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November 9, 2003
The Studio-Indie, Pop-Prestige, Art-Commerce King
Why Steven Spielberg really is the greatest living American director.
By A. O. SCOTT
n the second half of Jean-Luc Godard's ''In Praise of Love,'' a very tall African-American woman in a red sports car arrives at the home of an elderly French couple, veterans of the anti-Nazi resistance who need an infusion of cash to keep their small seaside hotel in business. The visitor and her colleagues are interested in purchasing the rights to the couple's life story on behalf of an outfit called ''Steven Spielberg Associates and Incorporated.'' This curiously named company's motives are summed up in a classic Old European canard: since Americans have no history of their own, someone observes, they are compelled to go around buying that of other people. At the news conference following the film's screening at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival, a journalist asked Godard what he had against Steven Spielberg. Of course it was nothing personal, Godard replied, and in any case a proper answer would require a detailed, shot-by-shot analysis of Spielberg's movies, for which there was, alas, insufficient time.
Needless to say, the unseen ''Spielberg'' of ''In Praise of Love'' is not the actual director of ''Jaws,'' ''E.T.'' or (most relevant to Godard's murky polemical purposes) ''Schindler's List,'' but rather a familiar straw man who goes, and not only in France, by the same name. The real Steven Spielberg is, by just about any measure, the most commercially successful living American filmmaker; three of his films (''E.T.,'' ''Jurassic Park'' and ''Jaws'') are among the 25 top-grossing box-office movies of all time. He is also, to an extent unmatched by any other director, living or dead, routinely invoked as a synonym for Hollywood itself, much in the way old-time studio bosses and producers used to be. This is partly because, since 1994, when he founded DreamWorks SKG with David Geffen and Jeffrey Katzenberg, he has moonlighted as a studio boss; he has also been, for quite a bit longer, a producer of no small clout and influence. But neither his power within the industry (he was No. 2 on this year's Entertainment Weekly ranking of show-business heavyweights, after Jerry Bruckheimer) nor his track record at the box office is quite sufficient to account for his status as a symbol. Just as Godard is still seen to embody a notion of French art cinema -- difficult, aesthetically uncompromising, politically provocative -- that is both cherished and reviled, Spielberg, to audiences and critics alike, personifies American commercial cinema in all its glory and excess. He is celebrated for the sweep, accessibility and ambition of his movies, and also, sometimes in the same breath, attacked for sentimentality, overreaching and grandiosity. Like Alfred Hitchcock's (and, for that matter, like Jean-Luc Godard's), his name has been turned into an adjective of somewhat ambiguous meaning. Depending on the context, to call something ''Spielbergian'' is to say either that it is wondrous and full of feeling or that it is pushy, pandering and manipulative; the word refers equally to the exaltation of cinema as a popular art and to its debasement by a blockbuster mentality for which Spielberg, along with his friend and sometime collaborator George Lucas, is ritualistically held responsible.
This double meaning has less to do with our responses to particular movies Spielberg has made than with a persistent ambivalence about movies in general -- what they mean to us, what they do to us, how we feel about them. We crave the pleasure they supply -- the spectacle, the vicarious emotion, the sheer sensory overload -- even as we often regard it with puritanical suspicion. We want everything from movies -- and we want movies that appeal to everyone -- and then we recoil when someone tries to satisfy our profligate, utopian desires. And no single filmmaker has satisfied them across so many genres, and on such a global scale, as Spielberg, which may be precisely why, in spite of it all, he remains curiously misunderstood and even, strange as it is to say it, underrated.
Not least by the film industry itself, or at any rate by its official guardians of quality and high-mindedness, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Yes, the academy was lavish in rewarding ''Schindler's List.'' It is only a little bit cynical, however, to suggest that it could hardly have done otherwise, given its length, its subject matter and its unflinching sobriety. And that episode of glory punctuated several decades of remarkably consistent neglect. It is hardly surprising that the beloved crowd-pleasers of Spielberg's early years were snubbed at the Oscars, since they belonged to popular genres that the academy tends to patronize with minor and technical awards. And perhaps the more literary films of his middle period, ''The Color Purple'' and ''Empire of the Sun,'' struck voters (as they struck some critics) as too earnest, straining too hard after maturity and respectability. But it is a bit harder to fathom the academy's post-''Schindler'' indifference to Spielberg's work, which (with the arguable exception of the well-intentioned ''Amistad'') has gotten better and better. I don't only mean the notorious and still-controversial bypassing for Best Picture of ''Saving Private Ryan,'' one of the most influential American films in recent years, in favor of ''Shakespeare in Love,'' one of the least. In the past three years Spielberg has released three movies -- ''A.I.,'' ''Minority Report'' and ''Catch Me if You Can'' -- that are not only, individually and in the aggregate, as good as anything he has ever done; these films are also, in the current artistic and technological circumstances, as good as it is possible to imagine movies to be. The three have yielded a tiny handful of nominations, again mostly in secondary categories, and no Oscars.
Of course, the Oscars are, in the end, little more than a lustrous prelude to the trivia contests of the future, but the academy's recent marginalization of Spielberg nonetheless reveals something about the current ecology of American moviemaking. Increasingly, the industry functions according to a two-tiered system, whereby the largest portion of money is spent (and made) by the major studios on big, effects-driven action movies, while the traditionally award-worthy prestige pictures -- the literary adaptations, the melodramas of terminal illness and domestic dysfunction, the historical dramas -- are more and more of a niche enterprise, handled by the studios' art-house and ''classics'' subsidiaries, which the Internet movie columnist David Poland aptly calls ''the dependents.'' (Of last year's nominees for the Best Picture award, only one-half of one movie, ''The Hours,'' came from one of the seven majors. This year, the studios are trying to redress this imbalance by releasing a slate of holiday action movies -- ''The Last Samurai,'' ''Master and Commander,'' ''The Missing,'' -- with A-list actors and period costumes.)
Spielberg's work tends to fall into the gap between these categories. ''A.I.'' and ''Minority Report,'' classified by default as science-fiction adventure movies and laden with eye-popping digitally enhanced special effects, were released during the summer blockbuster season, even though their dark, complex, morally troubling narratives seemed unlikely to appeal to thrill-seeking teenagers. ''Catch Me if You Can,'' which was released last Christmas and did blockbuster business, was both a dazzling pop caper comedy and a heartfelt variation on the Lost Boy theme that has been so central to Spielberg's imagination.
The problem may be with the categories themselves, which function as crutches for critics and studio executives at the expense of the movies and their audience. Perhaps because the experience of moviegoing remains one of sensuous immediacy and subjective feeling -- because both good movies and bad ones have the power to strike us dumb -- the language of movie talk is thick with abstractions and received ideas.
Perhaps because dividing movies into the only categories that really matter -- ''good'' and ''bad'' -- seems both overly facile and intellectually overwhelming, we devise more elaborate, more knowing ways of sorting them out. The division between studios and so-called independents is only the latest in a long series of dubious dichotomies that come and go over the years: between prestige pictures and B-movies; between auteurs and industry hacks; between movies as a form of personal expression and movies as a commercial product; between movies aimed at the widest possible public and those tailored for more restricted and refined taste; between the perennial imaginary antagonists art and commerce.
pielberg's career is exemplary in part because it reaffirms the uselessness of such distinctions. A child of the studios, placed under contract at Universal at the tender age of 22, he quickly became, in the ways that really matter, an independent filmmaker, able to do his work with minimal creative interference and with very little budgetary constraint. Without being overtly autobiographical, a number of his films seem deeply and obviously personal, especially those that perceive the world through the eyes of lonely, resourceful boys in difficult circumstances -- ''Close Encounters of the Third Kind,'' ''E.T.,'' ''Empire of the Sun,'' ''A.I.'' But all of these, along with quite a few others, originated as projects intended for other directors. Spielberg is clearly the author of his movies, but only once in his entire professional career, with ''A.I.,'' has he taken sole screenwriting credit. More significant, his movies, while never ceasing to court the appetites (and the dollars) of a public hungry for spectacle, have also been, to an extent that his skill makes it easy to underestimate, challenging and serious works of popular art. To try to sort them by genre and appeal, to divide the prestige projects from the B pictures, is an increasingly futile exercise.
Which is not to say that the movies -- Spielberg's own movies, and movies in general -- haven't changed in the 30-odd years he has been making them. Spielberg, who is 56, began experimenting with cameras and handmade special effects as a child; he has been directing feature films professionally for most of his adult life. In his 20's, he became one of the protagonists -- either a hero or a villain, depending on which version you follow -- in a story by now so familiar that it has acquired the air of myth. By the end of the 60's, the ancient studio system, which had weathered the Second World War, antitrust litigation, McCarthy-era witch hunts and the rise of television, had at last reached a stage of terminal exhaustion, and the movies seemed, perhaps for the first time in their history, to be drifting out of touch with the rest of the culture. Hollywood was transformed by a cohort of young directors, many of them film-school graduates or dropouts, all part of a ''film generation'' whose view of the world had been shaped, to an unprecedented degree, by earlier movies, and whose obsession with the medium expanded the formal range and, perhaps paradoxically, deepened the realism of American movies. Their names form, now that the 70's have been officially canonized as a golden age, a familiar roster of heroes, martyrs, survivors and burnt-out cases: Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, William Friedkin, Peter Bogdanovich, Hal Ashby, Bob Rafelson.
And also, of course, Spielberg and Lucas. Their places in the greatest-generation pantheon have been subject to a fair amount of contention and revisionism. In the received wisdom of hindsight, a heady period during which directors enjoyed unprecedented creative autonomy was brought to an end by two antithetical kinds of extravagance: the extravagant failure of a number of hugely, some might say hubristically, ambitious projects and the extravagant success of, in short order, ''Jaws,'' ''Star Wars,'' ''Close Encounters of the Third Kind'' and ''Raiders of the Lost Ark.'' Hollywood, the legend goes, began to turn away from tough, grown-up movies toward sequel-ready, cartoonish kid stuff, the dominance of which has continued to this day, in spite of the indie insurgencies of the late 80's and early 90's. Realism was supplanted by fantasy; storytelling was abandoned for sensation.
The accusation, though, depends on a highly selective reading of film history and on a misreading of the films themselves. What is most striking now about ''Jaws'' is not only how seldom the shark appears, but how slowly the action moves, how much time is spent generating suspense through scenes of dialogue. And while ''E.T.'' and ''Close Encounters'' are not inaccurately recalled as sentimental, supernatural fables, they are also notable for their fine observations of character and place, for rough, naturalistic edges that place them securely within the New Hollywood aesthetic of their time.
They look, in other words, positively old-fashioned. Their director, meanwhile, has long since passed through his phases of brilliant apprenticeship and precocious triumph to become a senior member of the Hollywood establishment -- and, more important, a conservator of the nobler visions and traditions of American cinema. His more recent work, from the quiet post-battle sequences in ''Private Ryan'' to the haunted futures of ''A.I.'' and ''Minority Report'' to the exuberant colors of ''Catch Me if You Can,'' has a calm precision that might even be described as classical, especially when compared with the fast cuts and narrative non sequiturs that dominate the summer multiplexes.
So Spielberg, who made ''Jurassic Park'' and ''Schindler's List'' almost simultaneously and who will pick up the ''Indiana Jones'' cycle next year, remains a category unto himself, both an incarnation of Hollywood's large-scale, world-conquering ambitions and a rebuke to its cynicism and coarseness. It would take a detailed, shot-by-shot analysis of his movies to prove this assertion. Chances are that you, along with a few million other people, have already undertaken it.
