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Munich
''I've been involved in political stuff all my life, gay issues and all sorts of lefty-type things,'' Pulitzer-winning playwright Tony Kushner said a few weeks before the release of Munich, the film he co-wrote about the tragic 1972 Munich Olympics and its violent aftermath. ''Nothing resembles the passion and the terrors that people bring to the Middle East crisis.''
Though Kushner was nervous about the incendiary nature of the story — a team of Israelis are assigned by prime minister Golda Meir to assassinate those who planned the Munich attack — the writer put his faith in the hands of director Steven Spielberg and reworked a previous draft of the script. In Kushner's vision, the assassins don't simply exact revenge. They wrestle with the justness of their cause. They fear the repercussions. And surprisingly, they get to hear a Palestinian perspective — a sticking point for some supporters of Israel.
''I knew that we were going to get in a lot of trouble,'' says the Angels in America playwright. ''I hoped the fact that somebody like Steven Spielberg wanted to address this meant that the dialogue is shifting and that people are getting more interested in a nuanced discussion of the politics of the region and less interested in a cartoony version of it.''
With its raw cinematography and subtle dialogue, Munich is far from a cartoon. But neither does it feel like a dry Sunday-morning-talk-show discussion. The film's greatest strength is that it works viscerally, as a thriller should, and doubly so because the feelings of the protagonists are adequately explored, even while bullets are whizzing and bombs exploding. Some have questioned the historical accuracy of what Kushner and Spielberg chose to dramatize — hence the film's disclaimer, ''inspired by real events'' — but the main thing Academy voters should ask is if the emotions ring true.
