Cowboys and Palestinians
Brokeback Mountain, Munich lead a promising few weeks for moviegoing
by Jim Ridley
There’s been a lot of talk about the “importance” of Brokeback Mountain, which is exactly the kind of talk that will either mislead or scare away the people most inclined to appreciate the picture. It’s true that Ang Lee’s film, adapted from an E. Annie Proulx short story by screenwriters Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana, paints a moving portrait of the dehumanizing effects of homophobia, as two sheepherders have a torrid sexual affair in the early ’60s and then spend the next two decades dodging their feelings for each other while trying to lead “normal” heterosexual lives. But Brokeback Mountain is far from mere gay agitprop. People who come to the movie looking for an all-encompassing political statement—or avoid it because they don’t want to hear one—will miss its lyrical evocation of the deep loneliness that haunts the American dream.
It’s not like the film is above criticism, either. There’s far too little in Brokeback Mountain about the women in these gay cowboys’ lives—they’re just one more set of shackles around our heroes’ hearts—and the original affair isn’t depicted in enough detail to fully justify the years of trouble it causes. But the lead performances by the ebullient Jake Gyllenhaal and the sullen Heath Ledger go a long way to filling in the story gaps, as they simultaneously portray camaraderie, caution and rapacious sexual need. And Lee, as always, delineates the physical spaces well, balancing medium shots and long shots and contrasting drab, confining small-town homes with the boundless possibility of the outdoors.
In the end, Brokeback Mountain isn’t about “gay cowboys” per se, but about the all-too-common feeling that life would be better if it weren’t for work, or social pressure, or family obligations, or whatever. In a way, not being together works better for these two men, because it allows them to dream of what might be. Reality would wreck the idyll.
Opens Dec. 30 at Green Hills 16.
—Noel Murray
Since Saving Private Ryan, Steven Spielberg’s movies have been haunted by the idea of necessary evil—as implicitly as the security-nightmare hassles of Minority Report and The Terminal, as explicitly as Tom Cruise’s life-or-death encounter with the isolationist cellar-dweller in War of the Worlds. He gives the idea his most forceful treatment yet in Munich, his thriller about the coordinated Israeli counterstrike after the Black September massacre in 1972. Already Spielberg has drawn fire from both liberals and neo-cons: either he has soft-pedaled the severity of Israel’s retaliation, or he hasn’t made the Palestinian conspirators mustache-twirling supervillains.
That’s the price a filmmaker pays when he doesn’t back down from ambiguity—from considering, with equal weight, the necessity as well as the evil. Munich sets the world stage in a brilliantly edited opening that depicts the attack on the ’72 Munich Olympics from every angle. We see the gung-ho Palestinian conspirators, who treat the startled Israeli athletes as if they were livestock; the inept police; the stunned ABC sports commentators reporting from the scene. Cutting from hostage quarters to live TV to the instant reception in the Middle East, Spielberg immediately casts the tragedy in human and global terms, which will have to be answered in kind.
The bulk of Munich concerns a Mossad agent (Eric Bana, whose ability to look both soulful and unstoppable is put to good use) who leads an off-the-books hit squad to take out, one by one, every Palestinian responsible for the Olympic murders. Instead of three acts and one clear villain, Spielberg and screenwriters Tony Kushner and Eric Roth create a looped paranoid nightmare that rewinds after every killing. Although Spielberg stages the assassinations with icy virtuosity, varying the settings, methods and light, the differences are ultimately minor: pick one off and get the next name. The targets seem agreeable in person, as fanatics might outside the context of their fanaticism.
As the assignment drags on, the hit squad itself falls into a moral no-man’s-land, cut off from their homeland, stranded in a supposedly neutral Europe partitioned by shady allegiances. The suggestion that they might feel some doubt seems to infuriate Spielberg’s neo-con critics, as if it were beyond reason to question whether retaliation, even justified, comes at a cost to the soul—or worse, only triggers more violence.
But the movie’s called Munich, not The Six-Day War: it’s about the futile consequences of an act of Palestinian terrorism, and it traces the bloodshed that follows on both sides. Spielberg’s film has flaws commensurate with its ambition: the climactic montage showing the murders of the Olympic hostages comes off overwrought instead of devastating, and supporting characters like Geoffrey Rush’s Israeli hardliner and Michel Lonsdale’s Corleone-esque information peddler remain mostly devices.
Even so, is there another American filmmaker of Spielberg’s gifts working at this scope and engagement with the times—let alone at this two-movies-a-year pace? Like War of the Worlds, Munich is an exorcism of shared trauma, confusion and powerlessness. And both movies, while deeply conflicted about retaliation, are clear about the need for response to enemies who will not be placated. Especially those who don’t believe in necessary evil—just necessity.
Opens Friday at area theaters.
—Jim Ridley
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