Spielberg
101
Steven Spielberg, who has made some of history's
most financially successful films, is an Eagle Scout who lives in a home filled
with movie props and Norman Rockwell paintings. But just as Rockwell frequently
cloaked tremendous nuance and unexpected pathos in his images of Americana,
Spielberg has only rarely been solely a commercial filmmaker. Since The
Color Purple
in 1985, Spielberg has alternated between the genre films that made his name
and fortune, and artistically ambitious dramatic fare. But the craftsmanship at
the fore of his most action-oriented efforts serves him well in films like Schindler's
List and Saving
Private Ryan,
and, from the beginning, there's always been considerable art in his most
crowd-pleasing efforts. He's an artist who sees no contradiction in giving
audiences what they want. Sometimes he knows what that is before they do.
Spielberg already had a reputation as a hotshot
when he agreed to helm an adaptation of Peter Benchley's man-against-nature
novel Jaws,
but reports from the set indicated that he was in over his head, saddled with a
mechanical shark that wouldn't work and a veteran crew that thought he was just
some punk kid. Somehow, Spielberg held the production together, and delivered a
movie that honored the traditions of classic Hollywood filmmaking—from
the Howard Hawks-style "men on an adventure" conversations to the suspense
beats cribbed from Alfred Hitchcock—while adding the sex, gore, profanity
and docu-realist Americana that his fellow film-school brats had been riding to
success. The result was a massive hit that's often cited as the first summer
blockbuster, even though very little about Jaws would mark it as
crowd-pleaser in today's blockbuster market. The movie is deliberately paced
and extremely talky, with a fairly bleak ending that speaks to one of
Spielberg's recurring themes—that when men try to control something
uncontrollable, they leave an ungodly mess. Jaws is a hit film with a
beating heart.
Flush with the success of Jaws, Spielberg reportedly
turned down offers to direct slam-dunks like Jaws 2 and Superman in order to make the
odder and more personal Close Encounters Of The Third Kind. Though ostensibly a
movie about space aliens making contact with Earth, Close Encounters is also about
post-Watergate paranoia, suburban anxiety, and—again—how humans
greet the unknown by drafting untenable plans. While channeling Hawks and
Hitchcock once more, Spielberg also nodded to Stanley Kubrick by inserting
creepy, mysterious images without immediately explaining what they meant. (The
generation of filmmakers and TV writers who grew up with Close Encounters would go on to create
shows like The X-Files and Lost, where the goal has been to creep viewers out
first, and fill in the blanks later.) Close Encounters is an unusual film with a
sprawling narrative and a problematic hero: Richard Dreyfuss, a family man all
too eager to ditch his wife and kids in order to go on a flying-saucer ride.
Spielberg now says that as a father and husband, he doesn't understand
Dreyfuss' choice, and that if he made the movie today, he would probably change
that part of the story. But the Spielberg of 1977 knew what he was doing,
asking an audience overwhelmed with late-'70s malaise to invest in a character
as restless and dissatisfied as they were.
Where Jaws and Close Encounters found Spielberg
redefining what genre films would look like from there on, he settled for
homage with his next film. With Raiders Of The Lost Ark, a joint venture with
producer George Lucas, Spielberg sought to do for classic adventure serials
what Lucas' Star Wars had done for Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon, updating the
material he liked as a boy, and repackaging it for the blockbuster age. But Raiders is an act of homage that
doubles as one-upmanship. The adventure is bigger, the villains nastier, the
hero more heroic (with a healthy dash of cynicism to keep him up to date), and,
most importantly, the action more impressive. And believable. From the moment
we first see Harrison Ford's Indiana Jones running from a rolling boulder, it's
clear this world runs on real, however oversized, physics. As elsewhere, the
believability helped sell the fantasy. A pair of sequels–one lousy, the other pleasant but lesser–followed throughout the decade. Spielberg and Lucas revived the franchise in 2008.
Released in the summer of 1982, E.T.: The
Extra Terrestrial
seemed an odd candidate to become the most successful film of all time—a
title it held until 1997. Rooted in the raw material of an American suburbia
increasingly filled with broken homes, it focused on a family united by a lost
alien, which wasn't exactly a rip-roaring quest for the Ark Of The Covenant.
(And, in the looks department, E.T. wasn't exactly Harrison Ford.) But by
drawing on his experience as a child of divorce and balancing whimsy with
slow-mounting paranoia, Spielberg built a spiritual fable that, like E.T.'s
method of phoning home, found ways to broadcast meaning using cobbled-together
elements of contemporary American culture. Immediately overexposed by a
merchandising bonanza that included everything from toys to pajamas to a
spectacularly bad Atari game, E.T. found its sweetness overwhelmed by the tackiness
around it. But the tackiness has long since dimmed—in part thanks to
Spielberg's repeated refusal to indulge in a sequel—and the film now
looks like a timeless call for acceptance and transcendence sent from a time
and place that's faded into history.
After E.T., Spielberg embarked on a shaky decade of
prestige projects and half-realized adventure films, some of which have their
merits, but none of which caught the imagination of the public the way his work
from 1975 to 1982 did. He started to right the ship of his career in 1993, when
he tackled Michael Crichton's bestseller Jurassic Park. Making his first
extensive use of CGI, Spielberg delivered an amusement-park attraction every
bit as thrilling and savage as the one in the movie. Yet in some ways, Jurassic
Park has
a lot in common with the shaggier early Spielberg blockbusters. The film has a
grandiose buildup, filled with science, philosophy, and teasing glimpses of
what's to come. Then the monsters arrive, set loose by a series of errors made
by arrogant scientists and ideologues. Spielberg returned to Jurassic Park four years later for The
Lost World,
and this time brought the dinosaurs to the mainland for a grand finale that
revisits the car-smashing and suburban subversion of early films like The
Sugarland Express
and Close Encounters. But the heroes and villains of The Lost World are a weaker breed, and
hardly seem worth terrorizing. When the beasts are finally unleashed, it's like
watching the Olympic Dream Team beat up on Greece. If ever Spielberg needs
another metaphor for powerful men tampering with a good thing, the making of The
Lost World
would be a fine subject.
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Intermediate
The same year that Spielberg released Jurassic
Park, he
made what's arguably his most successful prestige picture, in terms of box
office, awards, and enduring value. And yet Schindler's List has been Spielberg's most
controversial film, too, with some cultural commentators complaining about the
way the director glorifies a non-Jew who saved a handful of people from the
Holocaust, rather than providing a proper memorial to the millions who died.
(Not to mention the occasional applications of the "Spielberg touch," from the
mystical shafts of light to the sentimental John Williams score.) Given the
unlikelihood of pleasing everybody, all a filmmaker can do is tell the story he
wants to tell, and do it with sincerity and artistry. With Schindler's List, Spielberg made a
well-crafted, accessible film about a tough subject, and didn't spare the
brutality. He combined a meticulous documentation of the horrors of the
Holocaust with a nuanced study of two thorny characters: Liam Neeson's
morally hazy munitions-plant owner and Ralph Fiennes'
crude, middle-managerial Nazi commandant. These are two men caught up in a
combine, with one trying to use the system for good, and the other just
following orders. In the oft-mocked scene where Neeson breaks down and realizes
"I could've done more," Spielberg gives his hero a slight comeuppance, lest
Schindler be the one character in a Spielberg film who makes a plan that
succeeds without a hitch.
The justly famous opening sequence of Spielberg's
1998 World War II film Saving Private Ryan makes the violence in his
Indiana Jones films look like play. Following American troops as they descend
on D-Day Normandy, it focuses on realities of whizzing bullets and the gore
they produce. As soldier after soldier gets cut down, the scene provides, insofar
as a movie can, a jolting depiction of the grim realities of war and the sheer
scale of carnage involved when two countries meet in battle. What follows is,
in many respects, just as unsparing. Sent to find the last survivor of four American
brothers fighting in the war, Tom Hanks' quiet Captain Miller and a hastily
assembled squad embark on what's essentially a glorified PR exercise, a search
that ultimately concludes in the hard knowledge that it's sometimes impossible
to do good when doing what's right.
After beginning the '90s in semi-disrepute and
ending it in triumph, Spielberg rolled into the '00s with a new level of
maturity and attendant respect. Critics who might have dismissed him as a
panderer a decade ago were now hailing him as maybe the most important American
filmmaker of his era; suddenly even Spielberg's big summer action movies had
more heft and depth. Minority Report playfully riffs on
science fiction and film noir, using a Philip K. Dick story as a jumping-off
point for an examination of the human impulse to ignore questions of free will
and case-by-case reasoning, in the drive to make law and order more efficient
and uniform. But what makes Minority Report such a treat—besides
Tom Cruise's dynamic performance as a melancholy cop who gets framed for a
murder he hasn't committed yet—is the way Spielberg returns to the "what
the hell" weirdness of Close Encounters, throwing in all manner of strange
futuristic devices and darkly comic setpieces. The movie ends with a 21st-century
approximation of a detective-story drawing-room scene (followed by a too-pat
concluding narration that's best ignored) and a clear indication that following
the previous year's A.I., Spielberg was in a new, exploratory mode.
Catch Me If You Can followed later that year,
plunging Spielberg into the recent past instead of the near future. Con artist
Frank Abagnale Jr. was an unusual protagonist for Spielberg, who has generally
preferred to focus on everymen thrust into extraordinary situations. Following
a character who successfully posed as an attorney, airline pilot, and doctor in
the 1960s, Catch Me If You Can reverses the formula, leaving Tom Hanks' FBI
agent with the task of ending DiCaprio's career as a rogue, a quest that's
ultimately becomes less about preserving law and order than about bringing a
stray sheep back into the fold. Abagnale, played by Leonardo DiCaprio with a
disarming mix of confidence and vulnerability, is one of a long tradition of
Spielberg lost boys—even Indiana Jones was eventually revealed as a man
with serious abandonment issues—damaged by a disintegrating family and
adrift in a dangerous world he's learned to master only by deception and
disguise. The film initially chugs along on frothy moments that capture the joy
of being young, handsome, and responsibility-free, but there's a serious
exploration of spiritual malaise at the center.
So, too, for all the stomping alien ships and
lasers, with Spielberg's 2005 adaptation of War Of The Worlds. Miscast, but not bad, as
a working-class divorced dad, Tom Cruise escorts his family through the
devastation of an America in the midst of a cataclysmic alien attack. The 9/11
overtones are unmistakable, but no less effective for their obviousness, and
the film becomes a disturbing reflection of a nation that's learned to fear.
Making chaos out of mundane surroundings, the film explores how nobility and
generosity become the first casualty of fear, as the fleeing earthlings prey
upon each other in their attempts to survive. Social structures crumble nearly
as quickly as the roads and buildings that gave them form, and for a good
section of the movie—which, like a lot of latter-day Spielberg films, has
trouble seeing its vision through to the end—there's serious doubt
whether there will be anything worth saving at the end of it all, and whether
those left will still have their humanity intact.
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Advanced
After a few years on the TV beat in the early '70s,
Spielberg got his first crack at a major motion picture in 1974 with The
Sugarland Express,
a modest entry in the post-Bonnie And Clyde "hicks on the lam" movie
boom. Goldie Hawn and William Atherton play married ex-convicts who kidnap
Texas patrolman Michael Sacks while on the way to retrieve their baby from
foster care. As with Jaws and Close Encounters, Sugarland nicely utilizes flavorful
overlapping dialogue, pop-culture references, and soft lighting. And while it's
Spielberg's least Spielberg-y film, he does show off some visual chops by
framing scenes through auto glass and in rearview mirrors, so as to create
practical split-screens and practical superimpositions. And in the film's most
memorable image, a line of cars hangs behind the anti-heroes, stopping when
they stop and turning when they turn. It's a potent visual representation of
how problems pile up, as well as a hint of the force Spielberg himself was
prepared to unleash.
Spielberg's 1987 adaptation of J.G. Ballard's
autobiography-rooted novel Empire Of The Sun puzzled some critics and
left audiences shrugging. While it features a loveable kid as a protagonist (a
young, but already intense, Christian Bale), it remains one of Spielberg's least
instantly inviting films. It's also one of his most rewarding. Bale's character
(like Ballard) finds his life as a British child of privilege in Shanghai
interrupted by the Japanese occupation during World War II. Separated from his
parents (unlike Ballard), he spends the war fending for himself in an internment
camp, finding a reluctant, and sometimes dangerous, surrogate father in
resident schemer John Malkovich, and dreaming of flying away on one of the
planes that regularly take to the sky from a nearby base, sometimes on kamikaze
missions. The film never shies away from the grimness and, later, apocalyptic
possibilities of war, which constantly do battle with its hero's resilience and
hard-battered youthful optimism. Substituting episodic lyricism for forward
momentum, Empire plays
out the Spielbergian drama of growing up at half the speed and twice the
intensity, inching toward childhood's end along a path of dirt, death, and
disappointment.
And what of a childhood that can't end? With A.I.:
Artificial Intelligence, Spielberg took over a project long-planned by his friend Stanley
Kubrick, the story of a robotic child named David (Haley Joel Osment) cast
loose by his human family and left to search the world in an attempt to become
a real boy. Fixated on the story of Pinocchio (a Spielberg favorite), David has
his own Jiminy Cricket in the form of a robotic teddy bear named Teddy, whose
practical observations seem at odds with his cuteness, and whose suggestions
betray a not-quite-full grasp of the world around him. Like David, he's an
amazing machine with evident programming flaws. But does that make him less
than the humans who made him? And what divides humanity from this uncanny
simulation, anyway? The film asks, and rephrases, these questions with each
vignette, never quite coming up with the same answer twice, and seldom finding
comfort in the answers it does find. Maybe that's why it left audiences so
divided—particularly its ending.
Spielberg's difficulty with endings has become
more pronounced in recent years, sometimes leading viewers to expect problems
that aren't there. The knock against A.I. is that it reaches a natural conclusion,
then tacks on a happy ending in a final scene set two millennia beyond the time
frame of the rest of the film. Here, humanity's robotic successors discover and
revive David, long-frozen in front of a Blue Fairy statue at Coney Island,
having shut down after centuries of wishing to become a real boy. It's the
happy ending in which David, transported to a simulation of his boyhood home,
chooses to spend one last day with the long-dead mother who never loved him the
way he needed to be loved. Then, to all appearances, he shuts down forever, the
smile on his face brought about by an illusion he helped create. In a nod to E.T., the moon shines on
approvingly as he makes his decision. But it isn't a real moon.
If A.I. is Spielberg's trickiest film, 2005's Munich is his most punishing,
and for that, it struggled both at the box office and with a lot of
critics—though it was a surprise Best Picture nominee. Beginning with
the kidnapping and murder of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, Munich presents itself as a kind
of commando procedural, as Eric Bana leads a team of experts to ferret out and
assassinate those responsible for the Olympic mission. As the mission winds on,
the team gets sidetracked by new orders from above, as well as their own
inability to stay on task. Roughly two hours into an almost three-hour movie,
Bana and the audience begin to realize that they've entered one of Zeno's
paradoxes, and that somehow they'll end up further away from their goal the
more they try to move toward it. Viewers at the time may have been expecting
something more jingoistic for the Terror Age, especially coming from a man
who'd been making his Jewish heritage paramount. Instead, Munich is a cautionary tale
about how revenge tends to be messy and unsatisfying. And speaking of messy and
unsatisfying: Spielberg didn't do his film any favors with an awkward scene
that has Bana reaching a tearful climax in bed while thinking back on the
violence that's already occurred. But scenes like that are also a rebuke to
those who consider Spielberg's films soulless and mechanical. A soulless
filmmaker wouldn't take the kind of chances Spielberg does on scenes—and
even endings—that
ring so strangely.
Demerits
At Spielberg's lowest ebb as a director, he helmed
two fairly unredeemable films—1989's Always and 1991's Hook—that are
interesting primarily for the way they show him struggling to deal with
grown-up themes and emotions through the prism of fantasy. In Always, he covers falling in
love and saying goodbye to the dead by couching those feelings in a corny
remake of the 1943 romantic comedy A Guy Named Joe, complete with ghosts and
heavenly emissaries. Hook, on the other hand, is all about parental
responsibilities and growing up, and contains one of Spielberg's most painfully
personal sequences in its opening five minutes, when a grown-up Peter Pan
(played with maximum drippiness by Robin Williams) stresses out over what his children
expect of him. Spielberg quickly steps back from the psychologically thorny
stuff of Hook's
overture in favor of manic adventures in a cheap-looking Neverland, and
appearances by a Julia Roberts Tinkerbell spouting inner-child pap like "Be the
Pan you are!" Spielberg has said that he views Hook as his farewell to
squishy family movies. Apparently, he was done with them before he even started
filming.
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Flawed
But Fascinating
For 1941, his first World War II-themed
feature, Spielberg had a script from two simpatico pals—Bob Gale and
Robert Zemeckis, who'd already made the terrific, underseen,
Spielberg-produced, Zemeckis-directed comedy I Wanna Hold Your Hand, and would go on to make Used
Cars and Back
To The Future—and
a cast that included everyone from Saturday Night Live stars to Akira Kurosawa favorite
Toshiro Mifune. The premise isn't bad either: The film watches chaos unfold as
the West Coast prepares for a Japanese invasion. As a contraption, it's
fascinating to watch. Spielberg choreographs every movement in the madness, and
the cast gives it their all. Big problem: It's not funny. Not one tiny bit.
Steven Spielberg made his first fumbling attempt
at grown-up movies with his 1985 adaptation of Alice Walker's The Color
Purple—a
box-office hit that drew plenty of objections from critics, many of them with good
reason. Walker's book is told from the perspective of an abused, neglected,
underage, black farmer's wife in the early 20th century, and Spielberg's
decision to understand her plight as one of "yearning for escape" cheapens the
character, making her just another E.T. (or suburban white kid). Worse,
Spielberg's specific sensibilities remained rooted in the color and clamor of
old Hollywood, and given a choice between entertaining the audience and rubbing
its faces in dirt, he was still inclined to go for the polish. So he ended up
giving the slapstick choreography of The Color Purple's juke-joint brawls and
marital disagreements more play than the book's carnal sexuality and intense
emotional cruelty. On the other hand, Spielberg's crowd-pleasing sense of
rhythm and eye-catching visual style—heavy on shafts of light, purposeful
shadows, and Hitchcockian forced perspectives—makes The Color Purple engaging and even moving.
Toward the end, Spielberg tramples too quickly to get to the scenes of
redemption and sunny days, but he does find time to introduce the spiky themes
that rest under the sweet candy of his '80s work, by exploring the gaps between
the expectations of parents and children, and the decay of social order. More
than any of Spielberg's other early features, The Color Purple dramatizes how arrogance
and self-interest blinds people to their careless treatment of others.
When Amistad, Spielberg's beautifully
presented true-life story of a slave-ship mutiny and the trial that sided with
the mutineers flashes back to show the desperate actions of abused slaves
trying to escape their miserable conditions, it's as thrilling of a 10-minute
stretch as Spielberg has shot. The rest, however, plays out like the sort of
static courtroom drama he was never meant to make, right down to the too-easy
conclusions. As his sensibility continued to darken, the happy face Amistad puts on history felt too
forced.
After Spielberg took two years off following the
masterful one-two of Minority Report and Catch Me If You Can, fans expected more from
the fanciful 2004 romantic comedy The Terminal than the movie was able to
give. From Tom Hanks' thick Eastern European accent to the trumped-up, lightly
absurdist account of his character's nine-month attempt to clear up his
paperwork and leave the airport, The Terminal takes a true story about
the fluidity of borders and turns it into a pat "little guy against the system"
fable. And yet, on its own terms, The Terminal is charming, reminiscent
of the sophisticated screwball comedy of Preston Sturges and Ernst Lubitsch—neither
of whom always cared whether their movies stayed rooted in reality. And the
airport terminal set, inspired by Jacques Tati's masterpiece Playtime, is a thing of infinite
wonder and beauty. Spielberg plays with the multiple frames allowed by
split-levels, storefronts, and security monitors, and subtly plays out a lot of
his pet themes: the desire to peek behind curtains, the importance of
individual dignity, and the way humans create social systems that bind us more
than we intend.
Misc.
Not much of Spielberg's early TV work is available
on DVD, aside from a couple of episodes of Night Gallery, one episode of Columbo, and the TV movie Duel. (Missing: Two more TV
movies, and a handful of episodes of the likes of Marcus Welby M.D. and Owen Marshall:
Counselor At Law.
Universal owns all of these… surely a complete box set of Spielberg's early
work would be a good business decision, yes?) But even those few readily
available samples provide evidence of a clever filmmaker, emphasizing master
shots over close-ups in order to create a sense of scope on a low budget, and
already developing his career-long fascination with humanity's excessive and
frequently misbegotten attempts to impose systems on the organic. In Night
Gallery's "Eyes,"
for example, Joan Crawford plays a bitchy blind socialite who inadvertently
wastes her ocular transplant, while in "Murder By The Book," the first regular episode
of Columbo
(and what Spielberg described as "the best script that anybody had ever given
me"), Peter Falk's dogged detective picks at mystery writer Jack Cassidy until
his perfect crime unravels.
"Murder By The Book" also presages the tautness
and visual wit of Duel, a slim Richard Matheson story that Spielberg
padded into a 90-minute feature by artfully assembling a string of insert
shots. Dennis Weaver plays a harried businessman who passes a tanker truck in
the California desert and soon finds that same truck mercilessly riding his
bumper. On the DVD, Spielberg explains that he considered Duel an experiment in
pressuring an audience, keeping us hooked for as long as possible with a
minimum of plot and character. But he also squeezes a lot out of Weaver's
general discomfort as a civilized guy out of his element, unsure how to relate
to working-class types, and gradually becoming more and more of a prick about
it.
In the mid-'80s, Spielberg became interested in
returning to TV, first by making a big-screen version of Rod Serling's The
Twilight Zone
with a few of his director buddies, and then by landing two seasons of the
anthology series Amazing Stories on NBC. Spielberg's contributions to The
Twilight Zone
and Amazing Stories come from the heart of his twinkly, cutesy phase, when he was
all about stock Hollywood archetypes and quaint magical realism, so they're kind
of hard to watch. But even more significant than Spielberg's own work is the
opportunities he gave to friends and protégées like Joe Dante and Robert
Zemeckis. Spielberg has shown less interest than he used to in being a
producer, but he's nurtured the careers of several filmmakers (including his
recurring star Tom Hanks), and has remained one of the more socially connected
directors in Hollywood, staying friends (and occasional partners) with his old
pals Martin Scorsese, Brian De Palma, and George Lucas, while also cozying up
to new-breed blockbuster filmmakers like Peter Jackson.
The Top 5
1. E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial
We
all hope there's something out there bigger than our fears. Spielberg
visualized that something more as a wrinkled, endlessly benevolent monster from
space.
2. Close Encounters Of The Third Kind
Or
maybe the search for transcendence matters more than the finding of it, as in
this earlier film that used UFO culture to house a quest for something beyond
the mundane.
3. Raiders Of The Lost Ark
Looking
for God, or at least an artifact of the divine, plays a central role in the
first Indiana Jones adventure, too, but it never gets in the way of the pure
entertainment of one amazingly realized action setpiece after another.
4. Schindler's List
Spielberg
began to grapple with history in earnest with a true-life tale of a man who,
after living with no particularly strong moral convictions, saved more than a
thousand Jews from Nazi concentration camps. The hope comes in spite of a
portrayal of the Holocaust that's unsettlingly graphic, and in Ralph Fiennes' character,
a portrait of evil rooted in commonplace selfishness.
5. Empire Of The Sun
From the start, Spielberg knew how to tell stories
with images. This is the film in which he learned that images could sometimes
be stories in themselves.