Sometimes it's hard to take Steven Spielberg seriously. The deeply felt emotions of his debut feature, The Sugarland Express, would eventually curdle into the treacle of The Color Purple and Always. The brilliant engineer of Jaws and Raiders Of The Lost Ark would eventually craft such by-the-numbers thrill rides as Jurassic Park and its even more dire sequel. The oddball dreamer responsible for Close Encounters Of The Third Kind would bring us--shudder--Hook.
Spielberg's been on a bit of an upswing lately, especially with his most recent effort, Munich, but his instincts still fail him. Minority Report is well-written and superbly directed, with brilliant cameo performances from Lois Smith, Tim Blake Nelson and Max Von Sydow--but utterly compromised by being framed as a Tom Cruise starring vehicle. It wants to be a dark thriller about a haunted protagonist finding meaning in his life...but it's impossible to imagine an actor less introspective than Cruise. Every time he's on screen, he's at war with all the elements surrounding him.
Matthew McConaughey in Amistad, Tom Hanks in Saving Private Ryan, Cruise again in War Of The Worlds--Spielberg's penchant for movie-star casting constantly undercuts the believability of the worlds he's trying to create. And sometimes Spielberg does it to himself--has any movie been more inconsistent than Schindler's List? Brilliantly directed scenes mingle with tawdry sentimentality, and there is no tone, no overriding vision. It just sits there, demanding awards for its courage in exposing fifty year old horrors.
For whatever reason, the Indiana Jones series seems to energize Spielberg; even the worst in the series, The Last Crusade, is breezy and stylish. He doesn't seem to feel the need to bathe everything in significance; his entertainer's instincts kick in. Will this still hold true for the new one, or will it be mawkish and mechanical?
Honestly, the main reason I'm writing all this is to highlight one of my favorite Spielberg pictures, the misbegotten comedy 1941. Sure, it's gargantually overscaled, and often more cruel than funny. But that cruelty seems to have a point; there's a cynicism to this movie, a detached, God's eye view of human behavior at its worst. There's no way this mocking vision of patriotism run amuck could get made now, and its casual racism and misogyny seem to have been deliberate attempts to capture an era. It's impossible to imagine Spielberg even attempting something like this nowadays, and we're all poorer for that.
Justifications aside, though, the reason I like 1941 is because, all considerations of plot and characterization aside, it's simply brilliantly directed. Consider this scene: the amazingly physical performances of Bobby DiCicco, Treat Williams and Wendie Jo Sperber, the intricate staging, Spielberg's dazzling camera moves, the razor sharp editing--it's a thing of beauty. (And sorry about the overdub, it's the best-looking version of this sequence available.)
The guy responsible for that scene is a genius. Let's hope the new Indiana Jones picture is directed by this guy, not the one who made The Terminal.
