it too. I don't think the ending ruins the movie. The movie was ruined well before that. If anything, it allowed Spielberg to get his tonal mistakes out of the way so that he'd know the right pitch to direct Munich.
And for the record: All we know about time is that it is going to pass. Why does it always have "to vindicate" people here on this blog? Why can't it prove that the poster's opinion was WRONG WRONG WRONG? Did any of us ever think of that before invoking our psychic abilities?
Movies rise to greatness in their later years because people who liked them make a case for them and stick to their guns. A lot of the movies we consider our best were not well-received -- or at least not as well-received as we'd like to believe -- Citizen Cane, Rules Of the Game, Vertigo.
Personally, I think Vertigo is pretty excruciating to sit through. But it's not much of a secret -- he's publicly bragged about it -- that Paul Schrader and Andrew Sarris conspired to raise Vertigo up to top 10 status. Now it's pretty ubiquitous. Just took people with influence to make the case. Everybody else are sheep.
If 2001 had come out today it wouldn't have stayed in theaters non-stop for 2 years, while the youth market revived a panned/failed initial release. If lucky, it might've found new life on video and wound up in Donnie Darko land.
Munich was bad all around. It did nothing for me. It's interesting as a document of Spielberg's subconscious, but it fails on every other level. If you have a fundamentally unsound base to your structure it doesn't matter how relevant your themes are. The movie fails. Go write an op-ed.
The reason you think the ending is about common good is because you're looking at the movie in terms of Spielberg's 1980s output. I am not. To me, there's no other way the movie COULD'VE ended. And while we're on the subject, in the aftermath of Eyes Wide Shut's release, when the conspiracy theorists were trying to determine just how much of it was altered by WB, Hoberman, I think it was, actually suggested that the surface happy ending in the toy store had ACTUALLY BEEN RESHOT FOR RELEASE BY SPIELBERG!!! Any takers to that now?
The reason War Of the Worlds will have a healthy afterlife is because people like Matt and myself (and others) believe in it.
Movies rise to greatness in their later years because people who liked them make a case for them and stick to their guns.
If I may be so bold as to quote you:
"Oh boy...Did you read what I wrote?"
You didn't answer my question, nor did you acknowledge that, for ever action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.
Movies lose the lustre bestowed upon them in their initial release as well. They don't all achieve greatness because YOU like them and YOU fought for them. Face it, you're not right 100% of the time. Nobody is. That was my point.
And why is your and Matt's pulling for War of the Worlds, or any movie for that matter, different from Sarris and Schrader pumping up Vertigo? It's not. They liked the movie and they fought for it. The whiny cry of the righteous is one-sided; when their sins are used against them, the dissenters are "sheep." Well, baa. I liked Vertigo and, until you mentioned it, I had no idea Sarris and Schrader were secretly brainwashing me. I wish Schrader could have brainwashed me to love Cat People and American Gigolo.
Nobody tells me what to think.
2001 came out in 1968, not today. Spielberg directed War of the Worlds, not Kubrick. These straw man arguments do little to forward your position.
You don't like Munich, and that's your right. Have I, or anyone here, insinuated that you are being led or influenced by some group or person that didn't like it, or by the people who feel that it's anti-Israel? No, because I assume you have your own mind and can draw your own conclusions. Your reasons for not liking the film were well explained, even if I didn't agree with them. They were intriguing and interesting to me to read.
I'm certainly all for disagreement, but I learn better on the offensive, not the defensive. That's just me. Now excuse me, I have grazing to do. Baa.
Odie: You should ask Keith Uhlich about "American Gigolo." He has a shepherd's staff with your name on it.
Wow, that was kinda cool. Like Michael Myers with his eyes shot out, blindly swinging his knife, at the end of Halloween II...
Don't make me turn this car around.
Driving and posting at the same time? Be careful, Matt...
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