Beneath the 'Berg: The Director Who Wouldn't Grow Up

Several years ago, I received one of my infrequent birthday presents from an associate who was a fellow movie lover. When I opened the package, I didn’t want to seem dismayed, so I thanked him. Inside, I wondered why he had given me a large coffee-table book on Steven Spielberg. He knew the ‘Berg and I had “issues.” I realize I come from a different time and that I’m often a contrarian, but I admire a lot of what Spielberg has accomplished in his life. Those who shared the years of my childhood were all influenced in one way or another by one of the most profitable directors on Earth. Yet, as I grew older, I began to see cracks in the perfect veneer.

I imagine one of the first movies I ever saw was E. T.: The Extra-Terrestrial. Released a year before my birth, it is a film that is said to be magical and very touching. Aside from terrific performances by the actors (especially Henry Thomas), I always found it boring. This was years before our attention spans sputtered into nothing. It indeed does have some moments of movie magic (and, as always, a beautiful score by John Williams), but the plodding plot and the length of time between magic routinely put me to sleep and my VHS copy was used (along with Fantasia) to stave off insomnia, which has been a lifelong problem. But it is not just the film’s length and slowness that gives me issues.

I had a recent discussion so social media with a brilliant friend in which we bandied about on Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan for several hours. I think my major beef was Spielberg’s sentimentality. There’s a reason he made Hook. He never grew up. Part of this is something special because a lot of his films deal with childhood, children, and their point of view of the world. But the problem with sentimentality and someone who makes movies with a perfect sheen is the product is wide, not deep and leaves open so many opportunities for emotional manipulation.

No one likes to cry at movies and art the way I do. The tears are never of sadness, but a recognition of aesthetic beauty. While most people cry when Mufasa dies in the The Lion King, I cry when the herds bow down to Simba in the film’s opening moments (the opening is the best thing about the film). But I’ve never felt emotion for a Spielberg film—wistfulness, maybe—but not true emotion. Some directors are rather frank about their enjoyment in manipulating an audience. And most of the masters do, but they never show it. Spielberg ain’t so lucky. I can smell the cues a mile away and that prevents me from actually experiencing the sensation. When Hitchcock manipulates you, you have a big grin on your face. You don’t mind it because he’s smarter than you. Spielberg’s films appeal to almost everybody and, perhaps for that reason, the manipulation is rarely clever.

Let’s take a look at some of the biggies so I can express my problems. We recently had the 50^thanniversary of Jaws, most certainly a milestone in filmmaking. I’ve never found it particularly scary, but there is a certain fascination in seeing Roy Scheider, Robert Shaw, and Richard Dreyfuss work together. Vastly different from Peter Benchley’s novel (a fun read), today Jaws looks cheap and has the disadvantage of existing in a bizarre outgrowth of this century with people having a rather odd fascination (and love) of Great Whites.

None of these are the reasons I resent the film. As William Goldman pointed out, no single movie of the twentieth century changed cinema the way it did—and not for the better. After producers realized the kind of money they could make, the smaller, grittier films of the late sixties and early seventies (my favorite period) went by the wayside. Films could no longer open, play, and find their audience. All that mattered was that some teenager bought a ticket to your movie on the opening weekend. Spielberg (in tandem with Lucas) were the precursors of our Marvel problem today. They made amusement park rides—fun, most of them—but not films.

After the flop 1941, Spielberg rode high in the early ‘80s with fantasy. Raiders of the Lost Ark and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom were much like the Star Wars films—homages to the film serials of the ‘30s. The difference between those serials and the previously mentioned films is they had bigger budgets and most people seeing the movies between 1981 and 1984 didn’t know the swashbuckling pulp of the serials. To them, it was unique. But it never was. It was a retread and regression. I have, I admit, a soft spot for Temple of Doom. If you can believe it, it came with a Happy Meal when I was nine.

In the mid-80s, Spielberg began trying to wear the suit of an important director. He directed perhaps his most manipulative movie, The Color Purple, a misandrist piece of work that he had no business making. Aside from giving us the first commercial glimpses of what Whoopi Goldberg could do (there are no traces of her talent left as she makes her living as a political pundit), Purple sanitized Alice Walker’s book as Spielberg sanitizes everything, including the worst event in the 20^th century, but more on that later. After Empire of the Sun, Spielberg went back to his stock stuff for five years, producing one hit and one miss. The hit was the last Indiana Jones movie. Yeah, I said it. The miss was Hook, which wasted everyone’s time. Rather than doing a version of Peter Pan (which would have been autobiographical for Spielberg) he gave us a grim, garbled mess that elaborated on a mythology that, frankly, helped lead the world into an extended infantilization—most people escape teenage thinking now in their late thirties.

But 1993 was the year. Back to back, Spielberg would show us his consummate action skills with Jurassic Park (which I think everyone likes, including me) and Schindler’s List. Oh, no. He’s not going to say anything bad about Schindler’s List is he? Yes, I am. All I have to say is simply this: when you take a subject about the greatest failure of Western Civilization and play with the audience in the fake-out shower sequence, you should be fined at the least. As Terry Gilliam pointed out, Schindler’s List is not a story about the Holocaust where millions upon millions died—it’s a story of a minor (but still extraordinary) success. It’s a movie, I suppose, about hope—and the Shoah is not a story of hope. It is a story of evil. It might have been best never to have made it. I think that would have been more respectful.

After Jurassic Park, Spielberg whizzed in many different directions. He attempted to shoehorn one of his more prominent themes (parents and children) into an unintentionally funny sequel to Park, he made his real war movie Saving Private Ryan, and finished a Stanley Kubrick passion project. In my lively discussion with my friend, I held out that Ryan has an absolutely stunning beginning and then a plot that peters and peters out until we’re in a bombed-out church talking about the boys’ “first time.” I think Ryan is as sentimental as any of his films, not the major drama most people see. By the way, sentimentalism is never good. Sentiment can be life-affirming, but it’s a different thing and Spielberg doesn’t understand the difference between the two.

The early 2000s, I think, saw some of his best work. I see no flaws in Minority Report or Catch Me if You Can. The latter is the type of film he would have made had he lived in the early years of cinema. The major reason the film works is due to Leonardo DiCaprio, but Spielberg’s film is timeless now. In equal parts funny and actually touching, I think it’s his best work overall. Just because he deals with bigger themes in his more gigantic films doesn’t mean that he always had the assured hand. Catch is made by a true professional, which I’ve never argued Spielberg wasn’t. I never tire of watching it.

After it, there are definite stinkers. I think War of the Worlds is probably one of the ten most wastes of time I’ve ever seen on film. Lincoln is wonderful, but as disappointing as Hook in the sense that I would have loved to have seen a John Adams-style biopic of Lincoln directed by Spielberg. I got a movie about passing legislation. No, Steven. I want to see him grow up, save the Union, and be shot at Ford’s Theatre. He could have done that rather well, but he didn’t.

The last film I’ll discuss is West Side Story. Though a film about teenage gang violence in the 1950s, it is perhaps his most sentimental film. Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins’ original film is a masterpiece—one of the best musical films of all times. Spielberg’s is tiresome with too much dialogue (some of it in Spanish un-subtitled which was Spielberg trying to get with the times but instead it just alienated the majority of its audience who hated it) and a miserably bad performance by Ansel Elgort, who’s got the screen presence of a rotting mushroom.

As a blog post, this is not as comprehensive as I’d hoped and I’m not even sure I’ve made my point except to say it is good to be young at heart, but there is a time to leave the milk and learn to chew meat. There is a time for emotion and a time for sentiment, but never emotional manipulation. There used to be a time when you go to the pictures and see a grown-up movie. Spielberg is one of the reasons those works go straight to Netflix today. They’re the better films, but they don’t make hundreds of millions of dollars, so they must be pointless, right?

Spielberg is approaching 80 and he will most likely never slow down. That’s fine; everyone should be allowed to do their work. But do yourself a favor and compare a list of the films Spielberg has produced and the films he has directed. You’ll see how much better the former is: Back to the Future, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, The Land Before Time, Arachnophobia, Twister, the Coen Bros.’ True Grit. He’s a great producer, executive or otherwise. He brings out greatness in actors, writers, and others for sure. But I hold to my point. There’s a reason why All the President’s Men was called the thinking person’s Jaws. I don’t want to insult anyone, but perhaps you understand my meaning. How much of his iceberg is beneath? Surprisingly little.