PREMIERE.COM'S REVIEW (posted 12/22/05)

The once-great novelist Milan Kundera holds that the purpose of the novel—and, by extension, all narrative art—is to ask questions, not to pronounce answers. The cubic tons of horse manure that have been hurled at this film since well before its release, both in print and in the ever-delightful blogosphere, suggest any number of things—that they’re aren’t a lot of practicing Kunderans out there, for one; that a disturbing number of people don’t consider film an art form, even a populist art form, at all; and so on. For myself, the eye-rolling really gets going when reading those who condemn this moving, haunting film for what it is not. New York Times pundit and putative social observer David Brooks weighed in with a stupefyingly obtuse, “This is all well and good for what it is, but why make a film about the aftermath of the massacre of 11 Olympic athletes in Munich when the real story is today’s War on Terror?” while, on another plane altogether, The New Yorker’s Anthony Lane whined that the movie wasn’t enough like The Dirty Dozen for his tastes, the sophistication of his language (which has well and truly devolved into boilerplate in any case) failing to mask the puerility of his argument.

There are all sorts of nits I could pick regarding Munich, some bigger than others. I don’t much like the use of a night-darkened airplane window as a screen on which to superimpose the beginning of a (sort of) flashback, for instance. There will be plenty of others out there who will—hell, who already have—screamed to high heaven about Spielberg trotting out the 20 millionth endangered-child scenario of his career here. A late-in-the-movie sex scene is receiving snorts of derision. (For the record, I thought said scene was pretty gutsy, and could have tottered into ludicrousness in less deft hands. It ultimately worked for me.) But this lengthy, nuance-filled story about how eye-for-an-eye stuff differs from theory to practice is one of the most considered, thoughtful, and involving movies of its kind. In other words, see it. You might thoroughly disagree with some of the questions it raises. You might even hate it. But unlike the lot of “big holiday movies,” it’s a serious dramatic exploration of a real subject.—Glenn Kenny