Word: avner
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...Minister Golda Meir's full endorsement, mounted a secret war of revenge against the murderers. In one of the movie's most crucial lines, she says, "Every civilization finds it necessary to negotiate compromises with its own values." That negotiation--also carried out in the increasingly troubled mind of Avner Kauffman, leader of the Israeli hit squad on which the movie concentrates (there were several)--raises Spielberg's film above the thriller level, granting it real, often poignant, distinction...
...close range that is excruciating," says Spielberg. "Perhaps [your victims] are leading double lives. But they are, many of them, reasonable and civilized too." Killing them, he says, has unintended consequences. "It's bound to try a man's soul, so it was very important to me to show Avner struggling to keep his soul intact." (The moviemakers would not reveal the identity of the real Avner, whom they talked to at length during their research. In Spielberg's opinion, though, his soul was tried too much. "I don't think he will ever find peace...
There is an entirely fictional scene in the movie in which Avner and his Palestinian opposite number meet and talk calmly, with the latter getting a chance to make his case for the creation of a homeland for his people. That scene means everything to Kushner and Spielberg. "The only thing that's going to solve this is rational minds, a lot of sitting down and talking until you're blue in the gills," says Spielberg. Without that exchange, "I would have been making a Charles Bronson movie--good guys vs. bad guys and Jews killing Arabs without any context...
...provide the pictures," Spielberg remembers saying. "It was a lot of e-mails and arguments on the phone," Kushner says, "and an exciting amount of give and take. I think we really affected one another politically and emotionally." Another challenge was to create a sense of identification with Avner and his team. Avner, in particular, is a man not very in touch with his inner life. "I always felt like the character was trying to convince himself of an ideal without necessarily coming to terms with what the ideal was," says Bana. The whole team, says Kennedy, is five...
...stand-ins), and it is full of derring-do and suspense. (Best such sequence: a child innocently answers a call on an explosive-laden phone meant to blow her father to kingdom come.) At more than 2 1/2 hours, Munich allows itself time to efficiently develop character, particularly among Avner's team, which is run--mostly from afar--by Geoffrey Rush's hard-assed executive spook. The assassins include a hot-blooded South African hit man played by Daniel Craig, who is the next James Bond; Ciaran Hinds as his opposite, a meticulous cleanup artist; Mathieu Kassovitz as a toymaker...