Dad movies, at least among those who aren’t actual dads, tend to be undervalued pleasures; they pluck a certain satisfying, resonant chord, often without being particularly flashy. Munich: The Edge of War, directed by Christian Schwochow and adapted from Robert Harris’ 2017 novel, is the ultimate dad movie: its setting is the 1938 Munich conference in which European leaders met with Hitler in an earnest, if naive, attempt to stave off war. That part really happened. The more intimate story Munich weaves around that event—involving two young men, one German and one English, who attempt a risky plot to stop Hitler—is largely fiction. Yet the made-up narrative melts seamlessly into the historical one. If the movie is handsome in an oak-paneled-office way, there’s life in it too. You feel there’s something at stake for the two young would-be heroes, as there is for the world.
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Munich opens in 1932, at a champagne-fueled Oxford University garden party. Three friends gambol drunkenly on the lawn, noisy in their adamant youthfulness. One of them, whose slight accent marks him as someone-not-from-England, expresses his excitement about going home to what he calls the new Germany. His girlfriend, also German, protests that it’s a nation “of thugs and racists.” Their mini-argument ends with a flurry of sozzled kisses, but you know there’s trouble in this paradise. The third friend, who is English, teases them with amused annoyance, though he’s unsure of what to make of his best friend’s belligerent devotion to the fatherland. He also, it seems, likes the girl.
Fast-forward six years, and the young Englishman, Hugh (George MacKay, putting his scrubbed-clean innocence to good use), is a husband and father stuck in a demanding job as a secretary to Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain (Jeremy Irons,…
Source : time
