Yesterday's news today

Munich is a very good movie.

You knew that already, didn't you? Already I can hear your collective duh. Well, Maus and I are still catching up with many of last year's best movies — still haven't seen Capote, for instance — and this weekend we finally got around to what I now know was our biggest oversight of 2005.

Spielberg is a great filmmaker. Those of you not reprising your collective duh are perhaps rolling your eyes — mention of Spielberg usually elicits one of those two reactions. And it always strikes me as unfortunate that Spielberg's name usually conjures up memories of E.T. and Jurassic Park instead of Schindler's List and Empire of the Sun. His overwhelming popularity, accessibility, and success as an entertainer always seem to overshadow his tremendous talent as a storyteller and craftsman, as was the case with Alfred Hitchcock in his day.

Both Jaws and Raiders of the Lost Ark remain among the greatest entertainments ever put on film, each a now-classic distillation of the most elemental mechanics and grammar of cinema. Schindler's List, although its emotional weight upstages its technical mastery, is a close cousin to Citizen Kane on many levels. Saving Private Ryan rewrote the book on cinematic realism, and set the table for the near-perfect “Band of Brothers.” And Minority Report, released the same month as Lucas's manic, cacophonous Attack of the Clones, demonstrated just how clean and sharply layered a wholly CG universe could be.

We watched Munich already knowing that Spielberg had drawn a lot of fire from both sides — both Israelis and Palestinians feeling they were being vilified, their motivations and their causes questioned. Well, hurrah for that. But, after all that hype, I was surprised at just how even and objective the film was. I didn't detect much in the way of vilification in any quarter. The Black September terrorists, the Israeli leadership, the five members of the retaliatory hit squad, the French “family” providing them with intelligence, even the seductive assassin — all concerned were portrayed as people.

And the balance Spielberg achieves is a difficult one. How do you humanize the men behind the Munich murders without diminishing the horrifying evil of their acts? Conversely, if you faithfully depict these acts of terror and murder, how then do you keep the film from devolving into a stereotypical tale of justice and revenge?

Spielberg accomplishes this by not looking away. His camera does not blink. He shows us the private lives of the main characters (both the “heroes” and the “villains”), he lets us see the collateral damage of each killing, and he makes sure we see the gore, the grisly messiness of murder.

He also makes us witness the humiliation of the victims — when one character is murdered in his bed, Spielberg does not hide or strategically frame his nudity. We see the body fully nude and exposed, and when the man's assassin is killed later on, the killers leave her body the same way — nude and exposed. This small humiliation of the victims in death, their killers' refusal to grant them even the most basic portion of dignity, is a subtle but powerful touch Spielberg uses to sensitize an audience that over the decades has witnessed thousands upon thousands of dramatized murders.

But most importantly, Spielberg makes a point of leaving the depiction of the actual murder of the Israeli athletes for the end of the film, rather than showing it early on and letting it fade into memory. It is only after the story of the Israeli assassins has run its course that Spielberg takes us back to the focal event, the initial horror that set everything else in motion. And not only does Spielberg not look away during this key moment of violence, but he frames it against what should be the lead character's most private, intimate moments — a controversial directorial choice that emphasizes just how completely murder and death have infiltrated his world.

There were complaints that this was a disrespectful and highly inappropriate juxtaposition of images. That, I think, was exactly the point. Spielberg doesn't take these deaths and erect a memorial to the victims' sacrifice; instead, he hits us squarely in the stomach, breaking with convention to make us feel as uncomfortable and uneasy as he can, without allowing us to disconnect. He does exactly the same thing with the Normandy invasion in Saving Private Ryan — he takes violence that history has softened and bronzed, and makes it unnervingly visceral and immediate.

Not many directors could pull that off. But Spielberg, like Hitchcock, understands not only his craft, but his audience, and knows how to use one to get to the other. And 50 years from now, you should expect Spielberg to be routinely listed among the all-time masters of cinema — after his box-office success has faded into memory.