The directors of Spielberg's generation who came up in the late '60s and early '70s, many of them film-school-trained, were the first in America to push their encyclopedic passion for movies right into the forefront of their work. Their rebellion against Old Hollywood was essentially a pose, since directors like John Ford, Howard Hawks and Frank Capra were mainstays of their mindscapes. Old movies functioned for these filmmakers as primary experiences -- touchstones of inspiration -- in the same way that poetry or literature might have functioned for an earlier generation of artists.
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Spielberg, however, came from a somewhat different place. He never officially attended a major film school. His heroes were the big-picture guys like David Lean and Stanley Kubrick or versatile old studio hands like Michael Curtiz and Victor Fleming -- directors who could be counted on to deliver reliable commercial entertainment (and sometimes more than that). While many of his '70s confederates, who also were to include such directors as Terrence Malick, Jonathan Demme and Philip Kaufman, were attempting to work outside the industry, or subvert it from within through sheer force of artistry, Spielberg was directing episodes of "Night Gallery" and "Marcus Welby, M.D." and then moving on to sharks and flying saucers.*****
The career trajectory of Hollywood directors before the '70s typically followed the winding path from unpretentious to "prestigious" (i.e., Oscar-worthy). Take, for example, George Stevens, who went from "Alice Adams," "Swing Time," "Gunga Din" and "The More the Merrier" to "A Place in the Sun," "Giant," "The Diary of Anne Frank" and "The Greatest Story Ever Told." Most of the '70s directors did their best to avoid this syndrome or at least held out for as long as they could. Coppola's "Apocalypse Now," a deranged movie about a deranged war, could never have been mistaken for a respectable war epic. Scorsese's biblical movie was "The Last Temptation of Christ."But Spielberg, being the most attuned of his generation to the mojo of Hollywood, was naturally the director who most wholeheartedly fell into the prestige trap. Whatever their merits, and in some cases they are considerable, films such as "The Color Purple," "Empire of the Sun," "Schindler's List," "Amistad," "Saving Private Ryan" and "Munich" are all deeply conventional in terms of how the world is comprehended. Some of these films may be better made, or, in the case of "Schindler's List," more richly felt than their Old Hollywood counterparts. But all are afflicted with a kind of transcendent Stanley Kramerism. We are made to understand that moral lessons are being imparted and that, in the end, tomorrow will somehow be a better day.
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FOR A director of conscience who can make his camera do anything, the realization that he has it in him to inspire absolute dread must be supremely unsettling. (I'm not thinking of "Jaws," which was comic-book dread.) What surely must prey upon Spielberg as he gets older are not the bliss-outs he is uniquely capable of creating but the horrors. The Normandy Beach landing in "Saving Private Ryan" goes way beyond the usual technical exercise; it's a fury against the flesh. In "Minority Report," Tom Cruise's John Anderton, the chief of the Department of Pre-Crime in the District of Columbia, stands before a floating computer interface and, arms waving like an impresario, whisks around its midair crime scene visuals. It's a nightmare representation of the director as puppet master, and it comes with a kicker: Anderton, whose mind is a mausoleum of horrific images, is himself a murderer-to-be.The filmmakers of Spielberg's generation wanted to take over Hollywood and change the face of an art form. And for a brief period, until the blockbuster syndrome kicked in in the mid-'70s, they did just that. Along with Lucas, Spielberg is often blamed for shutting down the renaissance, as if without "Jaws" and "Star Wars" it never would have occurred to anybody in Hollywood to come up with high concepts and saturation marketing. "I hate Spielberg," a young filmmaker told me at a movie festival recently when he heard I was going to be writing about him. "He killed the indie film." And then he added, "But I loved 'Jaws.' "
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This doesn't mean Spielberg gets a free pass. Some of the cottages in his cottage industry have all the allure of McMansions. He has yet to make a movie that revels in the commonplace; for him, the ordinary is always (yawn) a springboard to magic. He has never made a movie with more than a trace of carnality. His world view is cut-rate Manichean -- darks and lights and not much gray in between. It's a pity he shelved his plans to make a movie about his childhood idol, Charles Lindbergh, the all-American aviator and Fascist sympathizer. Now there's a character who would have put Spielberg to the test. Instead, he's gearing up to make "Lincoln" with Liam Neeson, which sounds like a snooze. And "Jurassic 4" is on the radar.Spielberg is still the teacher's pet of his class, but the difference is that now he owns the schoolhouse. Maybe for a while he should try being a truant.
I don't think Rainer gives Jaws or Close Encounters of the Third Kind enough credit, discounting them as comic book fantasy. I don't think that's fair or accurate; Jaws is a great horror story cast in the mold of a Corman film, but it reaches beyond that genre mold as a criticism of capitalism and the struggle of one man's conscience against forces of nature, both human and aquatic. Close Encounters, on the other hand, is really a religious film with science fiction symbols. Rainer's argument that the aliens are benign from the opening is not true; view the home invasion when the extraterrestrials kidnap a young boy. It is among the scariest scenes in any Spielberg film ever. The film is about faith and uses religious references (lights in the sky, visions, climbing a mountain to have communion with the gods) to tell a story of revelation just as Scorsese used these kinds of references in films like Raging Bull to communicate themes of sin and redemption.
Rainer's lament that Spielberg has never dealt with the commonplace is a silly but often floated argument against both the filmmaker and against the science fiction and fantasy genres. If one thing has marked Spielberg's entertainment, not to mention his most successful proteges like Robert Zemeckis and Peter Jackson, it is the ability to place the personal into the fantasy. I've already made the case for Jaws and Close Encounters. Indiana Jones reconciles with the father that was never in his life and Jurassic Park takes on the perils and responsibilities of technology. Minority Report and War of the Worlds are about our post-9/11 world and place issues like broken families and distrust of social institutions against an action-adventure background. It is significant to mention that nearly all of the 9/11 and post-9/11 narrative films have been unsuccessful at the box office, even some that were quite excellent like United 93, but both of Spielberg's films were big hits. And there are plenty of reasons for that (star power, Spielberg's name recognition, etc.) but the fact remains that the films that nestled difficult subject matter within supposedly escapist fare were best received by audiences.
It's true that Spielberg often puts entertainment before substance, the Indiana Jones films being the primary examples. And his filmography is certainly not perfect; consider The Lost World. But a creative writing instructor once told me, quite wisely, that a storyteller's first obligation is to be entertaining. An entertaining story with no substance will keep an audience's attention although it will be disposable. A substantive story with no entertainment value will reach no one. A great story, whether it's about a giant shark or a Greek myth, will both entertain us while telling us something true and substantive about the world. And just because a story is optimistic doesn't make it shallow. Optimism is not to be shunned if it's authentic, and Spielberg's films are box office successes partly because audiences respond to that optimism.
As it is, Spielberg has won two Best Director Oscars and made many of the most popular and successful films of all time, so he probably doesn't need to sweat what the bloggers and the critics and the columnists think. While some critics will hound his work to the end either because he's just too damn optimistic or because he's made too much money, I would liken Spielberg's legacy to John Ford or Frank Capra. Both made some great films that were widely entertaining and had substance to them.
Could Spielberg do something more challenging or extremely dark and depressing? Probably. And Salvador Dali could have painted a vase or a bowl of grapes. But that's not what marked Dali's work and to complain that Spielberg's films do not mirror the tone or point of view of Coppola's or Scorsese's work is a ridiculous condition.
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