Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is somewhat notorious as a belated and unfortunate entry in Steven Spielberg's long-running adventure series. It lives up, or down, to that reputation in many ways, but it's not entirely the dismal failure it's said to be; it's deeply flawed but also strangely fascinating. The opening of the film establishes this fourth Indiana Jones movie, which is set in the late 50s, as a representation of the destruction of American innocence in the crucible of World War II: the Holocaust, the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan, as well as the Cold War and the McCarthyite anti-Red fever that developed in the aftermath of WWII. The previous three films were all set before the end of the war, and even if the Nazis were often Indy's enemies, the films still seemed very distant from the grisliest realities of the war. In The Last Crusade, Hitler himself appeared as almost a comic figure, in an absurdly hilarious cameo. Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, on the other hand, opens with Soviet spies, disguised as American soldiers, coolly gunning down the military guards at a desert installation.

From there, Indy, after escaping from the Communists, stumbles into a fake town in the middle of the desert, full of plastic people, with Howdy Doody on the TV, all of it ready to be blown away in a nuclear bomb test. Indy survives the bomb in a lead-lined refrigerator — one of many groan-inducing moments in this over-the-top opening sequence — then stumbles out into a wasteland with the distinctive mushroom-shaped cloud of the atomic bomb drifting up from the horizon, the sky turning red as Indy's distinctive silhouette is framed against this apocalyptic backdrop. It's a deliberate subversion of Indy's image, jamming the spirited adventure and pulpy thrills of the Indy serial against the real-world horrors of the atomic age that he's suddenly been thrust into. (This remains true even though the jaw-droppingly stupid refrigerator gag basically turns the whole thing into a cheap joke just moments before that harrowing mushroom cloud image.)

Perhaps that's why the tone of these opening scenes is so all-over-the-place. It's an attempt to integrate the pulp hero into Cold War nuclear age hysteria, but as such attempts go, it's no Kiss Me Deadly. Instead, Spielberg and producer/writer George Lucas vacillate back and forth from cutesy farce, to the near-slapstick kinetic action that the Indy serial is known for, to moments of seriousness like that beautifully apocalyptic image of Indy, with his whip and his fedora, dwarfed by the fiery mushroom cloud and its deadly rain of fallout. Indeed, in another sign of the times, Indy is soon expelled from his university teaching post, a victim of the Red Scare, before he's pulled into his next adventure by the sudden appearance of the young greaser Mutt Williams (Shia LaBeouf), a Fonzie type who joins Indy on a quest to find the mythical crystal skull.


The Indiana Jones films have always revolved around some rather fantastical premises — it's part of the series' over-the-top pulp charm — but this one, with its interdimensional aliens and portals to other dimensions, risks the ridiculous even more than the magical Christian relics and ancient cults of previous films. The climax, in which the secret of a hidden Mayan temple is revealed as a roomful of aliens with crystal skeletons, is so far beyond the usual tone of the Indiana Jones series that it feels imported from another movie, perhaps Close Encounters of the Third Kind or the equally contentious finale of A.I.. More than that, though, the film's script and action are often simply ridiculous. In one scene, Mutt swings through the trees on vines, accompanied by an army of monkeys who wind up causing trouble for the sinister Soviet villainess Irina Spalko (Cate Blanchett). The goofy monkey CGI recalls the equally silly gophers that run around underfoot during the opening scenes, a cutesy bit of patently fake computer imagery that recalls the worst moments of Lucas' Star Wars prequels more than anything in the previous Indy movies.

Thematically and emotionally, this film is a logical next step for the Indy series, but the execution keeps getting in the way. It makes sense that the film should be about Indy discovering he's a father — Mutt turns out to be Indy's son with Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen), returning from Raiders — after the father/son dynamics of The Last Crusade. Indy's distance from Mutt repeats Indy's relationship with his father, who had been distant and unapproachable until the pair bonded on that last adventure. The problem is that LaBeouf's Mutt is not an especially compelling action hero, even when he's not playing Tarzan leading those cuddly CGI monkeys to the rescue, and his repartee with Indy is forced and awkward. At least Karen Allen's return as Marion is welcome; she's been somewhat tamed by the years since her last appearance, but she still has the devilish grin that made her such a natural match and foil for Indy in the first film, and made all the women in the subsequent films seem like such pale, unsatisfying substitutes. Even Indy admits as much, telling Marion that the women he's known in the intervening years have been lacking because, "they weren't you."

This all adds up, unfortunately, to a film that's interesting in theory more than it is in practice. Spielberg and Lucas are obviously having their usual fun riffing on the previous films in the series and the pulp tropes they've based the character on, but the film is goofy where previous Indy flicks were witty, bluntly action-packed where previous films had action sequences that were thrilling and frenzied without veering so far into self-parody. The film is tonally inconsistent in the extreme, and Spielberg and Lucas fail to grasp that while the Indy films were never exactly rooted in reality, by any means, neither were they as relentlessly plausibility-defying as this one is. Compared against some of the ludicrous action scenes that Spielberg piles on here — like the jeep-to-jeep swordfight between Irina and Mutt — the aliens at the end begin to seem positively grounded. Even these more-ridiculous-than-usual action set pieces might have been tolerable, though, if the film had recaptured the ephemeral "magic" of the earlier films, but it just doesn't. Despite some interesting subtexts and ideas, this latest Indiana Jones film fails to add much to the franchise's history.

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade

The third film in Steven Spielberg's Indiana Jones series was Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and after the strange, overblown tone of Temple of Doom (which chronologically serves as a prequel to the series), this film continues much more directly from Raiders of the Lost Ark. Once again, Indiana (Harrison Ford) must try to track down a legendary Christian relic — the Holy Grail this time — before it falls into the hands of the Nazis, even though one would think that the Nazis would have learned their lesson after the last time they actually got a hold of what they'd been searching for. The film is more than just a repeat of the formula from Raiders, though, because this time around, Indy's no longer a solitary adventurer, but is instead surrounded by both a literal and figurative family. Of course, the first two Indy films had sidekicks and accomplices who tagged along with the hero, but this time around he's gathered together a more substantial crew.

Foremost among them is Indy's father, Henry Jones (Sean Connery), who's been searching for the Grail for his entire lifetime, and who's been kidnapped by the Nazis as part of their quest to discover the source of eternal youth. Indy must rescue his father and find the Grail, aided by Raiders returnees Sallah (John Rhys-Davies) and Marcus Brody (Denholm Elliott), who in Raiders had been Indy's office-bound acquaintance, sending the adventurer off on his missions but never coming along himself. These men form a loose masculine family for Indy, a rough and ready band of friends and family. The film's last shot shows the four men riding off into the sun and the blood-red sky, an image right out of a Hollywood Western. This is especially appropriate because, more than in the other films, Spielberg is making Indy a cowboy archetype, with his signature hat and his horseback heroics.

The Western references start right with the film's first moments. The clever opening sequence is a referential, and self-referential, tour de force that continually subverts expectations with clever visual gags in which things are seldom what they seem. The first shot evokes the imagery of John Ford's Monument Valley, with a line of mounted riders winding through dirt trails between massive cliffs and red rock mountains. When Spielberg cuts in for the first closeup, though, he reveals that the riders are not Ford's cavalry but a troupe of Boy Scouts, even though they do have the yellow scarves that recall the uniforms of Ford's She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. Soon after, two of the Boy Scouts, hearing strange noises, wander into a cave and find some men eagerly excavating ancient relics from the rocks. One of the men has the familiar fedora of Indiana Jones, but Spielberg keeps his face hidden, first by shooting him from behind and then from slightly above, so that the brim of his hat shades his eyes, showing only the man's unshaven chin and square jaw. He looks like Indy, but it's not him: when he finally looks up it's a different man, and Spielberg quickly reveals that one of the Boy Scouts observing this scene is a young Indiana (River Phoenix), as an onscreen caption identifies the time and place as "Utah, 1912."

The subsequent chase scene, in which Indy boldly steals a valuable relic from the fortune-hunters, is full of in-jokes for fans of the franchise, suggesting where Indy's famous fear of snakes came from, showing the first time he experimented with using a whip, and tweaking audience expectations of Indy's flawless feats by having the young Indy leap off a rock to land on the back of a horse, only to miss and stumble as the horse simply steps forward. The whole sequence is relentlessly meta, building on the history and iconography of this character from the previous two films.


This is everything one would expect from an Indiana Jones movie, all staged with Spielberg's typical panache for action set pieces. There's a thrilling boat chase, and then later in the picture, Spielberg fakes out the audience by hinting that there's going to be a second one, only to have Indy and his dad jump on a motorcycle instead. There's a brief aerial dogfight, followed by a sequence — nodding to Hitchcock's North By Northwest, an obvious touchstone for this film's dashing, globe-trotting adventures — in which Indy and his dad flee on the ground while fighter planes swoop by overhead, raining down machine gun fire. There's a battle in which Indy, riding a horse, manages to outwit and take down a squad of Nazi soldiers and a tank. There's a trawl through underground catacombs filled with rats and a river of petroleum, which of course soon gets set afire. Indy even comes face to face with Hitler himself, in one of the film's more absurdly funny moments. There's a hilarious scene that wouldn't be out of place in a Marx Brothers spy spoof, where Indy and his dad keep spinning around as a secret panel opens up on a Nazi communications room. The thrills are perfectly paced, and the film barrels along at breakneck speed, with crackling dialogue to break up the action scenes.

Connery's Jones Sr. is especially compelling in that respect, perhaps because his dry wit and unflappable demeanor are linked to Indy's unhappy childhood with a mother who died young and a father who was distant and immersed in work. As the opening scenes show, Indy struggled to get his father's attention as a boy, and when he reunites with his father as a grown man, their relationship is uneasy and marked by dark humor. When Indy breaks into a Nazi castle to rescue his dad, Henry hits him over the head with a vase, at which point the two men immediately begin talking past one another: Henry is upset that he shattered what seems to be a valuable Ming vase, while Indy (incorrectly) reads his father's words as guilt over hurting his son. There's a lot of humor like this in the film, built around this father/son disconnection — even Indy's avoidance of the given name he inherited from his dad is evidence of their fraught relationship — and Indy's boyish desire to please his father. At one point, after father and son have evaded the Nazis during a violent and frenetic chase sequence, Indy lets out a whoop of excitement as they leave the last of their pursuers behind, but his smile fades when he sees his father's unimpressed, stoic expression and total disinterest in his son's love of adventure. Indy is a grown man but he still thirsts for fatherly approval, and because of this obvious subtext the film's bantering dialogue often has real bite.

The father/son dynamics are complicated by the presence of Elsa Schneider (Alison Doody), who turns out to be a Nazi but first sleeps with both father and son, which confirms the theme of Indy following in his father's footsteps. Schneider is an interesting character even beyond her importance to the father/son relationship. She's a surprisingly sympathetic Nazi whose allegiances are somewhat ambiguous; it's not at all clear just what she really believes or if her alliance with the Nazis is just a marriage of convenience to get her closer to the Grail, which she desires for her own unstated reasons. Even after she reveals her villainy, her affection for Indy and, to a lesser extent, his father isn't diminished at all. Her best moment, though, is a silent closeup as she watches Indy uncovering clues and preparing to break into a hidden passage through a wall in an underground chamber. She smiles sweetly and affectionately, her eyes shining with warmth: it's a very affecting and mysterious shot, because it suggests a depth of feeling in her that makes the revelation of her true nature somewhat hard to believe. Later, though, when she reveals her betrayal, her smile becomes crazed and sinister, her eyes wild.

The Last Crusade is a worthy successor to Raiders of the Lost Ark, abandoning the darkness and lurid violence of Temple of Doom in favor of the spirited adventure of the first Indy movie. Spielberg successfully channels the tone and the pleasures of that first film without simply duplicating it. It's a fun and exhilarating adventure flick and a worthy addition to the Indy canon.

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom

With Raiders of the Lost Ark, Steven Spielberg established a new movie icon, a new larger-than-life hero in the tradition of the pulp adventure. The second movie in this new series, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, immediately announces itself as a very different kind of movie, a very different take on the pulp hero. The film opens with, of all things, a musical number, staged like a Busby Berkeley set piece, with glamorous showgirls in glittery costumes arranging themselves in colorful, shiny patterns within the frame. The song, of course, is "Anything Goes," an appropriate anthem for a film that deliberately erases the line between good taste and bad, casting Indy (Harrison Ford) in an even more absurd, crazy adventure than his first cinematic outing. Within the first twenty minutes of the film, Indy has battled gangsters while surrounded by balloons in a club ballroom, leaped from a window with club singer Willie Scott (Kate Capshaw) in tow, then jumped from a plane with nothing but an inflatable boat to break his fall, before careening off a massive cliff into the river rapids below.

Temple of Doom is also more exaggerated than its predecessor in terms of the supporting characters who accompany Indy on this adventure. While Raiders of the Lost Ark featured cartoonish Nazis as the villains, Indy's allies were the loyal and noble Egyptian guide Sallah and Karen Allen's tough, witty portrayal of Marion Ravenwood. The shrill, helpless Willie Scott is no Marion, though, and Kate Capshaw is no Karen Allen; her character here is basically the butt of jokes about feminine incompetence and greed. When Indy drags her to an Indian palace, investigating the disappearances of many children from a rural village, the first thing she thinks when she sees the wealth and splendor of the palace is to wonder if the maharajah is married. Even worse is the infamous Short Round (Jonathan Ke Quan), a Chinese orphan boy who accompanies Indy on his adventures, and who basically serves as a source of caricatured comic relief with his heavy accent and squeaky catchphrases. The infamous dinner scene — where Willie and Short Round are horrified as their hosts serve giant bugs, eyeball soup, a snake that spills out smaller living serpents when sliced open, and, most memorably, chilled monkey brains, served out of a monkey head with removable scalp — is another example of the film's wallowing in grotesque orientalism.


At its best, though, the film's melodramatic outrageousness can be strangely compelling. This is true even of the problematic aspects: the seduction scene between Indy and Willie is hilarious, since it consists of two profound egotists posing and sparring, culminating with Willie throwing her head back, closing her eyes and murmuring that she'll be the best he's ever had. Later, Spielberg indulges in a very different form of excess when the three heroes witness an ancient ritual in which a priest pulls the heart from a man's chest before thrusting the (somehow still living) man into a whirlpool of fire. This scene is all about operatic excess, taking the fiery spiritual climax of Raiders of the Lost Ark as a starting point and simply expanding its red-hued lunacy to even greater lengths.

That exaggeration extends as well to the vision of the slave labor mine that lurks within the temple, where dirty, chained-up children hack at rocks with hammers while being whipped by bare-chested overseers. At one point, Spielberg even conflates voodoo with Indian culture, because basically the evil cult depicted in the film doesn't emerge from any one culture or anything real whatsoever. The cult is instead a vision of every foreign culture, as viewed through the xenophobic eyes of the West, all blended together into a soup of strange customs, blood sacrifices, horrible food, and a pagan obsession with death and destruction. It'd be easy to say that Spielberg is parodying that particular lineage within the pulp fiction genres that he's drawing on, but that doesn't really seem to be the case: he's just delivering a potent and especially ugly vision of the stereotypical foreign bad guy, the villain whose very obvious distance from Western culture is the only source of his evil.


The best part of the film comes at the very end, when Spielberg drops all the campy strangeness and simply embraces the spirited action set pieces that made Raiders so boyishly exciting. The mine car chase sequence is punchy and thrilling, crisply edited and visceral, and Spielberg follows it with an equally tense and well-realized sequence with Indy trapped in the center of a rope bridge, sword-wielding villains advancing on him from either end of the bridge. Spielberg, whose action scenes always have a keen sense of place and spatial relationships, inserts long shots in which the bridge runs across the whole frame, showing Indy as a dot in the middle with the slowly approaching enemies, purple blots in their long robes, closing in on him. The action scenes stacked up towards the end of the film have all the tightly wound intensity of the best Spielberg action sequences, and this consistently exciting final act goes some ways towards redeeming the sometimes slack narrative, annoying characters and orientalist oddities of the rest of the film.

Temple of Doom is well-known as the oddball entry in the Indiana Jones series, at least before the fourth film, The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. It's a deeply strange and flawed film that, to its credit, doesn't simply repeat the very successful formula of its predecessor but tries to do something different within the pulp lineage. It doesn't always work — an understatement, perhaps — but there's still something hypnotizing about the film's embrace of its own knowing excesses. It's a very inconsistent movie, of course, both in terms of quality and tone: sometimes harrowing and horrific, sometimes barreling forward with no-consequences action, and sometimes goofy and cheery, as when Spielberg nods to the elephant hijinks of Howard Hawks' Hatari!, a film that (as Adam Zanzie first tipped me off to) seems to be very important to his career and his approach to cinema. The film's final shot embraces all these contradictions, as Indy grabs Willie for a kiss (after pulling her to him with his signature whip; kinky!) while Short Round urges an elephant to spray them with water and repeatedly squeals, "very funny!" It's cheesy and ridiculous, especially when Spielberg then pulls back to show a crowd of laughing Indian kids running to embrace the couple. Spielberg's dealing with big, bold images and events here, and the film is packed with clichés and absurdities. That it sometimes overcomes its own ridiculousness to deliver a satisfying action set piece or some other fun bit of business is a tribute to Spielberg's keen instincts showing through.

Raiders of the Lost Ark

Raiders of the Lost Ark was the movie that introduced the world to the legend of Indiana Jones, the archeologist/adventurer whose exploits — invading ancient ruins in search of treasure, trying to beat the Nazis to the mythic Ark of the Covenant — are director Steven Spielberg's tribute to pulp fiction serials and boys' adventures. Indy (Harrison Ford) is a romantic daredevil who, in the film's famous opening sequence, enters a South American ruin looking for a gold idol, dodging clever traps of darts, bottomless pits, and a boulder that rolls out of an alcove to pursue the hero through this treacherous cave. The opening sequence is so legendary for a reason, as it economically introduces the hero, his exploits of derring-do, and his ability to escape from even the most seemingly hopeless odds.

The film is packed with such iconic moments, the scenes that fascinated me as a kid watching this movie over and over again, and which can still evoke a silly grin of pleasure. There's Indy abruptly cutting short an Arab enemy's elaborate swordplay by simply shooting the guy. There's Indy chasing a Nazi convoy on a horse while the exhilarating and unforgettable John Williams theme plays. There's Indy and his one-time lover Marion (Karen Allen) in a shootout with Nazi troops led by the sinister, perpetually smirking Toht (Ronald Lacey), a cartoon Nazi villain who wants the Ark as a magic weapon to deliver to Hitler himself. Spielberg deliberately makes Indy's adventures over-the-top and outrageous, culminating in the religious fury of the climax, in which the Nazis win, getting to the Ark and opening it before Indy can — for which they're rewarded only with God's fury, an extinguishing fire that erases any trace of the villains from the world. That ending is pretty interesting, because Indy has nothing to do with the bad guys' defeat: he has the opportunity to destroy the Ark, foiling the Nazis' plans, but as Indy's opposite number, the French archeologist Belloq (Paul Freeman) recognizes, Indy can't do it, he can't simply destroy the relic he's been pursuing. He's obsessed, just like Belloq and Toht are, and he wants to see what's inside the Ark as badly as they do. So he and Marion end up tied to a wooden post, watching as the villains open the Ark, which should be the bad guys' moment of victory but instead turns into their death because they hadn't considered what it means to use a relic of such holy significance for evil ends. Indy wins because he lost.


Elsewhere, Spielberg has a lot of fun just playing with the genre conventions of the adventure. A perfect example is the spatial playfulness of the scene where Marion is being kidnapped, carried around in a large woven basket by a pair of turbaned bad guys. As Indy chases after the thugs carrying her, the geometry of the scene has a cartoon absurdity to it, as he winds down one alleyway after another, only to have the men he's pursuing show up behind him or down a distant alley when just moments before they'd turned the same corner that Indy has just rounded. It's Bugs Bunny logic, turning these back alleys into a surreally warped maze where space and time don't behave as they're supposed to. Spielberg frequently mixes the comic with the tragic in this way; the goofy illogic of the chase sequence doesn't diminish the danger that Marion is in, and indeed the sequence ends with her seemingly dead, blown up in the explosion of a truck that Indy tips over, unaware that it's full of explosives. Earlier in the film, Toht, always a locus of darkly comic violence, reaches for an amulet that he needs to locate the Ark, but the metal has been surrounded in flames and burns the Nazi's hand, so he runs screaming outside to stick his hand in the snow. Even at the climax, the open-mouthed screams of Toht and the other Nazis, before their faces begin to melt and decay, are almost funny in their exaggerated expressions of terror. Spielberg, who would later approach Nazis much more seriously, here makes them comic foils, dangerous and despicable but also ridiculous, worthy of derision as much as contempt.

That's a big part of the film's crazy charm, its enduring importance as an action/adventure classic. It's a film that doesn't really take itself seriously, right from the goofy opening moments when one of Indy's South American guides runs screaming in exaggerated horror from a stone statue. When Indy, early on, famously shouts that he hates snakes, you just know that by the end of the film he'll have to get through a tomb full of the slithery reptiles. This kind of movie logic is everywhere in the film, like in the subsequent scenes where Indy returns to his day job as an archeology professor, teaching classes that seem to be populated almost entirely with young girls who adore the dashing, handsome prof. (One of them, memorably, writes "love you" on her eyelids so that the message appears whenever she blinks.)


Another big part of the film's charm is Karen Allen's vivacious performance as Marion, who in a way is even more of a bigger-than-life figure than Indy himself. Indy is legendary primarily because of what happens to him, and because he reacts to everything with the same everyman casualness, betraying maybe a little smile or a flicker of satisfaction at most when he evades death yet again. Marion's a much more intense personality: she's introduced into the film during a drinking game in which she drinks a much bigger man into passing out, while she simply flashes a crooked grin and collects her money. Marion is a more complex and much more real character than the iconic Indy. She's had an active life — she owns a bar in a remote Asian city — and is obviously still nursing some heartache from the older Indy's cavalier treatment of her the last time he saw her. Her introductory drinking game is echoed in the later scene where she seduces Belloq, playing up her own exaggerated drunkenness and lulling him into drunken complacency before pulling a knife on him. She's a great character, a great woman, and if she sometimes falls into the damsel-in-distress role, waiting for Indy to rescue her, just as often she's scheming and fighting for herself, running around in the background of action scenes clobbering thugs in the head with metal pans. She's easily as much a part of this film's appeal as Indy himself.

What's great about Raiders of the Lost Ark is how cleverly Spielberg mines the pulpy adventure tropes that he's drawing on here, making a film that revels in its own artifice, its obviously fictional nature, and is all the more enjoyable because of it. It's a film that deals in legends and icons before the film itself even became legendary or iconic. Indy is a prefabricated icon, and even early on in the film, he's portrayed as just a distinctive silhouette, hat and all, on the wall of Marion's bar, identifiable just from his shadow. He was made to be a cinematic icon, and he fulfills the role admirably.

The Conversations #30: 3D

The latest conversation between me and Jason Bellamy is now live at The House Next Door. This conversation is a bit of a different approach for us, as this time we focus on the phenomenon of 3D film, discussing the technology and aesthetics of this popular and controversial format. We concentrate especially on two recent 3D movies by popular directors — Martin Scorsese's Hugo and Steven Spielberg's The Adventures of Tintin — along with the Werner Herzog documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams. I know everyone has an opinion on 3D, so I hope we'll see some debate and disagreement in the comments section.

Join us at The House Next Door for the full conversation, and be sure to add your own thoughts.

Continue reading at The House Next Door

Munich

Munich is a film of exceptional moral ambiguity and inquiry from a director often known for his tendency to tie his films' morals up in neat little bows at the end. Steven Spielberg resists, for the most part, that temptation here, and the result is one of his best films and certainly one of the best of his more self-consciously "serious" films. The film concerns the aftermath of the 1972 terrorist attacks on Israeli athletes at the Olympics in Munich. Spielberg's film is based on a book by George Jonas, about the Israeli government's secret response to this act of terrorism. A group of operatives are gathered and sent off with the names of 11 Arab men who had planned and been involved with the Black September terrorism in various ways. Led by a young and inexperienced low-level Mossad operative named Avner (Eric Bana), this secret group moves around Europe targeting and killing these terrorists.

It is a film about revenge and the cyclic nature of violence, but it is also a compelling, taut, and tightly constructed thriller, a visceral espionage movie in which each kill is meticulously tracked from the planning stage through to the often troubled and frenzied execution of the plan. Spielberg is a master director of action, and part of the reason that Munich is so successful is that there isn't a schizophrenic disconnect between Spielberg the Hollywood crowd-pleaser and Spielberg the "serious" moralist, as there is in so many of Spielberg's other late films. Instead, the action is the content here, and Spielberg uses the crisply executed action scenes to build the moral foundation of the film. It's a seamless and organic process that makes Munich work on multiple levels, as a straightforward historical thriller and as a moral consideration of guilt, revenge, and political assassination.

One of the best scenes in this respect is the sequence where Avner and his team plot to kill one of their targets using a bomb in a telephone. They plant the bomb, then wait outside the man's apartment one morning, watching his wife and child leave, then call from a pay phone, waiting for the target to pick up so they can set off the explosive. The plan goes wrong because a moving truck pulls in front of the bombers' car, blocking their view of the apartment, so that they don't see when the car carrying the target's daughter pulls up again so she can go back inside to fetch something she forgot. The Israelis go forward with their plan, calling the apartment, one of them poised with the detonator, but when it's the little girl that picks up, not the father they intend to kill, they realize their mistake. Spielberg deliberately draws out the tension here, cutting back and forth from inside the apartment, where the girl strolls around trying to find what she'd left behind, to outside where the commandos prepare to carry out their kill. It's harrowing: each number dialed on the pay phone outside gets its own shot, interspersed with images of the girl, and after she picks up, as two of the commandos scramble to warn off the man with the detonator, it's not at all obvious whether they'll be in time or not. It's an especially potent use of Spielberg's instincts for Hollywood-style suspense: the moving truck that blocks the commandos' view is certainly a Hollywood contrivance, and the emphasis on the cute little girl who may soon be blown up is also deliberate heartstring-tugging, as is the earlier moment where one of the commandos, in the apartment posing as a journalist, sees her play the piano and smile at him.

Spielberg's use of such devices isn't just empty manipulation, though. Scenes like this one — and the later scene where a honeymooning couple are injured in the overly powerful blast that kills another target — drive home just how delicate such missions of vengeance are, just how easily the ethos of eye-for-an-eye can lead one astray. It's not only the possibility of unintended collateral damage: this mission of murder begins to weigh on most of the commandos, with the possible exception of Steve (Daniel Craig), who says that "only Jewish blood matters" and as a result doesn't feel any remorse at extinguishing the lives of those who threaten his people. Steve's Zionism and nationalism give him an unshakable faith in the rightness of this mission that makes him eerily parallel those on the other side who are also so convinced in the essential rightness of their cause, who also believe that murder is justifiable in pursuit of their objectives. Not incidentally, many of the Arab terrorists depicted in the film also see their mission as one of revenge for Jewish attacks on their people.


Indeed, Spielberg's parallels between the Arab terrorists and the Israeli commandos hunting and killing them excited much outrage from Jewish and Israeli groups, upset by the film's conflation of terrorism with counter-terrorism. But that's missing the point. Spielberg's film is about not forgetting the value of a human life, and most importantly it's about not falling for the delusion that violence can beget peace. Several times in the film, the characters count up the record of Palestinian terrorist attacks and Israeli reprisals, as though keeping a tally on some morbid scorecard. The more men they kill, the more they question their actions, as they see that even while they're in Europe killing terrorists, others immediately take the place of those they kill, and high-profile attacks are still carried out, killing Israelis and other Westerners all over the world. Seeing no tangible result of their actions, no benefit, they begin to wonder if all the bloodshed is worth it, or if they're simply sacrificing the moral high ground, the goodness and decency that allows them to live with themselves.

In one key scene, the Israeli commandos are unexpectedly surprised at a safehouse by a team of PLO soldiers, because the double-dealing French spy Louis (Mathieu Amalric), who set up the location, had, accidentally or on purpose, double-booked it. The subsequent standoff and fragile peace between the two groups (with the Israelis pretending to belong to various European terrorist cells) is another of those Hollywood contrivances that Spielberg turns into a productive opportunity for moral inquiry. (Though the scene where Steve and a PLO operative stage a symbolic battle between East and West on a radio dial is a rare goofy, heavy-handed misstep.) Avner has a late-night conversation with his opposite number, Ali (Omar Metwally), in which Ali expresses his sincere belief that soon Israel will fall, and that the whole world will have to go along with the creation of a Palestinian state. Avner looks at him uncomprehendingly, unable to grasp that this man actually believes that this will happen, actually thinks that terrorist attacks and bombings will somehow convince the world of the rightness of the Palestinian cause. Ali thinks that violence will wake people up, will make them see what's going on, but Avner is starting to understand something very different: that violence only causes more violence and entrenches people even deeper into their established ideologies, making them less, not more, open to compromise or change. What this conversation also yields is a reminder that the Palestinians really do want a home, that whatever else this fight might be about, the primary stakes are the right to a feeling of rootedness and belonging. Avner can't deny Ali the right to want that feeling, for himself and his descendents, and the conversation ends, typically, with nothing resolved, with the two sides remaining separated from one another by a seemingly irreconcilable conflict in ideas and desires.


At times, Spielberg is almost aggressively even-handed. Early on, when the news mistakenly reports at first that all the Munich terrorists were killed but all the Israeli hostages survived, Spielberg shows relieved Jewish families and sobbing Arab families. When the news changes and the reporters have to correct themselves and announce that the hostages have also been killed, then everyone on both sides is crying, mourning their dead. The effect is not, I don't think, to equate terrorists and their victims, but to suggest that there are families and human connections on both sides, even for those who perpetrate terrorist acts. This is a recurring theme in the film, the importance of family and home, because the justification for all the violence and war and terrorism and reprisal on both sides is always that everyone involved is fighting for their families, for the right to a homeland. Avner's wife and daughter appear at several key points in the film, as reminders of his humanity and his home, but terrorists like Ali are also fighting for what they believe they need to do for their families. It's telling, too, that at the end of the film Avner's Mossad contact refuses to "break bread" with him; governments and their political agendas are largely disconnected from such domestic concerns, though they also perpetrate their acts in the names of their citizens and their families. That's why the family-focused Louis and his father (Michael Lonsdale), who run a global espionage, information-dealing network, refuse to deal with governments, with their abstract motivations and distance from the passions that drive individual fighters.

What's great about Munich is that, atypically for Spielberg, all of these moral questions and entanglements are dealt with but there's no definitive resolution for the contradictions and doubts that dog the Israeli commandos during their mission. The film simply confronts, head on, the cycle of violence that marks the entire history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In one scene, which epitomizes the film, Avner comes face to face with one of his targets, having a pleasant chat on adjoining balconies at a hotel, while in the background a passionate couple kiss and grope one another on a third balcony. Avner is just waiting for this man to go to bed so he can give the signal to blow him up, and he knows that the man is a terrorist responsible for many horrendous acts, but for a few moments he's confronted with both the humanity of his target and the potential innocents who could get caught up in this attempt at retribution. Spielberg even layers Avner together with the target and the innocent couple within a single shot, so that the link between Avner's signal and the murderous consequences will be absolutely clear. Vengeance, the film suggests, is never a simple thing, but rather part of a network of causes and effects that tie together family, politics, religion, history, and more, making questions of right and wrong far more complicated than mere binary values. Never before has Spielberg seemed so acutely aware of such complexities, and never before has he so powerfully portrayed them onscreen.

The Conversations #27: Jaws

Jason Bellamy and I have posted our latest conversation, this time turning our attention, at the heart of summer blockbuster season, to one of the first summer blockbusters, Steven Spielberg's classic Jaws. We talk about the film's reception at the time, its legendary status, and how it holds up now. We also talk about the music, the shark, the performances, the influence of Hitchcock and Hawks, and the surprising amounts of meta humor built into this often harrowing film.

Come join us with your own Jaws thoughts. As always, we welcome your contributions to the comment section.

Continue reading at The House Next Door

Close Encounters of the Third Kind

Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind perfectly captures the fear and the fascination that the unknown holds for humanity. The film focuses on the utility worker Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss), who's sent out into a remote country area to investigate a rash of mysterious power outages and instead comes into close contact with inexplicable sights that seemingly could only be alien ships. From that point on, Roy becomes obsessed with what he saw and felt, obsessed with getting answers, some explanation for his bizarre experience. The film is about the possibility of alien life coming to Earth, but more than that it's about the larger search for meaning, for understanding, the desire to make some sense of life, the universe and everything.

Spielberg is well-suited to capturing the mingled wonder, fear and confusion that characterize the film's complex mix of emotions and tones. Although Spielberg opens with a scene in which the French scientist Lacombe (Francois Truffaut) tracks the signs of the aliens' arrival on Earth, and returns to Lacombe at intervals throughout the film, the real substance of this movie is the effect of such unusual events on ordinary people. When Roy first encounters the alien ships, he's driving along on a deserted, pitch-black country road, lost and struggling with maps to try to find out where he is. Behind him, a set of lights pulls up in the window behind his head, and he gestures for them to pass by; they do, as a car impatiently goes around his truck. The next time some lights pull up behind him, Roy similarly waves them on and returns to his maps, so that only the audience sees that the lights go up, revealing a distinctly un-car-like shape hovering behind Roy. Spielberg's visual playfulness makes moments like this even more potent: witty, awe-inspiring, surreal and yet also somehow ordinary, the extraordinary seeping into the prosaic without warning, upturning all expectations and altering even one's basic presumptions about the way things work.

Roy's experience is indirect — mailboxes vibrate, all the metal in his truck is pulled momentarily up into the air by an electromagnetic force, and a bright light shines down on him, burning his face as he cranes his neck out of the truck's window to bask in its blistering beauty — but he'll soon see even more startling sights. Spielberg's presentation of the alien spacecraft is just as casually awesome, showing these hovering ships surrounded by halos of light, speeding down highways in convoys, turning whimsical circles in the air, trailed by a small ball of red light that seems to be scurrying to keep up with the larger ships. The imagery is spectacular but also grounded, suggesting that there's some kind of order and purpose to the ships' configurations and actions, even if it's a purpose that's obscure to those who witness these events.


Roy, along with fellow witness Jillian (Melinda Dillon), begins to get visions of a mountain that seems to have some importance to the aliens, but his family, especially his wife Ronnie (Teri Garr), is unsympathetic to his increasing obsession. Roy loses his job and begins spending his nights with fellow obsessives and curiosity-seekers, hoping to see something again, to get some confirmation that he wasn't just crazy. Nevertheless, there's more than a little humor in Spielberg's portrayal of Roy, who totally loses touch with ordinary day-to-day life in the aftermath of his "close encounter." At one point, Roy, finally having a clear vision of the mountain image he's been trying to capture, begins gathering plants and dirt and bricks from his yard, throwing them through the window into his house, as his distraught wife tries to stop him. He's oblivious, so caught up in his own excitement that he can't understand why no one else shares his thirst for answers. Later, after he's constructed a massive sculpture of the mountain in his living room, he looks out the window, his face covered in clay and grime, the mountain towering over his shoulder, and looks around at the beautiful sunny day outside. His wife and kids are gone, and his neighbors are playing and enjoying the day, puttering around in their gardens and playing with their children, and the contrast between inside the house and outside emphasizes the total disconnection that Roy feels. He's seen something he doesn't understand, and now he only wants, or needs, to know more, to make sense of it all.

At other times, Spielberg plays this confrontation between humanity and the aliens as a horror movie, as when the ships surround Jillian's house. She struggles to close everything off, to keep the aliens out, and Spielberg shoots the sequence as horror, emphasizing Jillian's fear, even while her son Barry is as excited and curious as Roy is. The boy opens the front door as his mother desperately struggles to close off the house, and outside the open field around their home has been transformed into a glowing orange landscape, alien and strange, infused with the light of the ships hovering above. In another shot, Spielberg shoots down a chimney as Jillian fumbles around inside, trying to close the flue; the point-of-view shot suggests that an alien is scurrying down the chimney towards her as her hand blindly flails about for the lever. Perhaps the most chilling image, though, is the shot of screws turning themselves, rising out of a floor grating and falling out to loosen the grate.

The film does such a good job of evoking complicated, contradictory emotions about the aliens that the ending, in which Spielberg finally reveals the aliens as a benevolent presence (one even smiles at Lacombe), can only be a disappointment. The film is about the unknown, about mystery and awe and the struggle to understand, and the final confrontation between the humans and the aliens preserves this sense of wonder and uncertainty right up until the moment when the aliens are revealed as the typical large-headed humanoid creatures that we've so often imagined them to be in popular representations. When the humans try to communicate with the aliens by using a musical language — not fully understanding what's being said except that some kind of back-and-forth communication is happening — that's beautiful and mysterious. The aliens, in their rubber costumes, obviously fake even when they're shot through a haze of light obviously intended to maintain some distance and mystery, are a bit of a letdown in comparison to the unsettling, wondrous effects that came before. Still, Close Encounters of the Third Kind is a powerful, deeply affecting film that shares its protagonist's sense of gape-mouthed fascination with the prospect of life beyond Earth.

Saving Private Ryan

It has been said that all war movies are ultimately anti-war. The implication is that it is impossible to show the reality of war — the death and destruction, the dismemberment, the endless struggle over just one more patch of land like any other — without showing its horror, brutality and pointlessness. It has also been said, however, that no war movie can ever truly or completely be anti-war. By the nature of the war movie genre, it is inevitable that these films will be exciting and visceral, that they will show the bravery and honor of the soldiers, who are always at their bravest precisely when they are delivering grand, solemn speeches about how they're not brave. If Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan proves the truth of one of these axioms, it is the latter rather than the former. Spielberg's film is all about the honor of war, the bravery of the soldiers. Saving Private Ryan has often been praised for its realism, for its truthfulness to the experience of war, but Spielberg's idea of realism is hiring real amputees to play soldiers who get their limbs blown off. It's shallow realism, a thin coating of the real over a foundation of Hollywood contrivances and rote recitations of familiar ideas.

The script (by Robert Rodat) makes repeated use of the words of Abraham Lincoln's letter to the widow Bixby, who lost five sons in battle during the Civil War, the key words of which refer to those who offer their lives as a "sacrifice upon the altar of freedom." (There's a metaphor for Spielberg's "realism" here, since history has shown that the letter was mistaken, and at least three of those sons didn't die in combat.) This letter is read early on in the film by a general upon learning that three brothers have died within a week of one another during the invasion of Normandy, during World War II. A fourth brother, James Ryan (Matt Damon), has air-dropped into a chaotic region, his location and status unknown. The film bears the name of this Private Ryan, and it's this man, who remains offscreen for much of the film, who serves as the focus of the subsequent action. Later, the words of the Bixby letter are repeated in voiceover, and again they seem like brazen manipulation, an unthinking regurgitation of grand words with a grand name to somehow legitimize them.

Such sentimentality is at odds with the battle scenes, in which Spielberg tries to be unstinting in his depiction of the horrors of war. The celebrated opening (which kicks in after a lame and thoroughly Spielbergian framing device) is a nearly half-hour re-enactment of the invasion of Normandy, a bloody and relentless sequence. The opening minutes of this sequence are especially striking: as the troop boats drift towards the shore, Spielberg shows the men inside the boats, praying and muttering to themselves, throwing up, shaking with fear. And then the boats arrive at the beach, and the gangway at the front lowers to allow the soldiers to charge off... and the enemy machine guns open fire, cutting down whole ranks of soldiers where they stand, before they have a chance to take so much as a step forward. Within seconds, a whole boat's worth of men has fallen, each line collapsing riddled with bullets, clearing the path for the next men behind them to be shot as well. It's horrifying, this devastating slaughter, and the rest of the sequence only intensifies the sensation of being surrounded by death. It's loud and visceral. Limbs fly, the bottom half of a man's body disappears into an impact crater, blood spurts, bullets ping off metal, medics struggle to staunch the flow of blood from men who are soon dead, either from existing wounds or new ones, as bullets continue to fly. In one shot, Captain John Miller (Tom Hanks), dazed from an explosion, watches as a soldier with his arm blown off wanders aimlessly in a circle, stoops down, and stands back up holding his own detached arm before strolling away like a zombie.

This is powerful stuff. But the film's visceral feel for combat and death doesn't really carry over into the scenes after the battle of Normandy, when Miller's unit is tasked with the mission of locating the missing Private Ryan and bringing him back safely, so that his mother will not have to hear that her fourth and final son has also died in combat. Miller's men resent the mission, resent being asked to risk eight lives for the sake of one, and though Miller mostly tries to keep his reservations to himself, he too is unhappy with the job. He loves and cares for his own men and feels the pain of losing each one, but Ryan, as he says himself, means nothing to him. The bulk of the film consists of this small group's trek across a battle-fraught stretch of France where German and American troops square off in various ruined small towns.


When the soldiers aren't engaged in battle, Spielberg and the script mostly resort to war movie clichés, like one man's never-sent letter to his parents, taken after his death by another man in the unit and then passed from one man to the next as those carrying it are killed in action. Another man regrets a childhood unkindness to his mother. Another man is Jewish and never gets tired of shouting his religion at German soldiers. The home and pre-war occupation of the guarded, private Miller are the subject of a pool in his company, and of course at a key moment he must deliver a big (and unbearably maudlin) speech about what he did before the war. The action is realistic and visceral, but when the soldiers put down their guns there's nothing but obvious scriptwriters' devices and Hollywood speechifying, a reminder that for all the blood and missing limbs Spielberg displays onscreen, this is still just another in a long line of Hollywood war movies, and a rather traditional one at heart.

There is one cliché that Spielberg and Rodat go to great lengths to subvert, and that's the cliché of the cowardly or incompetent soldier who redeems himself at the last moment in a grand act of bravery. Corporal Upham (Jeremy Davies) is a translator and map-maker who has never seen combat, but who joins the unit because Miller needs someone who speaks both French and German. Upham cowers at the fringes of each battle, watching from the sidelines, but in the film's final battle, a desperate struggle to hold a bridge against German tanks and infantry, he's tasked with running back and forth among the American positions, carrying ammo where it's needed. At some point, his already modest courage utterly falls apart, and he can barely do more than whimper and cower in a corner, trying to hide from the Germans. There is a certain moment that seems to be building towards Upham's redemption, but that redemption never comes. The tension of the scene arises almost entirely from the way Spielberg cleverly sets up expectations for a very conventional resolution: one expects Upham to finally man up and come to the rescue, but it never happens. It's a bracing defiance of convention from a filmmaker who is usually conventional, and purposefully so, even at his finest moments. So it's worth noting that Spielberg defies the convention in order to reinforce another, solidifying Upham's status as the cowardly and ineffectual intellectual figure. He also ties this cowardice to one of the film's most laughable contrivances, the German soldier who Upham had earlier defended from summary execution, only for him to return at the climax, once again killing American soldiers. It's outrageous, especially since it winds up suggesting that Upham was wrong, earlier in the film, to oppose the summary execution of a surrendering enemy soldier. The film seems to be singularly lacking in the perspective that enemy soldiers are, like Miller and his men, mostly just ordinary men doing their duty for their country. Instead, Spielberg, with his blockbuster instincts, has to make this random German soldier the villain of the piece, and everything surrounding Upham and the German soldier is so irredeemably muddled that it's not really clear what, if anything, the film is trying to say about this situation.

Sometimes a movie that isn't very good can still be interesting. A movie that fails in a thousand ways can still capture the imagination, provoke thought, deliver startling insights. Spielberg's movie is the opposite. Saving Private Ryan is a "good movie" that's not that interesting, a well-made war picture with no particularly fresh or interesting insights, only confused messages and silly regurgitations of clichés and leftovers from countless other war movies. In isolated scenes it sometimes seems like a fine film, and at its best it's undoubtedly a great action movie. There are scenes here, moments of awful beauty, that must surely rank among the most powerful cinematic encapsulations of the wartime experience. The red waves washing up over the bodies of men and beached fish at the end of the battle of Normandy, bloody waves gently rolling into the shore, are haunting and unforgettable (though borrowed from Sam Fuller, a towering influence on this film). The film's non-battle scenes don't often rise to this level, though, and the film is torn between two modes, between stark realism and Hollywood artificiality, without ever quite settling on one or the other.

Catch Me If You Can

Steven Spielberg's Catch Me If You Can is a breezy but smart thriller, a briskly paced film whose playful title captures the charm and ease of this story, but barely hints at the surprising emotional nuances that Spielberg finds in this 1960s con man who skipped across America inventing occupations and identities for himself. It's based on the true story of Frank Abagnale Jr. (Leonardo DiCaprio), who runs away from home at the age of seventeen and immediately begins concocting grand schemes that are as much about creating a glamorous identity for himself as about all the money he makes through counterfeit check schemes. For Spielberg, Abagnale is still a kid when he runs away, trying to recapture an idealized image of happiness and family and security that he lost in his teenage years. The film opens with some unnecessary framing material set after Abagnale's eventual capture, but it doesn't really start until the scenes of the Abagnale family's 1960s suburban bliss.

Frank's father (Christopher Walken) is an honored man in their community, a local businessman who's recognized by his peers and respected by all. Frank Sr. is, above all, proud of his wife, Paula (Nathalie Baye), who he met during World War II in France. Frank Sr. tells the story of how he met her over and over again, how he saw this gorgeous blonde dancing in a small village and vowed that he "wouldn't leave France without her." As he tells the story over Christmas, dancing with his wife as Frank looks on, Frank knows all the words by heart, can fill in the blanks with ease. It's a story he cherishes, because it contains the essence of Frank Sr.'s philosophy, an ideology of entitlement that he passes on to his son: if you want something badly enough, if you fight hard enough for it, you will get it. Of course, the Abagnales' happy life eventually falls apart as Frank's father gets in trouble with the IRS and spirals into ruin and disgrace. His wife begins bringing other men around, and Frank knows that trouble is coming, but he still isn't prepared for the announcement that his parents are getting divorced. Unable to deal with it, he simply runs away.


Those early scenes, bright and idyllic as they are, are like TV sitcom visions of domestic contentment: the glamorous mother and suave father, an icon of paternal serenity even as his life collapses around him. Frank carries these visions off into the world, memories of the paradise he's lost and is now trying to recover. He is an intuitive mimic, and he is seeking alternate realizations of the glossy glamor of his childhood. He sees a pilot, in his crisp black uniform, surrounded by beautiful, cheery stewardesses in pale blue, and he immediately seizes upon this image as his own goal. Other kids would want to learn how to fly, to go through the work, to achieve that ambition, but not Frank. He doesn't want to fly, he just wants to be a pilot, and to him the two are almost unconnected. It's not the job he wants, it's the image of himself in that handsome uniform, surrounded by pretty, giggling girls. It's the sensation of walking down the street, turning heads wherever he goes. The film is set in an era when flight still seemed a little magical, and certainly very adventurous: the pilot is a kind of globetrotting hero, in control of these giant metal birds that only he really understands how to handle, living a life of adventure all around the world. When Frank occasionally reports in to his father with his adventures, his father is impressed by how "exotic" his son's life is. He says the word repeatedly, with a kind of reverent awe: where are you going tonight, Frank, he asks, somewhere exotic? Frank is able to continue and even improve upon the life of glamor and respect that his father lost when his finances fell apart.

Frank's opposite number is the FBI agent Hanratty (Tom Hanks), who makes it his mission to catch Frank as the con man's tricks grow bolder and bolder. Frank and Hanratty share a Christmas tradition, a telephone call from the lonely man on the road to the lonely man in the office. Both have nothing better to do on a family holiday. Both have shattered families. Hanratty still wears his wedding ring, as Frank points out, but he's not lying when he says he doesn't have a family; the air of sadness of a man with nothing waiting for him outside the office is unmistakable. The film is nakedly about the desire for family; it's not even a subtext, it's what drives everything Frank does, everything he wants. He doesn't even care about the money, not really. At one point, he pulls out a pair of suitcases that are stuffed with loose bills, carelessly tossed inside and crumpled up. Frank projects such a calm, self-assured demeanor most of the time that it's easy to forget, even for the audience, what an insecure child he still really is, but moments like that make it clear. He's got suitcases full of money that he doesn't know what to do with, and still he keeps going, keeps writing bad checks, keeps making up new identities: a doctor, a lawyer, a Harvard graduate, a Berkeley graduate. It's not about wealth for him, but what the wealth stands for: respect, security, acceptance, being able to impress people. He's after the vibe of that Rotary Club dinner — the first scene of the film after the framing material — where his father is honored by his town's most respected men, even the mayor himself.

Frank thinks he's found this restoration of family life in Brenda Strong (Amy Adams), a young nurse who he meets in a hospital, and who spontaneously inspires in him yet another lie, yet another identity: as a doctor. This, more than anything else Frank does, makes it clear that it's not money he wants. There's no money in this ploy, not really, but there's the respect of being in a noble profession, and there's the obvious adoration of Brenda, who's the same age as Frank, more or less, but seems like a giggly teen in comparison to his assured maturity, which makes him believable when he says he's a decade older than he actually is. (The casting of DiCaprio is ingenious in this respect: he looks awkward and ungainly as a teen in the early scenes, then seems to naturally grow into Frank's cocky-kid projections of maturity and confidence.)


Frank rediscovers, with Brenda and her family, the happy home life he'd lost as a child. They are almost surreal, this cheery, tight-knit family, and it's easy to forget the darkness lurking just around the corner: Brenda's Irish Catholic parents had kicked her out after she'd slept with a boy and gotten an abortion. Frank's seeming respectability wins them back over, not only to him, but to their own daughter. They're living a different kind of lie from Frank, lying to themselves about their own goodness, rejecting their daughter as a slut until she returns with a handsome doctor who wants to marry her. Spielberg kind of glosses over this subtext, but it's there nonetheless, lurking beneath the unreal cheeriness and familial closeness of this household. In a David Lynch film, the Strongs would be a parody of suburban nicety and inner hypocrisy, but one senses that Spielberg sees them in more of a rosy light. They're funny, this stern but sentimental couple who do the dishes together, their butts swaying in time to the music, dancing together as they do domestic chores, totally in sync and totally contented. Frank watches them and sees in them his own parents, dancing together in the living room on Christmas, totally happy and totally into each other.

It's a dream of family, an ideal, and Spielberg's cinema is perfectly suited to capturing ideals. This is such a rich film because Spielberg seems to identify so completely with Frank the innocent trickster, always in search of family, always in search of a childhood innocence that's gone forever. Everything in the film is seen through this lens. Everything is 1960s glossy, bright and airy, clean and pure. Only occasionally does Frank touch up against the grimier underpinnings of the fantasy life he's building for himself: a glimpse of a bloody leg during his doctor ruse, a negotiation with a prostitute that's a letdown after he thought he was having just another romantic encounter, the tears of Brenda when she tells him about her abortion and again when he has to leave her, to go on the run again. These are reminders that the fantasy is just a fantasy, that the glossy world Frank is erecting around him can only remain intact so long as he keeps his blinders on to everything he's running from, everything that's poised to destroy his dreams. Spielberg brilliantly constructs that glossy fantasy world, a con boy's dream of love and family, and he brilliantly explores the emotions of the man running through the fantasy, breathlessly exclaiming "catch me if you can" as though it's all a game, even if it's really anything but.

Duel

Duel was the first film of Steven Spielberg, made for TV and adapted from a short story by pulp author and screenwriter Richard Matheson. It's a remarkably simple, stripped-down film, a teeth-gritting suspense thriller that unrelentingly increases the pressure on the traveling businessman David Mann (Dennis Weaver) as he faces off with a vicious truck driver who seems intent on killing Mann. Spielberg slowly builds up the suspense, seemingly from thin air: the first time the truck appears, Spielberg's low angles and uncomfortable closeups of the truck's rusty grille and thick, rotted fenders already suggest something sinister. The film begins with innocuous jockeying for position on the road, as the impatient Mann, late for a meeting, passes the truck, only to have it pass him in return, promptly slowing down again as soon as it's in front of him. It wouldn't play as anything other than ordinary highway machismo if it wasn't for Spielberg's menacing camera angles, which make the truck loom over the much smaller car, its grille like a hungry maw, its whole surface grimy and rusted, its driver obscured so that the truck seems like an inhuman, mysterious threat. When Mann pauses at a gas station, the truck pulls up next to him, and Spielberg shoots from above, looking down over the truck's cab at Mann and his little red sedan, emphasizing how he's dwarfed by his adversary.

The subtext of this highway duel is masculinity, as suggested by Mann's phone conversation with his wife when he calls her from the gas station, before the action begins in earnest. They'd had an argument the night before because they'd been at a party where a friend or business associate had obviously been all over Mann's wife — "he practically raped me," she says, as the couple's two kids play innocently nearby — and Mann had done nothing to stop the harassment. With the incident behind them, she's willing to let it drop now, but it's obvious that it was a failure of masculinity for Mann, a failure to protect his wife and defend her honor, a failure to assert his strength and dominance as a man. (His name is even Mann: get it?) A sexual failure, too, the failure to maintain his exclusive sexual possession of his woman. This brief conversation colors the entire film, as does the radio program that Mann listens to during the introductory scenes, a conversation in which a man worries that he's not the "head of his household," that his wife really runs things. Mann, when a gas station attendant tells him, "you're the boss," makes a similar joke, wearily tossing off, "not at home," suggesting that he, too, feels like his masculinity is not entirely secure, that he's also not the head of his household.

These concerns are echoed in a later scene where Mann, during a respite from the truck's assaults, comes across a school bus that's stranded by the side of the road. The bus driver wants Mann to push the bus out of the dusty shoulder, but Mann simply gets their bumpers locked together and gets stuck himself, as the kids in the bus make faces at him and mock him, their laughing faces captured in uncomfortable closeups that emphasize Mann's humiliation. When the truck suddenly appears and easily pushes the school bus back onto the road, the symbolism couldn't be more obvious: it's a visualization of impotence, as Mann's car fails to have the power or vitality to do the job, while the big, powerful truck just charges in and pushes.


Maybe it's this psychological subtext, but there's something very Hitchcockian about Spielberg's debut. The film is populated with colorful Hitchcockian bit players — especially a vibrant old lady who runs a roadside gas station slash rattlesnake farm — and has moments of suspense and dark humor worthy of the master. At one point, at a café, Mann's reveries are interrupted by the loud clatter of silverware as a waitress tosses down a place setting and asks for his order, the woman seeming to loom over Mann as she's shot from a low angle: everything begins to unnerve the poor guy, who looks around the café trying to figure out which one of the men here with him might be the truck's hateful driver. More generally, all these wide open spaces, coupled with the general situation of a man pursued by a vehicle seemingly intent on his death, evoke the crop duster showdown of North By Northwest. But the film Duel resembles the most, in some surprising ways, is actually The Birds. Much as in the Hitchcock film, Duel is about senseless, incomprehensible violence, about something innocent turning on the protagonist and seeking his destruction without any apparent reason. Just as the birds have no purpose, no cause for their sudden violence, the truck driver in Duel remains inscrutable, his face always obscured — the most Mann ever sees of the driver is his boot and his forearm. This sudden violence makes no sense, it's a nightmare of helplessness, as inexplicable as it is terrifying.

Spielberg, even at this early stage, has a real feel for these scenes of suspense and action. The editing is crisp but not choppy, alternating between wide angles and long shots that show the car and the pursuing truck winding around twisty mountain roads, and closeups that capture the contrast between the implacable, monstrous facade of the truck and the sweaty human desperation of Mann in his car. Throughout it all, the sun beats down on the cars, bright and huge, spreading its white glow diffusely across the whole sky, refracting in the chrome and dirty glass of the dueling vehicles. The film feels hot and dusty, with Mann trapped between the steaming heat of the sun and the clouds of dust kicked up beneath the tires of his car.

That atmosphere, coupled with the mysterious, almost apocalyptic aura of the unyielding, unstoppable truck, makes Duel a consistently powerful debut film from the soon-to-be blockbuster director. The film does bog down during its middle section in the café, where Mann tries to grapple with what's happening to him. His internal monologue, delivered in voiceover, is awkwardly handled and doesn't add much to the film that isn't conveyed much more potently without words. This is a concept that requires few words and few adornments, and once Mann returns to the road, pursued by the unrelenting truck that haunts him, the film picks up speed again and never slows down until its fiery conclusion.

Minority Report

[This is a contribution to the Steven Spielberg Blogathon, hosted by Icebox Movies and Medfly Quarantine, running from December 18-28.]

It is fitting, and much remarked-upon, that for a film about seeing the future, eyes and vision are incredibly important to Steven Spielberg's Minority Report. The film literalizes the idea of seeing the future, removes the concept from the realm of the metaphysical and places it into the context of a gritty forensic police thriller. The future world it imagines, by way of Philip K. Dick, is one in which a trio of powerful precogs — savants with awesome mental abilities — are harnessed by the police department to prevent violent crimes before they happen. The precogs see — literally see — murders that are going to happen in the future, and their visions are harnessed through computers into video records that can then be played back, manipulated, and enhanced, their details thoroughly dissected by the precrime investigator John Anderton (Tom Cruise).

The business of cop shows, the sifting through of evidence and unearthing of clues, is translated into this futuristic milieu as Anderton analyzes these videos in order to discover the soon-to-occur murder's location and actors. Spielberg stages the introductory scene of Anderton leading an investigation as though the detective was conducting a symphony, using a complex computer system that responds to his every movement. He waves his hands and video fragments dash across the screen. Segments are looped and repeated, details are zoomed in on and snatches of sound are amplified, and every nuance of the video becomes a potential clue pointing towards the scene of the future crime. Detective work becomes a process of looking deeply and intently, examining the image — in other words, the detective becomes a figure analogous to a film editor, or perhaps a film critic, an analyzer of images, fitting together the bits and pieces of a scene in a way that makes sense and reveals the meaning of the scene.

The film's literalization of seeing the future is so potent because it's a metaphor or a model for the cinema, but even more poignantly it's compared to home movies. Anderton spends his days looking into the future, but his nights are spent immersed in the past, in home movie recordings of his young son, who disappeared and is presumed dead. We never say that we are seeing the past in the same way as we talk about seeing the future, but when we look at home movies or a photo album, we are in fact seeing the past, visually engaging with memories. When Anderton pulls up the footage of his son playing on the beach, selecting it from a larger collection like a connoisseur, he engages with it in much the same way as he does with the precogs' visions of the future: looping and rewinding, revisiting key passages as though hoping to extract some meaning, some tangible clue, from these images of his laughing, energetic son. It places Anderton's work in heartrending relief, as an effort to find the truth in these video images of the future, the truth that eludes and mystifies him when trying to make sense of the loss of his son through video records of the past.


The directive to look, to see deeply, is also central to the character of Agatha (Samantha Morton), the most powerful of the precogs. Agatha wants a witness, wants someone to look closely at a particular vision of hers, a vision of a crime that has long been thought "solved," the murder prevented before it happened. Agatha's quest becomes linked to Anderton's when Anderton sees himself in one of the precogs' visions, and sees his own name come up as the next would-be murderer for the police to apprehend. Anderton is forced to go on the run, eventually joined by Agatha, who he liberates from her weird imprisonment in the tanks that house the precogs and make them look like exhibits at an aquarium, an aspect of the whole precog system that everyone seems, curiously, morally blind to until Anderton rips Agatha out of this housing and is forced to confront her humanity.

That moral blindness is another form of seeing and not seeing, the motif that Spielberg seems fascinated with here. Is it really possible that this future society is so indifferent to the humanity of the precogs that a system where these people are permanantly chained, physically and mentally, to a computer system that channels their visions, is not only accepted but is soon to be unveiled on a larger scale? Before Anderton goes on the run, he and his fellow cops make some nods to the moral and philosophical dilemmas at the root of precrime — how do you arrest someone for a crime that hasn't actually occurred? — but they easily shake off the deeper doubts of FBI agent Danny Witwer (Colin Farrell), dismissing his concerns as inconsequential whining. In (broad) contemporary political terms, Witwer is the bleeding-heart liberal concerned with rights and morality, while the rest of society seems poised to side with the law-and-order conservatives who view the sacrifice of these abstract values and ideals as secondary to the gains of preventing murders. Spielberg never taps too deeply into this subcurrent of the story, but it's there nevertheless, teasing just below the surface.

Instead, there's a lot more fun with eyes and seeing. Anderton, grieving for his son, buys his drugs from an eyeless man whose hollow, empty sockets unseeingly bore into the center of the suffering Anderton. Later, he goes on the run but his eyes identify him wherever he goes. In this future society, eyescans are so routine that even advertisements scattered around on billboards scan the eyes of passersby in order to target spoken ads at individuals. As a result, wherever Anderton goes, his name is being shouted out amidst cheery slogans; Big Brother sees him everywhere because big companies see him everywhere. There's something to be said here, probably, about the reversal of the usual couch potato dynamic of consumers staring at ads. Now the ads stare back, and get personal, the logical outgrowths of online ad targeting and spyware. Spielberg, again, doesn't really go there, just leaves it as intriguing loose thread. For him, the eyescans are a plot device, necessary to give Anderton an obstacle to overcome.


This problem results in the ingenious sequence where Anderton goes to a disreputable doctor who gives him an eye transplant, which in this society where eyes are the windows not only to the soul but to one's entire person, is the equivalent of a new name and a new identity. Spielberg stages a brilliant sequence where the blind and blindfolded Anderton, who has to shield his eyes for some time after the surgery, is forced to hide from an army of spider-like miniature police robots. Spielberg's camera follows the robots on their skittering journey through the dilapidated building where Anderton is hiding, the camera seeming to creep through walls, finally arriving at the room where Anderton tries to slow his pulse and hide his breathing by submerging himself in cold water, before being forced to reveal his new eyes for the robots to scan.

All of this is set-up and preparation for the film's best gag, the slapstick chase sequence between Anderton and his own eye, a slippery connection to his past identity that he finally holds onto by the barest thread. Literally. This sense of humor — black, grisly, sometimes positively naughty as in Anderton and Agatha's visit to a virtual reality sin palace — enlivens the film, as does Spielberg's predictably fluid action staging. Minority Report is tense and visceral, balancing man-on-the-run suspense with bursts of action and those moments of piquant humor that give this dark film a surprisingly playful sensibility.

The finale drives home the film's multiple takes on seeing — to see the future, to see the truth, and not always at the same time or in the same sense — while first imprisoning Anderton in a way that mirrors the fates of the precogs at the beginning of the film, then unleashing him for the climax. Spielberg, as always, can't resist tying things up for the finale, resolving the darker undercurrents of the film in a tidy denouement where the bad guy is caught, the precog program ended, and everything set right. The rest of the film raises unsettling propositions about justice and morality: that justice could miscarry; that the illusion of moral certitude is just that, an illusion; that predicting the future can be the same as creating it, as Anderton is, paradoxically, set on the path to murder by the prediction that he would commit a murder. The film's ending tiredly suggests a more benign justice that will, eventually, win out in the end, but the torturous, unlikely machinations required to reach this happy ending only wind up enforcing the limitations of justice and law. Spielberg, no matter how hard he tries, can't erase the disquieting implications of his own film, and Minority Report is all the richer for this final lingering tension.