The current crop of political thrillers especially Munich

...As Niall Ferguson wrote last fall in the Los Angeles Times, "with the benefit of hindsight, 1989 was not the decisive turning point of the late 20th century...

...They see themselves as the hunted as well as the hunters and soon suspect everyone: the CIA, the seemingly fictional French family from whom they've been buying their information, the Mossad itself...

...Spielberg's point again is that violence will not work: bombs should be dismantled, not constructed, perhaps even replaced by toys...

...Yet the seizure and murder of the athletes, done in cinema verite manner, interwoven with actual television coverage, explodes before us with tremendous emotional force...

...Writers like John Buchan, Eric Ambler, Graham Greene, le Carre, and, most recently, Alan Furst, had something different in mind...

...Soviet agents replaced ruthless Nazis as the ultimate enemy, but the good guys and bad guys were not always easy to tell apart...

...It can be heavy-handed: one member of the team, a nervous Belgian bomb-maker played by the French actor-director Mathieu Kassovitz, was originally a toy-maker who had been drafted to dismantle bombs, not construct them...

...Avner grew up with Israel itself as his home...

...The balance of the movie is further tipped by the curious fact that several of their murder targets appear harmless, even appealing: first there is an elderly Palestinian poet who DISSENT / Spring 2006 n 91 NOTEBOOK has just translated 1001 Nights into Italian, identifying it as a tale of survival...

...It also shows how a facile paranoia, the sense of being doomed by gigantic forces manipulating the world, has always been a pitfall for the serious thriller...

...Munich does not try to "humanize" the Palestinian terrorists, like Hany Abu-Assad's Paradise Now, in which two garage mechanics are tapped to become suicide bombers, only to get caught up in banal, everyday difficulties as well as second thoughts...

...Spielberg's film makes a similar attempt at balance, also using the thriller as a vehicle for debate...

...That came 10 years earlier, in 1979— the year of the Iranian Revolution...

...Munich shows a good deal of empathy for IsNOTEBOOK raelis as classic Jewish victims, none at all for their vulnerability as a nation or for the eyeforan-eye strategy that helped them survive...

...This marks the movie as the work of Diaspora Jews, not Israelis...

...His most recent book is A Mirror in the Roadway: Literature and the Real World (Princeton...

...0 FILM CAN BE expected to solve the problem of the Israeli-Palestinian con...

...Even this doesn't work, for in the crudest, most embarrassing scene, Avner is haunted by the Munich massacre as he makes love to his wife, not because it turns him on but because he cannot reach beyond it...

...she asks...

...Home and family, as I've said, but also the notion, true as far as it goes, that violence breeds more violence, a cycle of violence with no end in sight...

...But the creators of the show —and Sutherland especially—understand that even suspense stories need people we might care about, not simply ciphers...

...The film has no sympathy for Israeli toughness...

...Such is the way Munich appraises the situation of the Jews in their Zionist homeland: bright beginnings, intractable dilemmas, false solutions...

...Like real people, they're saddled with annoying children, inconvenient ex-lovers, and flickering office romances that ignite at the wrong moment...

...Recent movie thrillers allow more prominence to the personal lives of their characters, either to motivate them convincingly, as in The Constant Gardener, or to give them serious moral qualms or a sense of vulnerability, as in Munich...

...Visually, even morally, we can make no connection between them and the militants who seized and finally killed the Israeli hostages...

...Their agents were burnt-out cases who had lost their ideals or decent men abused or cut loose by their callow or corrupt superiors...

...The twentieth-century thriller reached its peak in the treacherous setting of a divided Berlin, that nest of conspiracy and big-power rivalry...

...Home is everything...

...But these human distractions feel parenthetical, serving little purpose but to retard the action and punch up its rhythm...

...As in 1970s movies such as Alan J. Pakula's The Parallax View or recent ones like Stephen 90 n DISSENT / Spring 2006 Gaghan's Syriana—the latter targeting oil companies rather than drug companies—this haunted sense of a tentacular, all-powerful conspiracy catapults the thriller beyond politics into a shallow, helpless fatalism...

...Avner makes frantic phone calls, rips up his own bed, sleeps in the closet imagining all their own plots turned against them...

...WHAT ARE SPIELBERG and his screenwriters, Tony Kushner and Eric Roth, actually invested in here...

...Now you think Israel is your mother," his wife tells him...

...As the movie repeatedly makes clear, he opts for home over homeland, the authenticity of the personal life over the collective project of nationhood in which he was raised...

...Just as the current Bush administration has propped itself up with claims of pursuing a global war on terror, so writers and directors have used the real threat of terrorism as an inexhaustible source of evil and danger...

...If not for the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, the end of the cold war would have been a catastrophe for thriller writers...

...Such thrillers thrive on the melodrama of global political struggle, especially the subterranean world of espionage, assassination, and dirty tricks...

...Unlike Zionists who want a normal state, they envision Israel as a beacon to the nations, a bastion of Jewish morality now at risk of losing its soul...

...But on the phone from Brooklyn, Avner's wife tells him that "the kitchen is too big...

...Just as the Iliad focuses on a hero who withdraws from battle and sulks in his tent, Munich centers on a Mossad agent, Avner, played with moody effectiveness by Eric Bana, who sacrifices his family life to lead the revenge mission and then develops misgivings and paranoid fears along the way...

...You're the only home I ever had," he tells her...

...At the end of the movie, in the face of all entreaties to return to Israel, he remains there with them, choosing family over nation, the free air of exile over his perpetually beleaguered and now morally compromised homeland...

...They could be secret sharers, brothers under the skin...

...Critics for whom this is simply a case of good versus evil bridle at seeing it relocated onto the nebulous terrain of moral ambiguity, the region of the serious thriller...

...Because we see everything from the angle of the Israelis, inevitably it is their point of view that the movie questions, as they themselves do...

...The early work of John le Carre, especially The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, and its spare film version by Martin Ritt, gave local color to the vicious logic of the cold war, turning it into a chess game of operational tactics and down-at-heels characters, reversals and betrayals...

...flict but Munich, relying on the bleak conventions and ambiguities of the serious thriller, seems like a particularly empty contribution...

...When Golda Meir says that "every civilization finds it necessary to negotiate compromises with its own values," when one of the men on Avner's team complains that "we can't afford to be that decent anymore," when the iconic Gila Almagor says that "whatever it took, whatever it takes, we have a place on earth, at last," and "we have to take it because no one will give it to us," the film formally acknowledges their point of view but highlights its flawed moral logic...

...Most thrillers are no more than machines designed to build up excitement through spectacular action, chilling suspense, and the head-on collision of unlikely heroes and vicious scoundrels...

...Later, Avner comes to challenge whether these targets have any connection to Munich, just as the story itself has been challenged as fiction, and now is described at the outset merely as "inspired by real events...

...STEVEN SPIELBERG'S Munich, of course, is about real conspiracy: first the assault by Black September on Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics, then the retribution supposedly organized by the Mossad at the behest of the Israeli government...

...Everything in the movie weighs in favor of domestic values, the kind of absolute loyalty Avner's wife feels for him as she pulls up stakes, leaving friends and family behind...

...In this shady territory, political loyalty, vital information, and even human life itself were always up for sale...

...Only Palestinians are permitted to dream of restoring their fathers' olive trees, no matter how many generations it would take or how much blood might be spilled...

...Avner longs for his wife and misses the birth of his baby daughter...

...The intertwining of the two, as when photos of the terrorists are intercut with television images of the victims, has led to a charge of moral equivalence...

...His father, who never appears, was a national hero...

...Munich is full of just such exclamation points...

...Eventually he moves them to Brooklyn to keep them from harm...

...Quayle's growing determination to get to the bottom of his wife's death reflects le Carre's own shift from an elegantly dark, knowing, ironical writer to a muckraking crusader...

...As the moral atmosphere of the movie darkens, along with Avner's mental equilibrium, the lighting itself grows darker...

...This "sympathy" for their victims is typical of the serious thriller, the kind that raises moral conundrums...

...Only the oversized kitchen in Brooklyn is bathed in light...

...They show how evil lurks at the edge of everyday life and—in Alfred Hitchcock's films, for example—how ordinary people behave when their lives and families are menaced and they are suddenly thrown into the center of a maelstrom...

...But this is only his way of acknowledging the movie's paucity of ideas to match its electrifying charge of visceral intensity...

...The Palestinians voice their hopes and claims, but the logic of terrorism is never examined, except by Israelis who see it as barbaric, a hateful challenge to their more humane civilization...

...As a contribution to understanding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, this is a well-meaning piece of humanitarian nonsense—a position taken by Diaspora Jews who warmly empathize with the Other but have never been under the gun themselves...

...Everyone else—his own mother, his prime minister, his coldly businesslike Mossad handler, played as an impatient, abusive father by Geoffrey Rush—is willing to sacrifice him for a larger cause, as he himself is at first...

...When the characters pause to examine their feelings for each other, the real action comes to a halt, only to resume half a minute later...

...They could be covert operatives, posing as diplomats or businessmen, or entrepreneurs of intelligence working in a demimonde of double agents and Mata Haris...

...This nightmarish moment contrasts sharply with a lyrical love scene early on, before the mission, when his wife was pregnant and the future seemed open-ended...

...If I lose that I lose my soul," says another member of the team...

...All this blood comes back to us," says another...

...then an affable man who makes light conversation with Avner on the balcony of their hotel...

...his mother deposited him in a kibbutz, where he was raised collectively...

...This is the nub of the story, for he uses either too much explosive or too little, and eventually blows himself up...

...Such a kitchen "costs dearly, but then home always does...

...The protagonists, weighed down by past experiences, moral scruples, and the distractions of their own messy lives, operated within a gray zone of moral ambiguity...

...Filial attachment, sexual attachment, the nuclear family, this is the largest community the film can imagine—for Jews, that is, because Palestinians are allowed to long—and fight—for a homeland...

...Directed by Fernando Meirelles from a late novel by le Carre, The Constant Gardener shows us how Justin Quayle, a shy British diplomat, played with Alec Guinness-like understatement by Ralph Fiennes, is gradually transformed by his firebrand wife, Tessa (Rachel Weisz)—and by her violent death—to probe a conspiracy and a cover-up in which a pharmaceutical company has been testing dangerous drugs on unsuspecting Africans...

...These serious thrillers still belonged to a bipolar world...

...With each episode set in a single hour of a twenty-four-hour period, and many innocent lives hanging in the balance, the series gives us a high-tech version of the endless cliffhangers of old movie serials...

...As in the safe house, with Israelis and Palestinians in a stand-off of raised guns and irreconcilable ideas, the movie turns the Israeli retaliation into a cycle of violence— for which it can conceive no political solution, only a personal exit...

...They depend on the stereotype of swarthy, scheming men with Middle Eastern accents, demonic in their fanaticism and implacable in their hatred of the American way of life...

...Because the filmmakers are in no way invested in them, they feel like rationalizations, honest delusions, or simply lines of dialogue inserted to provide balance...

...Spielberg himself called it "a prayer for peace," a drama of questions rather than answers...

...MORRIS DICKSTEIN teaches English and film at the CUNY Graduate Center...

...then a family man devoted to his wife and a daughter who, in the movie's most conventionally suspenseful scene, is almost killed instead of him...

...In an improbable scene in which Avner's team and a group of Palestinians take refuge in the same "safe" house, where (like the entire Middle East) no one is safe, a Palestinian named Ali tells Avner that "you don't know what it is not to have a home...

...They made spy stories a medium for serious themes...

...Wedded to rudimentary notions of good and evil, these works purposely lack all moral shading...

...By the end, when Avner decides to remain in Brooklyn, Rush refuses to come home to break bread with him, for that would acknowledge that personal and domestic life have some kind of claim...

...92 n DISSENT / Spring 2006...

...At the same time, the colorful villains took on confusing traits of humanity, including their own family lives and some remnants of idealistic beliefs, however tarnished...

...Blithe in its improbabilities, dazzling in the speed and concentration of its action, anticipating tomorrow's headlines, 24 touches on serious themes such as the use of torture on terror suspects only to keep us glued to whatever might happen next...

...Nearly everything controversial about the film stems from the decision to focus on the vengeance of the Israelis rather than the original crime...

...For Spielberg, Papa's sprawling family compound is like a dream of paradise, and one of Avner's rendezvous with Lonsdale's son Louis (Mathieu Amalric) takes place outside a shop window featuring a model kitchen...

...Standard thrillers, the action kind that Hollywood still churns out, care little for credibility: the genre formula demands simple villains but deviously complex conspiracies...

...The best example of the conventional thriller today is the highly addictive Fox series 24, with Kiefer Sutherland as the super-agent Jack Bauer, battling fools and traitors in his own government as he confounds a dizzying array of terrorist plots...

...In this movie, soul is bound up with home and family...

...After the Israeli avengers have themselves become targets, after they've killed a female mercenary agent in an especially humiliating manner, their confidence in their mission begins to break down...

...As a nod to the serious thriller, the counterterrorist agents in 24 have personal relationships that impel them, at least briefly, to consider the effects of their actions...

...Israelis, from Golda Meir down to Avner's own mother (played by the celebrated Israeli actress Gila Almagor) are shown to be compromising their values to achieve the same goal...

...Another character, a woman recently returned from Europe, makes the case against violence and holds out a dim promise of domestic happiness rather than certain death...

...Scattered through the movie there are more than enough lines giving voice to the Israeli position, yet every one of them rings slightly hollow...

...Don't you want your daughter to be Israeli...

...Munich never questions that the massacre was heinous, but it raises doubts as to whether the retaliation was tactically effective, whether it can be seen as genuinely moral, or perhaps was soul-destroying to those who executed it...

...instead, it sends Jews back to the family to retain the moral high ground...

...Bauer is at once fearless and modest, loyal to his agency yet often out on his own, with a knack for finessing DISSENT / Spring 2006 n 89 NOTEBOOK insoluble problems...

...Meir treats him like a son, as does Papa (Michael Lonsdale), the Frenchman who sends him blood sausage and feeds him precise information about his Palestinian targets for huge amounts of money...

...You could have a home like that," he tells Avner...