Something Old, Something New: The Last Temptation of Christ / Lincoln

I knew I'd forgotten to link to something this week. Last Monday, my second Something Old, Something New piece went up, this time on the similarities that link Lincoln with another subversive, empathetic portrait of an abstracted icon, The Last Temptation of Christ. I'm quite happy with this piece, so I hope you read it. It can be found at Movie Mezzanine here.

Lincoln (Steven Spielberg, 2012)

Like so many modern movie titles, Lincoln is only one word, and as with so many other titles, this offers an oversimplified, even misleading idea of what the actual film contains. Though Steven Spielberg roped in perhaps the most noteworthy white elephant actor of our time, Daniel Day-Lewis, to portray the 16th president, Lincoln concerns the man only elliptically. He appears chiefly as a do-gooder who relies on Machiavellian practices, one of which is the use of others to do his dirty work. And though the film concentrates on the passage of the 13th Amendment, Lincoln’s most celebrated achievement and undoubtedly an act of great good, Lincoln reveals that the path to that moment was rough and dirty, indeed.

That filth can be seen in the film’s first shots, the only ones of the movie to take place on a battlefield, or at least the only one to do so during a battle rather than the still aftermath. In a few gruesomely intimate but stably mounted shots, Spielberg manages to top the false realism of Saving Private Ryan for sheer visceral repulsion. Unionists and Rebs have moved too close for musket fire, resorting to bayonet stabs, fistfights, even drowning foes in the rising rainwaters in trenches. It is brute savagery at its most chaotic and meaningless, and it hangs over the rest of the film as Lincoln alternately uses and is hindered by war developments in his quest to get slavery abolished. And as the footage is revealed to be the memories of black soldiers relating the battle to Lincoln, the pride they express in getting back at Confederates massacring all captured black soldiers hints at the tangle of racial strife that will only be compounded by the amendment, not solved by it.

Steven Spielberg: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

In defense of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, there is at least some kind of push to make the movie distinct from its predecessors. Where the first three films paid homage to serials of the ‘30s and ‘40s, Crystal Skull accounts for the 19-year gap between between this fourth installment in the franchise and 1989’s Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade by shifting its inspirations accordingly.

Here, the root inspiration is ‘50s-era science fiction (and its attendant Cold War subtext), which, in a way, makes the film unique, at least in relation to the other Indy movies. Instead of relics with supernatural might, the treasured objects of the film’s title are mysterious, perfectly formed skulls with strange powers, powers not of brute strength but of mental manipulation. In keeping with anti-Communist paranoia, the weapon here is the power to brainwash without fail. It’s a clever twist that didn’t get enough credit upon the film’s initial release; the only critic I can recall even mentioning it was, of all people, routine Spielberg-basher Jonathan Rosenbaum.

Steven Spielberg: Munich

An act of American obliviousness sets in motion the events of Munich. At the 1972 Olympics, a group of American athletes stumble across some Palestinian men attempting to get past a gate. Used to the sight of small bands of men from different countries roaming the area, the Americans jovially call out to them and ask what event they're in. Blind to the tense, apprehensive faces of the men, the athletes show them in and depart on friendly terms. But before the Americans are even out of range, the group is already pulling out new clothes and weapons to storm the hotel room holding the Israeli Olympic team. They do, and everything else plays out on the actual newscasts recorded over the next 18 hours. It ends, of course, with Jim McKay's infamous declaration, "They're all gone."

But despite the film's title, Munich does not end with the conclusion of its heinous massacre; it's only just begun. In fact, Munich may not even be about the aftermath of the killings in the titular city. Released in proximity with the 9/11-conjuring fever dream War of the Worlds, Munich serves as the more thoughtful, severe follow-up to the notion of a terrorist attack and society's response to it. Spielberg's reenactments of news crews frantically assembling outside the hotel, scrambling for any new updates as their presence only worsens the situation, is as indicative of Spielberg's true aims as the final shot showing the New York skyline with the World Trade Center still standing in the middle of the frame. Munich may be about a specific event and the fallout from it, but the director clearly wants us to apply the lessons the movie teaches to more current issues of terrorism and counterterrorism.

Steven Spielberg: War of the Worlds

It's just as well that War of the Worlds was hobbled upon its initial release by the lingering effects of Tom Cruise's infamous couch-jumping whatever. If Americans were going to let a stupid thing like that distract them, who knows how they might have reacted if they realized what all the movie had to say about 9/11 and the still-raging debate over Iraq. Even the conclusion of H.G. Wells' original novel, forecast in the opening credits expanding outward from single-cell organisms to humanity and even the cosmos, reflects the pitfalls of the War on Terror. "Occupations always fail!" declares a mad character late in the film, and one gets the distinct feeling he isn't just talking about invaders from Mars.

But War of the Worlds is, for the most part, not a commentary on the War on Terror so much as snapshot of what inspired it and how the national emotions of panic, grief, rage and bewilderment contributed to it. There's no criticism here; that would come with Spielberg's other 2005 film. No, War of the Worlds' primary aim is still to function as a blockbuster, but in its finely detailed, occasionally surreal construction is an almost therapeutic attempt to recreate an event fresh in the nation's mind, all the better to study it and to (hopefully) make a more informed decision than we did when that day actually happened.

Steven Spielberg: The Terminal

Spielberg's first film to truly address the changing American landscape after September 11, The Terminal is at once a key point in his development and one of his most instantly forgettable movies. Shot on a titanic set intended as a sort of tribute to the great comic canvases of Jacques Tati, The Terminal confines its action to the most logical of starting points when unpacking the effects of 9/11: an airport.

The first shots roll over Customs & Border Patrol setting up for the day at JFK International, cordons being set up to direct incoming travelers as dogs make a quick scan of the place. Soon, the people pour in, travelers of all different nationalities cramming into lines and handing over passports and declaration forms as they are screened by officials in booths. Then the camera pulls back to reveal that these measures are but the first step of heightened security. Above it all, more officials watch on surveillance cameras for any anomalies, the airport now looking more like a casino than a transportation hub. In a few minutes, Spielberg deftly casts a world of total monitoring, where excuses and intentions don't matter. If someone catches an error, arrest and deportation follows swiftly. In this new world, the prospect of travel seems more frightening than exciting.

Steven Spielberg: Catch Me if You Can

The brilliant opening credits of Catch Me if You Can encapsulate the spirit and tenor of the film to follow with magnificent conciseness. Animated with the use of rubber stamps (an ingenious technique that only further ties the credits to the content of the actual movie), Olivier Kuntzel's and Florence Deygas' title design renders Spielberg's most delicate film into a brief summary of plot and direction. The credits have a tremendous flow and momentum to them, the words forming in elegant typography, lines always continuing until they form the next credit. The animation has the same unceasing inertia, with the frame shifting horizontally and vertically as the stamped silhouette of Frank William Abagnale, Jr. (Leonardo DiCaprio) evades FBI Agent Carl Hanratty (Tom Hanks). Buoyed by John Williams' own '60s throwback, a light but still dramatic score, these first minutes are so memorable that I recalled them instantly after not seeing the film in years, while so much of the actual story had faded.

Watching Catch Me if You Can again, however, made me wonder how I'd let it sink in my estimation. It's an undeniably light work, perhaps Spielberg's lightest since The Sugarland Express, his first theatrical film. But it's also the first of his movies since then to truly work as a comedy, to still operate on the formal, large scale of his typical work but also generate character-driven, intimate humor woefully absent in, say, 1941. So delicate is Spielberg's craft here, so unlike his typical populist stylist of overwhelming spectacle, that it can be easy to miss that the film, like The Sugarland Express, is actually a drama. In fact, it may be the most elegant summary of some of Spielberg's pet themes of childhood innocence and distanced parenthood. That it is so funny only reveals frustratingly unexplored depths to Spielberg's storytelling capacity.

Steven Spielberg: Minority Report

Filmed from March to July 2001, Minority Report was not influenced by the September 11 attacks later that year, yet retrospectively it seems the first of Steven Spielberg's attempts to grapple with the aftermath of the tragedy. A neo-noir in which crime is committed and prosecuted in the mind, Minority Report proves disturbingly prescient in its vision of a world in which murder is punished preemptively. Though based on an even older Philip K. Dick story, the film feels like the meeting point of the Patriot Act and the impetus for the Iraq invasion, albeit the focus lies not on wars and national defense but mere law enforcement. As the PSAs encouraging support for a national PreCrime system argue to the people, "That which keeps us safe also keeps us free."

Chief John Anderton (Tom Cruise) believes that motto with all his heart. Having lost his son years ago to an unknown kidnapper/murderer, John looks at PreCrime as a way to prevent such pain from afflicting anyone else. Using a trio of genetically engineered psychics to predict when murders will occur and who the perpetrators and victims will be, Anderton and the rest of Washington D.C.'s unit have reduced the murder rate in one of America's most violent cities to zero. The resultant utopia resembles that of Demolition Man: exceedingly bright and almost eerily calm. Only where Demolition Man presented its peace as the product of nanny-state liberalism, Minority Report shows how instant detention has cleared the streets.

War Horse (Steven Spielberg, 2011)

Like his other release this year, The Adventures of Tintin, Steven Spielberg's War Horse indulges in the best and worst of a particular facet of the director's talent. Tintin lacks a proper dramatic arc and works largely without any stakes, yet it showcases Spielberg's talent for choreographing dynamic, vast setpieces of eye-popping visual marvels. War Horse, the more low-key, Oscar-friendly picture, contains moments of such beauty as to border on the poetic, matching the most abstract and haunting shots of the director's canon. But it is also such a hand-holding, tedious affair as to display the most immature, irritating traits of Spielberg's storytelling. In other terms, if Tintin displays Spielberg at his most childlike, War Horse shows him at his most childish.

War Horse barely even gets started before it's in your face with forced wonder, opening on a young English farm boy, Albert (Jeremy Irvine), watching the birth of a foal with fascination. But the film moves through a quick series of shots that continue to convey Albert's instant love of this creature, even as the edits clearly hop over a significant portion of time. Within seconds of screen time, the foal grows into a yearling, but Albert has that same dopey look on his face. Does that mean he walked around like the village idiot for weeks, even months, gawping at a damn horse? And when Albert's lovable alcoholic father (Peter Mullan) buys the horse at an auction just to get one over his landlord, the lad is so overjoyed that the very real possibility his dad just made them homeless matters nothing next to owning "Joey," All the while, John Williams score insists you take a handkerchief, regardless of whether your eyes are wet. This is not the organic Spielberg who could masterfully manipulate an audience to genuine reaction; this is a battering ram methodically slamming against the portcullis until it can break through and shove the intended emotional response down everyone's throat.

The Adventures of Tintin (Steven Spielberg, 2011)

Written as one extended climax, The Adventures of Tintin can be a draining experience, and one generally bereft of traditionally dramatic human elements. Yet the film bursts with such exuberance and imagination that even the Uncanny Valley limitations of motion-capture animation vanish in Brobdingnagian sequences so vast they make the special effect showcases of the Indiana Jones films look like the Super-8 pictures Spielberg made as a teenager. However well or poorly Spielberg's crack team of British writers capture the spirit of Hergé comics, Tintin is remarkable first and foremost for allowing one of cinema's biggest dreamers the opportunity to do anything he wants to do.

Spielberg's camera, already so active and eager in his live-action films, is here unmoored from any hindrance, be it spatial dimensions, production safety or physics itself. Every shot swoons, tilts, zooms and soars with elegance, creating such fluid motion that scenes routinely flow into each other through sudden inversions of  scale and setting. A massive setpiece shrinks into a puddle of water stepped in as the focus shifts, or a camelback trek through an endless desert forms on the back of a hand. Such segues make the film even more vertiginous, a dizzying, unabashed exercise in style over substance, one constantly in motion as the 3D communicate the unstoppable momentum, not unlike action lines in a comic. But when the artist in question is one of the medium's great stylists, sometimes it's more rewarding to simply sit back and be wowed.

Steven Spielberg: A.I. Artificial Intelligence

Given that my return to A.I. is what prompted my decision to revisit all of Steven Spielberg's films in the first place, I was afraid I had nothing to add to my original review. However, I think I mostly avoided retreading and if I have no particularly new point to make about the ending, I do at least come at it from a different angle in response to Roger Ebert's recent addition of the film into his Great Movies canon, a move that makes me happy but does not preclude me from disagreeing with his interpretation. I stand by this being Spielberg's finest film, and also one that I think is better for his involvement, not some second-best option to a Kubrick direction (Kubrick likely would have agreed, since he urged Spielberg to take it well before he passed). Perhaps the most philosophical blockbuster ever made, and certainly one of the finest American films of the Aughts.

Check out my new review of the film at Cinelogue.

Steven Spielberg: Saving Private Ryan

Saving Private Ryan is the most troublesome film in Steven Spielberg's filmography. It, far more than the contested Schindler's List, Amistad or even the tonally inconsistent The Color Purple, is the best evidence for Spielberg's supposed unsuitability for drama. Those films counterbalance Spielberg's worrisome moments of misplaced sentimentality with glimpses of an actual understanding of the gravity of the situation. The understated tilt up from the infamous shower scene in Schindler's List to show the consequences of actual gas chambers works as a response to both accusations that the director was exploiting a world travesty and his supposed lack of subtlety. Saving Private Ryan lacks such a moment. No, that's not right; it does contain such moments, but they feel artificial and forced, feeling like the work of a man who threw them in desperately at the last minute instead of finding organic depth.

In essence, Saving Private Ryan is the Holy Bible of war movies, in the sense that it contains so many contradictory, half-baked themes and morals that it can be used to justify practically any outlook. As such, I cannot say that it is a bad movie, per se; in fact, some moments display an almost overwhelming sense of form. But it is a schizophrenic movie, filled with competing influences of other war films. That indeed is the problem: for a supposedly realistic document, this is a film founded on other films instead of history.

Steven Spielberg: The Lost World: Jurassic Park

Having filled my viewing gaps in Spielberg's filmography, the status of The Lost World: Jurassic Park as one of the director's weakest films, if not his worst film, has never been less in doubt. Other low points in the director's career have at least shown promise or intriguing premises: Hook may rely far too much on its regrettably hip version of the Lost Boys' hideout, but it sports two great performances and a high concept floated it through many of its glaring flaws. 1941 showed the director's first major, explicit attempt to revive the films of his youth for the modern multiplex, an approach that would soon bear fruit with the Indiana Jones franchise. Even the forgotten Always, with its too-broad combination of haunting movies A Matter of Life and Death and Only Angels Have Wings, had moments of beauty worthy of those wrenching melodramas.

In comparison, The Lost World seems such a cynical cash-in for Spielberg's biggest hit that hardly any visible reason exists as to why he would do it. It's not like the world's richest and most powerful director needed to do this to get approval for another film. His previous two films, the first Jurassic Park and Schindler's List, eradicated whatever sliver of doubt remained that Spielberg was King of Hollywood. The knowledge of the uselessness of the sequel makes its wretched, slapstick construction all the more grating.

Steven Spielberg: Amistad

Amistad is the last film in Steven Spielberg's corpus I'm visiting for the first time. Surrounded by the more lauded dramatic achievements of Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan, not to mention colored by certain feelings of its preachiness among those who saw it, Spielberg's middle drama of the '90s never appeared on my radar as anything other than a faint blip. But just as I got to see Always through fresh eyes that countered a number of my expectations for that film, so too did Amistad prove far more than the half-forgotten mainstream consensus would have me believe.

In fact, Amistad might well be the most consistent of Spielberg's triumvirate of '90s prestige pictures. It lacks the overwhelming emotional impact of Schindler's List and the visceral power of Saving Private Ryan, but it makes up for these shortcomings by sidestepping the bouts of moral ambiguity and questionable "mainstreamification" of its serious themes. Amistad does have a bit of typical writing in its construction, but by and large it proves a deftly written, fleetingly problematic return to the issue Spielberg did not treat with full sincerity and conviction with The Color Purple: slavery and racism.

Steven Spielberg: Schindler's List

Perhaps the greatest argument for the sincerity and dedication Steven Spielberg put into Schindler's List is how radical a departure it was for the artist. Spielberg's Holocaust drama was by no means his first serious drama, but it is the first to be largely void of his more flamboyant framing and movement. Spielberg had previously shown a keen ability to cut and frame in such a way as to maximize audience impact, but here he needed them to do more than just be entertained or sympathize with characters. Gravity and respect are required here, and Spielberg wrestles with crafting a working mainstream film without his usual stylistic élan.

Ingeniously, he finds ways to maintain his usual level of craftsmanship while employing unfamiliar techniques. Schindler's List is more static than any of Spielberg's other works, and the camera movement that feels so liberating in his other movies connotes dread here. Whenever the camera starts to track, practically nothing good will come of it, and one fears the movement because it will only display more atrocity, more terror.

Fundamentally, the movie is an indirect conflict between two principal characters, Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson) and Amon Goeth (Ralph Fiennes), and Spielberg structures much of the movie as a call and response between them. Perhaps it speaks to the director's limitations that he condenses the Holocaust to a more conventional dramatic structure, but I never really believed the film was "about" the Holocaust anyway. Instead, it concerns the human reaction of those mired in it, not seeking to explicate the motives or moral justifications of the greatest of human failings but demonstrating how some reacted to it. In the case of Goeth, it brought out the worst; for Schindler, the best.

Spielberg introduces the two, though far apart, in similar manners. He does not show them directly, letting us see another person speaking to them until the camera finally reels around to present them. We first see Schindler through close-ups of his material effects, pristine formal wear and wads of cash casually crammed all over the place. We then see an extreme close-up of the man placing a Nazi pin on his business suit, suggesting that the fascist regime is something he wears over his real identity as a money-maker and never thinks twice about. Sure enough, when he arrives at a restaurant to meet with the head of the SS in Kraków, Scherner (Andrzej Seweryn), Schindler flashes that cash to make himself known: he has come to Poland to profit from the war, and getting approval for his business ventures will require greasing some wheels, preferably with Hennessy cognac or Dom Perignon. Sure enough, he soon has a factory up and running, which he populates with Jewish workers because they cost less than anyone else.


When Goeth appears, however, he is in the opposite shape as proud, hale Schindler, hunched over with a handkerchief ever-present at his face as he sniffles. Bent over, Fiennes looks even less impressive than the lumbering Neeson. Where Schindler's initial dealings with Jews display only his money-hungry scheming, Goeth almost seems sympathetic to the Jews. He looks tenderly upon a shivering woman, Helen Hirsch, and his sickly frame makes him pitiable. Then, a Jewish engineer tells him she needs to re-pour the foundations, he calmly has her shot for delaying proceedings, even as he agrees with her assessment and orders his men to fix the problem after having her executed. In an instant, Goeth is revealed to be a tyrant, a man who has internalized the anti-Semitic preachings of the party because it feeds into his desire for power.

His entrance demonstrates how far Schindler has progressed without any outward signs of a change of heart. At the start of the film, Oskar decides to use Jewish labor because it costs less than paying Poles. Furthermore, Jewish wages go to the SS, which allows Schindler to perhaps save a bit of bribe money by sending one monthly payment out instead of two. He tells his accountant, Stern (Ben Kingsley), to round up some Jews whose money is about to be seized anyway to invest in his factory in exchange for the pots and pans his enamel-work factory will produce. "Money is still money," says one Jewish man in disbelief of the insult of this offer. "No it is not," Schindler calmly replies. "That is why we are here." As Stern starts to use the factory to house the intellectual and infirm from harm, Schindler starts to wonder why such under-qualified people work for him. When a one-armed man, who earlier thanked a disinterested Schindler profusely for saving him, gets shot callously by German soldiers for sport, Oskar's complaints to the commander communicate only his annoyance at having to train a new worker.

But Goeth brings with him the full force of antisemitic terror, and not even Schindler can blind himself to his atrocity. In the film's defining setpiece, Goeth leads troops through the Krakow ghetto, killing all who resist or cannot leave and shipping the rest to camps. On a hilltop outside of town, Schindler and his wife watch, and the look on Oskar's face shows the man unable to hold back the fleeting hints of compassion in his unwillingness to expose Stern's account manipulations and his attempts to keep his workers alive.


How could anyone not be moved while watching such sights? Nazis yank suitcases out of the hands of fleeing Jews, pouring out contents into massive piles of loot as more and more corpses fall around the stacks of clothes. The Krakow sequence shows Spielberg at the height of his formalist powers, intricate tracking shots capturing the horror in ethereal detail, highlighting how otherworldly this atrocity is but adding enough grisly close-ups to tie that detached disgust to raw, real feeling. Few escape the pillage: one of Schindler's Jews stops and clears suitcases from the road when Goeth and his men come upon him, avoiding death. A young German boy tasked with alerting soldiers to any strays comes across an old woman but recognizes her as a friend's mom and hides her. These moments provide not relief but terrifying moments of suspense; the slow, relieved exhale never comes because too much carnage continues around these glimpses of fortune to make them relaxing.

The event transforms Oskar, who taps into his latent humanism and resolves to protect those under his stead. Oskar butters up Goeth just as he does every other authority figure, but by this point he displays a care for his employees. He maintains his concern extends only to protecting himself from the cost of training new workers, that by killing his Jews or sending them to camps. Goeth argues Schindler's points but finally agrees, on the condition Oskar pay a bribe for each worker. Schindler, once so obsessed with money, goes deep into debt to protect his people.

Goeth, otherwise an embodiment of merciless antisemitism, accepts his friend's money, revealing the true motivators among men even during these times. Money trumps ingrained social brainwashing, even direct orders of Herr Hitler. Sex, too, clouds the mind. Both Schindler and Goeth take Jewish mistresses, but where Schindler freely enjoys the perks of wealth, Goeth wrestles viciously with his belief system and his clear affection for Helena (Embeth Davidtz), who brings out a repugnant sexual aggression in the monster. When Goeth looks upon her, the longing in Fiennes' eyes brings out the humanity in this devil. He thinks of life with her, even hinting to Oskar that he'd like to take her back to Vienna. But she is still a Jew, and Amon's crisis finds its outlet in blaming Helena for tempting him. Highlighting Goeth's turmoil over his antisemitism and Oskar's increasing fondness for his Jewish workers is a sequence juxtaposing Goeth sadistically beating a stripped-down Helena in a wine cellar with Schindler celebrating his birthday by enjoying too lingering a kiss with a Jewish woman in his factory. (In a moment of grim irony, Schindler goes to jail for this offense while Goeth does not even face questions for his behavior, yet Goeth successfully pressures his superiors to release his friend.)

Much of Schindler's List carries this mordant gallows humor, perhaps a reason for some of the backlash that eventually assailed the film's reputation. One scene shows a rabbi in Schindler's factory caught out slacking on the job by Goeth himself, who drags the man outside for swift execution. Amon forces the man to his knees, pulls out a Lüger, presses it to the man's skull and...click. The gun jams. Goeth tries again, and nothing. At last, he becomes so enraged he beats the rabbi with the butt of the pistol and leaves in a huff with the man alive. Elsewhere, he succeeds in murdering without compunction, and his lazy Sunday sniping of stray Jews in the camp from his villa's balcony takes on an absurdist element.


Yet Spielberg never plays up this repellent, twisted brand of comedy, instead using it to achieve an emotional verisimilitude. I distrust any film depicting atrocity that omits those air-sucking inverse laughs that offer just enough energy to keep people moving in the face of death. Despite the verité style of some handheld shots, Schindler's List does not attempt to present its images as documentary truth. The director's tracking shots are more graceful than they'd ever been, and his use of constant juxtaposition removes the camera from fully capturing How It Really Was. Instead, Spielberg seeks a spiritual truth, and that humor is but one way in which he makes the film feel real.

Bolstering the film further is a sense of moral complexity previously unseen in Spielberg's filmography save for Empire of the Sun (which actually handled it with more subtlety). We meet Schindler as a villain, someone who gleefully exploits the Jews' situation for personal gain and reacts to their gratitude as if he just realized he'd stepped in dog muck. Though he does not subscribe to Nazi ideology, he is more than willing to go along with it if he can make a buck or two. Goeth, on the other hand, enters the film almost sympathetically, his weak, distended frame -- Fiennes made a fascinating choice to lean his thin stomach out until it formed a paunch, making Goeth misshapen -- hinting at a softer, bookish soul. Then we see him morph into a tyrant, but even then Spielberg does not cheapen him with two-dimensional atrocity. His Goeth struggles as much, if not more, with his conscience as Schindler. The aforementioned tryst with Helena adds layers to a man most would be happy to relegate to the pile of History's Greatest Monsters (and not at all without reason), and it demonstrates a maturity on Spielberg's part willfully ignored by those who tore the film apart after its release.

No film in Spielberg's corpus is as fiercely debated as Schindler's List, because none of his other films carries such hefty stakes. Less than two decades after its release, Spielberg's Holocaust drama has become the focal point for nearly any discussion about the propriety of Hollywood making large-scale films about real human tragedies. To this day, contentious arguments arise over the nature to which Spielberg "glamorizes" the Holocaust, which is not to say that he makes it appealing but that he exploits the horror of the event to mine audience reaction.

But let us consider a few of the most debated moments of the film. In the most infamous sequence, the train carrying all the women and children from Schindler's factory in Krakow gets rerouted from his new munitions factory to nearby Auschwitz. When they arrive, guards strip them and send them into showers, where the women shriek in fear of expected death. The terror is unlike anything I've ever felt during a movie, and I continue to seize up at the scene. Then, water flows from the outlets, and the exploding wave of relief and restarting hearts rolls right out of the frame into the theater or living room.

Some accuse Spielberg of manipulating an audience with this moment, but I can never agree. Is any emotion beyond reverent disgust inappropriate? Is it wrong to try to capture what it must have felt like in those seconds of pure fear? Frankly, the only way I can see Spielberg honoring the solemn tone of this kind of film would be to have actually sent those women to their deaths as he lingered outside the chamber, but which of these two scenarios sounds crueler to you? Besides, Spielberg does give the audience a taste of the latter when the women emerge from the showers hugging and crying in joy as, behind them, a single file of Jews enter another chamber that does not hold water in its pipes, and the camera tilts up to show black ash billowing from the building.

At the other end of the supposed emotional manipulation spectrum are the tear-jerking moments. At the end of the film, Schindler, nearly broke but with just enough money to escape the country in advance of the Red Army's breach of the camp and the inevitable shooting first and asking later, stands with his workers gathered around him. More than 1,000 men, women and children assemble, capable of doing so because Schindler and Stern saved their lives. But instead of feeling proud or relieved, Schindler breaks down and sobs, wracked with guilt for the millions he couldn't help. He rips off what trinkets remain his and wonders how many lives he could have saved with each. Even his lapel pin might have worked as a bribe to save one more person. Perhaps it's a maudlin moment, but who could feel satisfied in this situation. Spielberg's film might show the goodness of humanity even in its darkest hour, but he is not so childish as to think one man's actions, despite the Hebrew proverb Stern recites to him ("He who saves one life saves the world entire"), can undo all the pain. But for those he saved, Schindler truly did save their whole world.

I find it somewhat amusing that scenes such as the one just mentioned provide ammunition for the film's detractors. Spielberg, who founded the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation (now the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education) with some of the profits of the film and continues to finance that foundation, has been accused far more often of exploitation and profiteering than Claude Lanzmann, maker of the astonishing, vital and deliberately non-conclusive documentary Shoah.

That film is deservedly lauded, but it is also held up as the answer to Schindler's List by some critics who fail to acknowledge that the methods Lanzmann used to elicit information from both the perpetrators and victims of the Holocaust breached nearly every ethical boundary in the book. He broke the rules not for money but to get the story, but do people really think Spielberg just wanted the cash or a gold-plated statuette? Spielberg wanted a story as much as Lanzmann did, and I find faults and quibbles with Spielberg's otherwise admirable work just as I do Shoah.

This is not to say that I feel every decision Spielberg makes is the right one, or even that he completely honors the subject matter. He paints Schindler's wife, Emilie, into the background, bringing her out only so Oskar can repent for having so many mistresses. According to the Schindler Jews, Emilie was as good a person as her husband, if not better. Even the wallflower cinematic version of her would had to have noticed all the odds and ends slowly disappearing from her house or the debt her husband amassed. When she appears at the end to stand over her husband's breakdown, her disjointed connection to the story stands out in horrible clarity. She should be sharing in that moment, not made to be a spectator.

Every time I watch Schindler's List I feel like I should resent it, if only because of the pressure to do so for its historical inaccuracies or its manipulative moments. But all films must smudge the ink somewhere (even most documentaries cannot get the whole picture), and if Schindler's List is to be considered manipulative, could that be because any imagery of the Holocaust will, must, grab us if we are good-hearted and humane people? The film sears in my memory, and I routinely think about certain aspects: that eerie smile on Fiennes' face, with its lack of gaps but inexplicable space between each tooth that gives every incisor or molar its own dangerous glint; Helena standing in the disorienting center of frame as she reflects upon her doomed life, well aware that Goeth will one day get over his fleeting attraction and put a bullet through her head; Schindler shouting "They're MINE" when Goeth casually speaks of taking his Jews for slaughter, a moment of passion his friend does not fully comprehend.

Schindler's List is not the first film to showcase Spielberg's aesthetic mastery within the confines of more serious-minded narrative ambition, but where The Color Purple used too many tricks to tell its story and Empire of the Sun eased up on the director's visual skills for its cynical but affecting humanism, Schindler's List finds the balance. Spielberg manages to get away with something as stylized as the Krakow raid, which features a scene of an SS officer playing Mozart on a piano in one of the ghetto apartments as muzzle flashes and machine gun ratatats serve as his audiovisual metronome, because he never lets the moment run off the dramatic weight. It may not hit me quite as profoundly as Empire of the Sun and its unique approach to and perspective of war cinema, but that nagging feeling that tugs at me every time I sit down to watch this film evaporates as I experience it. I would never presume to say the film captures even a fraction of the Holocaust; it is instead what Stanley Kubrick labeled it, not a film about six million who died but 1,000 who lived. It is worth telling the good stories with the bad; they deepen our understanding of mankind's darkest hour.

Steven Spielberg: Jurassic Park

At five stages in his career, Steven Spielberg has directed two films in the same year. In each case, both are targeted at a large crowd -- whenever is a Spielberg feature not? -- but one clearly exists to be a massive crowd-pleaser while the other, however grand in scope, is more personal. Usually, the films also offset each other, tackling some unifying aspect from different angles. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade showed Spielberg setting his father themes to rest for awhile, and, appropriately, the more low-key Always dealt with the theme of letting go. Nearly two decades later, War of the Worlds sought to capture the pandemonium of being trapped in the sensory overload of a sudden assault, while Munich dealt with those 9/11-inspired themes with a more analytical oversight.

The link between Jurassic Park and Schindler's List is not immediately as clear, for reasons one can only hope are obvious. Yet the adaptation of a Michael Crichton thriller about recreated dinosaurs and a biopic of a key symbolic figure of the Holocaust do have one element in common: both deal with the arrogance and tyranny of mankind. Schindler's List surveys our capacity for evil against each other; Jurassic Park demonstrates man's constant exploitation of the Earth.

Of course, the film is also, first and foremost, a thriller, and it demonstrates that Spielberg lost not an ounce of his ability to terrify in the two decades separating this film from Jaws. The opening scene sets the mind a-reel: a giant cage being shoved against a gate as men who look like mere foremen carry guns and tasers looking uneasy. Some kind of beast is inside the lumbering metal box, and when a worker lifts a gate for transfer, the unseen creature charges, knocking back the cage and sending the poor man plummeting into the the animal's mouth. The ensuing frenzy bewilders: what is in that cage? How can it move so fast yet be powerful enough to toss a large man around like a rag doll? The suspense still works years later, after we all know what's in that cage and, furthermore, that the tossing around is honestly ridiculous and more a blatant nod to the woman being whipped to and fro in the water. Spielberg, master of effects, makes them felt even in a scene where the dinosaurs are not visible.

Where Jurassic Park breaks from Jaws, however, is in the weakness of the actual human beings in front of the camera. Technical delays permitted constant rewrites of the Jaws script into one of the best screenplays of all time, a mainstream blockbuster with fully realized characters with motives and pathos. Everyone in Jurassic Park now looks less fluid than the 20-year-old computer animation, which has held up astonishingly well. Indeed, the dinosaur animation of this film, save for a few iffy spots generally involving too many creatures on-screen, looks better than a great deal of current work.

But those damn characters. The issue is evident immediately: in the badlands of Montana, paleontologist Alan Grant (Sam Neill) and paleobotanist Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern) dig up a velociraptor fossil as a group of tourists inexplicably hangs around the site. Well, I assume they're tourists; they cannot be dedicated paleontology buffs, as Grant gets into argument with a child unimpressed by the raptor and terrifies him into respecting a creature that went extinct 71 millions years ago. It's an absurd scene, serving to introduce these characters via their half-written traits that substitute for actual humanity: Alan hates kids and computers, Ellie has the smarts to match him but also serves as the mediator between Grant and the rest of humanity. Then, a Scottish version of a leprechaun arrives announcing himself as Mr. Hammond (Richard Attenborough), the beneficiary of Grant's dig. Hammond exudes "kooky eccentric billionaire," and he insists the two come out to a theme park he's devising. Along the way, they meet Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum), a mathematician who appears to have taken fashion cues from Miles Davis' '80s wardrobe.

But once they arrive on the Latin American island and a jeep pulls into a clearing, for one brief moment the turgid anti-momentum of the film's plot setup gives way to one of the most magical moments of Spielberg's canon, one that takes me right back to a childhood of obsessing over dinosaurs and the sense of complete wonder and awe this movie instilled in me at age 5. That brilliantly laid out sequence of the dinosaurs revealed first through gentle but forceful surround sound whoomps, then the facial reactions of stunned characters and finally the glorious shot of a brachiosaurus as the music swells. In that instant, nothing else matters, and one sympathizes with Grant going weak at the knees.

More than any modern director, Spielberg understands the power of cinema as spectacle. Spectacle does not automatically connote simplicity, and the power to please millions should not be written off as proof of hackdom. Just because Jay Leno builds his audience by diluting his once caustic brand of verbal peroxide with water doesn't mean everyone who become a household name sold his soul. Look at how perfectly Spielberg reaches for the audience's collective jaw and gently pulls it down; this movie began with suspense and fear, gave way to stiff narrative exercises, and then it morphed into this?

The director finds his groove here, using the next scenes, all of which build as much plot as the scenes leading to the arrival at Isla Nublar yet feel lighter, more engaging. A dated but fun segment answering the questions prompted by the sight of a dinosaur walking around -- chief of which being, "How the hell did this happen?!" -- and also tempers the fantastical element of the preceding reveal with genuinely clever pseudo-science from novelist Michael Crichton. Though his explanation is not only impossible but far-fetched even if one were to accept some degree of plausibility, the idea that scientists could get the DNA needed to clone dinosaurs from the drunken blood preserved in fossilized mosquitoes beats the hell out of any previous reason given in dino films for the presence of terrible lizards.

Crichton's setup also allows for explorations of the morality of genetic engineering in a time where scientific breakthroughs made work in the field possible -- two years after Jurassic Park, scientists cloned Dolly the sheep. Hammond expects to be worshiped by his assembled experts, but instead they all express reservations. Malcolm, who specializes in chaos theory, outright lambastes the park and notes that all the genetic safeguards do not guarantee perfection and cryptically forewarns, "Life finds a way." Grant and Sattler note the variables and unseen dangers as well, but they agree to go on a tour of the place. By this point, however, Spielberg has subtly meshed the excitement of the film's trademark scene with the earlier suspense, gracefully intertwining curiosity and terror as the genetic talk deepens.

The tour itself epitomizes the inability to manufacture life to be entertainment. The scientists might be controlling breeding by restricting gender to female, they might even orchestrate a fail-safe protein deficiency in case a creature gets off the island, but they can't make the dinosaurs show up at the edge of the fence in each paddock waiting to dazzle the audience, which by now includes Hammond's tween grandkids, the bookish, dino-loving Tim (Joseph Mazzello) and the hacker tomboy Alex (Ariana Richards). The group does not see the first dinosaur, nor the second. When they all finally come across one, it's a sick triceratops that can only be seen when Ellie spots it and gets out of the automated electric car and everyone follows suit.

Meanwhile, the head programmer of the park's advanced computer system prepares to betray his boss. Dennis Nedry (Wayne Knight) sits at his computer bank surrounded by food wrappers and cola cans, his keyboard likely sticky with grease. Swimming in debt despite being a key staff of the park, Nedry blames Hammond for not paying him even more and decides to sell embryos to a rival genetic engineering firm. If life can be manufactured, life has a price. Not only does cloning raise moral issues of playing God, it turns life into a commodity, a copyright other businesses try to steal.

Looking to cover his tracks, Nedry hacks his own system to shut down all the security features of the park so he can escape. In the process, however, he turns off all the electric fences, letting the dinosaurs get out. At last, the plot thickens, though it still has the viscosity hot sauce. For the rest of the movie, the humans run, hide and run some more from unleashed dinosaurs, either trembling at the onslaught of a T-Rex or waiting for an ambush by the smaller but smarter raptors.

Both predators offer more potential for Spielberg's thriller. The T-Rex, gargantuan, deafening and capable of crushing a whole man in one bite, makes even the massive shark seem simple in comparison. The director announces it by the motif of a soft thud deep in the background and a quiver of water in a puddle or glass, the calm before the storm. Whenever that massive head juts into view, the panic overwhelms. The velocirpators work in an opposite fashion. There is no warning, no trick to contain them. The T-Rex gives itself enough time to let its victims froth in terror; the raptor just strikes. Small, fast and resourceful, the raptors come out to play whenever a human might find itself in an area where it need not fear the tyrannosaur, ensuring that no place in the park is truly safe.

The "baddie" dinosaurs, like the rest of the creatures, are the collective result of four effects masters working in tandem: Stan Winston with his animatronics, Phil Tippet's go-motion, supervisor Michael Lantieri and digital animator Dennis Muren. Though one can tell when a puppet is being used and when the computer animation is on-screen (typically the animatronics are used for close-ups and direct contact with characters while the CGI dinos appear in long shot), the effects work borders on the seamless. Jurassic Park, a film about the potential side effects of technological growth, ironically set off a technical revolution in the cinema, introducing a breakthrough in storytelling potential that almost immediately morphed into a way to make big, silly effects on the cheap. How many movies today survive solely on CGI that dazzles an audience instead of working fluidly in a story? Why, the same is true of Jurassic Park itself.

In fairness, the film does have some clever writing. In smoothing out Crichton's technical writing and heavy plot, David Koepp made the wise decision to alter the characterization of Hammond, who in the novel was a conniving old huckster who abandoned pharmaceutical research for genetic engineering because, despite the gouging policies of Big Pharm, he could not charged as he pleased for medicine. The novel's Hammond would agree with the lawyer here (weakened into a thin stereotype for the movie) that he could charge tens of thousands for a single ticket. Koepp helps drive the point about the dangers of genetic engineering by casting Hammond as a kindly old benefactor who wants, Walt Disney-style, to see smiles on the faces of all the world's children. However, like Disney, Hammond has a hard ambition that cannot be hidden, not even behind that avuncular face, and he allows himself to overlook tiny flaws until they escalate into massive problems.

Elsewhere, however, the characters thin, from the lawyer to Alan, who loved children in the book because of their love of dinosaurs but hates them here so he can fit into Spielberg's running theme of emotionally distant father figures and to set up the ostensibly emotional plot of Grant learning to care for Hammond's grandchildren out in the park. Perhaps if Neill committed, he could make the character work, but he appears to have recognized that the dinosaurs would be the main attraction and coasts through the movie with his Indiana Jones-knockoff hat (and profession, come to think of it) while Laura Dern makes for the world's unlikeliest scream queen as she shrieks and swears in terror for the whole of her time on the island. She has a scene late in the film with Hammond in which she must deliver one of the most eye-rolling "HERE IS THE MESSAGE" speeches ever, and she over-emotes so blatantly it's hard not to laugh when she unhelpfully adds, "People are dying out there!" Only Goldblum is remotely animated, but he spends so much time dancing around tossing out quips that he only manages to cover up for the fact that Malcolm has no actual character.

There's also the issue of some sloppy editing. When the guests get out to see the triceratops, it's barely cloudy outside. After about an hour, a hurricane has blown in and lightning arcs the sky. Not 20 minutes later, it's pitch-black and raining in monsoon quantities, just so Nedry's escape can be all the more confusing and doomed. Alan shoots at raptors with a shotgun, but the glass he shoots shows bullet holes, not shot damage. The clearest example is, of course, the tyrannosaur paddock, which is ground level at the start and suddenly a 30-ft. gulf when the T-Rex busts out and shoves a car into its pen. Everything exists for maximum entertainment, but the lack of even basic continuity at times shows an amateurism that Spielberg never previously allowed in his immaculate work.

I will forgive a film thin characters and predictable plotting if it is told well visually -- it is a visual medium, after all. But Spielberg seems to have dialed back his style to make the computer animation easier for his staff as they felt their way around their own innovation, and Jurassic Park suffers most not from its characters but from Spielberg letting off the gas. Jaws worked so well as a thriller because the director was in control of everything. Here, he must rely on others to put stuff into his frame after he shoots, and he appears out of his element. Of course, he was charting new territory and the degree to which he incorporated CGI meant he had to be the one to brave these unknown waters, but there is an unease with digital animation in this film that Spielberg would only later overcome.

And yet, the film does achieve that maximum entertainment. Jurassic Park may sacrifice character, coherence, even style to grab the audience, but I cannot deny I still thrill at that brachiosaur, still sit on edge when Dern goes into that raptor-ridden bunker and still feel uplifted by John Williams' main theme, one of his finest compositions. Even so, like Hook, Jurassic Park can no longer make me ignore glaring issues for the sake of nostalgia. Its conservatism is particularly tedious: the film emphasizes the need for a nuclear family through Grant's storyline with the kids (who, frankly, are so annoying I wouldn't mind if they made toothpicks for the T-Rex), and it makes a justifiable yet overbearing critique of the unchecked progress of science. Hell, it even has a minor go at electric cars for being silly and reliant upon outside factors that limit our freedom.

Looking back, it seems the perfect blockbuster for the Clinton era, an attempt to add heart back to the blockbuster after the soulless '80s (even Spielberg used the decade to make the largely self-serving Indiana Jones films), but that do-good liberalism ties to old-school conservative values. In that sense, one must credit Universal president Sid Sheinberg insisted Spielberg make this film before Schindler's List: Spielberg, the ultimate Hollywood liberal, had to cleanse his palette with this film before moving totally into the humanism of his next feature. Taken with Schindler's List, Jurassic Park cements the director's domination of all aspects of mainstream American cinema, and for all the film's flaws, it still shows a man capable of pleasing hundreds of millions with the ease of flicking a light switch. Nostalgia be damned: when the film clicks, it transcends its weaknesses, even if but for one blessed instant. Sometimes, that's all it takes.

Steven Spielberg: Hook

The story of Hook's inspiration is, like the film itself, at once so brilliantly and frustratingly childlike that everything that works and fails can be gleaned from its conception. Nick Castle, originally slated to direct a Peter Pan movie after Spielberg gave up the idea, got the idea from his son. The boy did something that only a child ever has the gall to do: when presented with an absolute -- Peter Pan never grows up -- he questioned why. That twist made it perfect for Spielberg to take over the project; only a Disney-fed eternal child like him would think to continue pursuing that idea, and only Spielberg could use it as the last major expulsion of his pet themes before he entered the more serious phase of his career.

Originally slated to make a version of the original Peter Pan in the '80s, Spielberg shelved the project when he had his first child. Wisely, he also believed his thoughts on childhood and the perversion of either staying young in a harshly adult world or maturing too quickly were thoroughly expounded with Empire of the Sun. For Hook, he approaches the same topic from the opposite angle: now that he's a father, a father who might be gone months of the year on location shooting, Spielberg clearly fears he might become the same absentee father that he endured as a child. Thus, for all the light, occasionally distracting comedy of the tale, Hook has as much to say about the director's hangups as any of his other films.

Ingeniously, he recasts Peter Pan as Peter Banning, a Baby Boomer lawyer who, as Wendy (yes, that Wendy) rightly notes, has become a modern pirate. Opening with a Truffaut homage in the form of children's upturned faces as they watch their peers perform a school play of Peter Pan, Hook's gentle mood is broken ever so slightly the second it settles upon Peter (Robin Williams) as he watches his daughter on the stage playing Wendy. Then, it shatters when he cell phone rings. Ignoring his daughter, he then makes plans that conflict with his son Jack's baseball game in the morning.

Though the film tracks Peter, Spielberg roots it in a child's perspective, preparing for the eventual shift back to Neverland but also allowing everyone but Peter to see the effects of his behavior. It is a shame that Spielberg never gives us the point of view of Peter's adult self, the desire to work hard and provide comfortable lives for his family, but then that point of view has always reeked of self-justification anyway and the misery of his family hardly speaks to their well-being.

Only when the family heads to London with a still-fuming Jack does Peter's humanity show. There to help Granny Wendy (Maggie Smith, who in her younger days played Peter on the stage) with a hospital wing dedication in her honor, Peter is still distracted. At the actual dinner, however, he shines, beautifully paying tribute to the woman who took in him and other orphans without saying much at all. Contrasted with his previous coldness, and an ill-timed shift in the deal he thought was a lock causes him to explode at his children, we can see the good man in Peter, even if he cannot.

The lighting in this first segment is soft, tranquil but also ghostly. This is most visible at the charity ball where dozens of table lamps first illuminate the power and meaning of Wendy's efforts with orphans then turn cold and ominous as Hook's return sends waves of chilled atmosphere rolling across an already frigid London. Once Peter is lured back to Neverland -- by, who else, that zipping ball of light known as Tinker Bell (Julia Roberts) -- Spielberg alters the lighting scheme to something brighter, more optimistic, replacing artificial light with the natural sunlight the office-bound Peter likely had not noticed in years.

Spielberg has his fun with the character, making Peter Pan not only a grown man but one with an intense fear of heights and flying. After stumbling into Hook's pirate hangout and confronting the mad captain, Peter must suffer the humiliation of having to chase his trapped children up a mast under the ultimatum that, if he can simply fly like Pan and touch Jack and Maggie's hands, they can go free. All the poor man can do is tremble and fail when he attempts to climb out and grab them. Only Tinker Bell's quick-thinking saves the Bannings from death, and her successful plying of Hook's vanity gives Peter a shot at rediscovering his past self to add some punch to the fight.

Without question, Hook is a flawed film. Nowhere are the issues more apparent than in the Lost Boys' hideaway, a bizarre yet unimaginative mash-up of classical tree house structure with modern touches like a skate park(!). The use of oddly placed bright paint -- contained in suction-cup arrows, placed in a large pool used for rough landings in flying lessons -- captures less a sense of the childhood id gone mad than Spielberg grasping at straws for something that might amuse a kid. For a director all too often accused of being emotionally stunted, Spielberg suffers from the opposite problem here: like Peter, he's grown up, and returning to his innocence proves an unexpected challenge.

The most egregious indicator of the director's age showing is the dinner scene, where Peter looks on helplessly as the Lost Boys eat what appears to be nothing until he too plays along and finds a feast laid before him. As the dinner begins and the children exclaim over the foods they're eating, one boy exultantly shouts "banana squash!" What goddamn child in the history of human existence has ever lost his mind for banana squash? Adults don't even get excited for it. You're telling me that a child (a runaway child with no parental conditioning, no less), left to imagine his ultimate meal, would A) have anything that could even pass as a vegetable and B) wouldn't invent some magical meat made of ice cream? It's a small detail, I grant you, but it's indicative of the issues that mar the film.

Likewise, the Lost Boys themselves lack characterization beyond their appearance, from the jovial, roly-poly Thud Butt to a wee lad whose shortness reveals an impish cad. I've been watching this film since before I could even remember, and I've yet to decide whether Rufio works as a character or derails the entire picture. That a Lost Boy would assume authority of the troupe in Pan's absence is sensible, but there are several problems with Rufio. For one thing, even though Pan was always the biggest of the Lost Boys, he hovered around 12 and 13. Rudio looks like he drove into Neverland after stealing his stepdad's GTO and avoiding the prom because his high school suspended him. For another, he does not ever fit in with the other boys, and his attempts to engage in the goofy imagination that occupies the Lost Boys' time resemble a teen awkwardly breaking out old toys and messing with them like an Alzheimer's patient who has forgotten their function.

By the same token, he obviously looks like the clear leader in Peter's absence, and his half-punk styling fits within the genteel vision of Lord of the Flies that is the adolescent anarchy of the Lost Boys. He regards Peter with scorn because he's a grown-up, but the more Peter proves himself and reveals his inner Pan, the more Rufio prepares to hand power back without a fight. Dante Basco clearly had fun working on this large-scale production, an undeniable step up from his start as a child breakdancer and bit actor, and the twinkle in his eye as he gets to sneer at Robin Williams carries the character much further than anything he actually says.

What the film does well is explore Peter's half-regression, half-evolution to a man who remembers his responsibilities but also taps into his childish side. Williams finds one of his best mixes of his manic, often grating comic style and powerful but occasionally maudlin dramatic side, and he arguably wouldn't better the balance he found here until World's Greatest Dad last year. He plays Peter as the sort of man who would yell, "When are you going to stop acting like a child?" at his 10-year-old son, who has the only possible answer: "I am a child!" In Neverland, Williams has the unlikely role of straight man, the one who has to remain calm and incredulous instead of unleashing his series of impersonations and stream-of-consciousness rants. Fresh off two lauded dramatic performances in Dead Poets Society and Awakenings that showed off his Julliard-honed skills, Williams perhaps uses Peter's arc to get back in touch with his own roots.

Still, even when the old, playful Pan reemerges, the best comedy of the film by a mile belongs to the double act of Hook and Smee. Hoffman and Bob Hoskins could not be more game for their roles, and they play their relationship less as master and servant than mental patient and caretaker, Smee constantly trying to buck up Hook in his incessant and hysterical bouts with suicidal depression. Hoffman takes the same tics and obsessive mannerisms that made Rain Man so borderline offensive and turns them into comedy gold: his Hook is all slight nods and twitching lips, trying vainly to act respectable until he explodes in villainous glee. There's a reason the film is called Hook, because whenever he's on-screen, the film swells.

Symbols of emotional and physical baggage run through Spielberg's films, from suitcase a starved, half-mad Jamie drags out of the internment camp in Empire of the Sun to the image of the Devil's Tower Roy cannot get out of his mind until he leaves it, and Earth (and his family), behind him in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Several predominant symbols in Hook lock and unlock memories, their potency enhanced by Neverland's ability to make one forget himself. Before leaving for the charity function, Peter attempts to make amends with Jack by giving him his watch, a sign of adulthood and responsibility. Hook, naturally, hates clocks of all kinds owing to that damn crocodile that haunts him even after he killed it, uses that watch to break Jack. Playing on the boy's resentment of his father, Hook brainwashes Jack into loving him instead, and the clear break comes when the boy smashes Peter's watch.

Another symbol is a baseball, which Jack carries around with him. Hook organizes a baseball game to fully win Jack over, and when the boy hits the home run he never could in the real world, he finally gets his perfect childhood wish even as he sends the symbol of his innocence rocketing away from him. When it hits Peter on the head, it helps jog back his own priorities, but he must find his own repository of childhood to fully reawaken his own powers. This he finds in a teddy bear, a symbol Spielberg already used way back in his first theatrical feature, The Sugarland Express, thus tying Peter's childhood with his own.

These intelligent touches keep me coming back to Hook long after I should have grown out of it, but they remain frustrating when taken with the film's many missteps. There's a terrific moment of slapstick during the pirates' ballgame when a man tries to steal second and is shot, much to Hook's annoyance, but the funniness of the moment also begs the question why Jack just doesn't react at all to a man being murdered in front of him, in some ways because of him and his desire to play a game no one else in Neverland understands. The climactic fight should carry the weight of two old rivals engaging in their final duel, but the slapstick of the Lost Boys' involvement turns a bloodbath into Home Alone; I half-expected Commander Macaulay Culkin to lead a division of Lost Boys. And in one of the film's true serious moments, Peter's recollection of his mother and how he came to Neverland, Spielberg and his writers come up with a backstory that clashes with the director's visual accompaniment. Peter speaks of fleeing his family because he was afraid of mortality, yet the film shows his baby carriage simply sliding away (and his mother just not reacting in any way whatsoever). Even setting that aside on grounds of whimsy and fantasy, we're still left with a baby who was apparently engaged in philosophical rumination on the nature of death, and suddenly we're back in banana squash territory.

Yet I still do enjoy Hook, with its Hook/Smee dynamic (further proof that Spielberg can make comedy work when he adheres to a more classical structure instead of his more epically scaled missteps) and the form that only Spielberg can bring. He breaks from reality as soon as possible here, casting an intense but cold light reminiscent of the the passing UFOs in Close Encounters of the Third Kind outside the children's bedroom in Wendy's house. Shots bookend each other, whether in close proximity -- a long shot of Peter standing on the balcony after the children's abduction to Tinker Bell flying in and assuming a similar scale with the dollhouse inside. Spielberg had no reason to go to Neverland, not after saying everything he could have said there in an internment camp in Shanghai, but he does find new topics for discussion even if they might have been better served elsewhere. At its core, Hook is one of two expulsions of Spielberg's "old" style before he entered into the modern phase of his career. Unlike Empire of the Sun, both Hook and Jurassic Park would couch his themes in his more broadly entertaining élan. But if Hook is all about taking out all the childish things we put away, the director used it to stow his old self as he prepared for one of the most remarkable late-careers of any prominent filmmaker.

Steven Spielberg: Always

Considering what an omnipresent force Steven Spielberg has been in the cinema since he broke through with Jaws in 1975, the relative anonymity of his 1989 romance Always engenders concern before one even pops it in the DVD player. There are underrated Spielberg films, sure, but unseen ones? The only Spielberg movie post-Jaws that I had not seen before this retrospective, Always was both my most eagerly anticipated watched and my most feared.

The film itself deserves neither reaction. Though my initial response in the film's early minutes bordered on total revulsion with its sub-1941 humor, Always pulls itself out of its tailspin ironically as its protagonist dies in a plane crash of his own. The pilot, Pete (Richard Dreyfuss), flies a converted A-26 bomber designed hold water for putting out forest fires that seem to rage every day in the same area. He's the best, and most reckless, flier in the squad, and invariably he returns to base to find his pilot wife, Dorinda (Holly Hunter), thrilled that he made it back alive and pissed that he seemingly does his best to do the opposite.

Their relationship is playful but deep, like two best friends who finally realized how right they were for each other. Pete constantly cracks funny jokes to make up for his somewhat boorish nature, while Dorinda's endless stream of corny one-liners balance a tough but bubbly personality. Pete can make a big show of her birthday despite getting the day wrong, mounting an increasingly impressive set of gestures that would only piss Dorinda off more. And then she can turn around and forgive him when he gets her a sparkling white dress -- "Girl clothes!" she says with her mouth so wide open in joy that whatever dirt she might have had left on her from the day rolls off her face. While much of the quasi-slapstick of the first act falls flat, Dreyfuss and Hunter convey such chemistry that they distract from a number of huge flaws around them. They're just so damn goofy that their adorable quality wins out.

A harrowing crash-landing that opens the film -- a misplaced scene that generates no tension -- Dorinda and the couple's friend Al (John Goodman, who inexplicably serves as a pilot of a plane with a cockpit he could never fit into) encourage Pete to give up this dangerous gig and take up a cozy position over in Flat Rock teaching the pilots who will eventually be sent to put out this incessant conflagration. The moment Dorinda, back home with Pete, launches into a monologue so intense and prophetic it may as well be a soliloquy delivered past her husband instead of to him, the film turns from its weak comedy to something more serious. So sudden is her change that Pete looked as stunned as I felt, and his cavalier attitude breaks in the face of her overwhelming fear. Then, of course, comes one last run, an emergency situation that requires Pete's skill.

For all the pyrotechnics involved, Pete's last flight feels oddly serene, an initially incongruous mood that works when Pete dives his plane over Al's to drop his payload on Al's burning engine and winds up setting his own plane on fire. Pete's last look is, as ever, lighthearted, a "What, me worry?" grin that disappears in a fireball. In a flash, Pete is gone, cutting his life short just as he was getting worthy of the audience's attention.

Ah, but when Pete shuffled off his mortal coil, it appears to have stuck to the bottom of his shoe like a rogue strand of toilet paper. He comes to in a strangely lush and untouched area of the charred forest where a old but beautiful woman (Audrey Hepburn, in her final big-screen part) waits and even cuts Pete's hair -- his first words after he fully comes to terms with his death are "Keep the sideburns." The woman, Hap, informs Pete that she was his guardian angel, and that he shall now counsel others, speaking around the next generation of pilots as the nagging voice in the back of their heads that advises them. Turns out he's going to be that instructor after all.

Here, Always fully picks up. Pete, rascal that he is, heads to Little Rock to guide the pilots, discovering Al has taken the open slot he wanted Pete to fill. He proves as impish in death as he was in life, shouting suggestions for pranks into the ears of those in his vicinity. At last, the comedy in this movie becomes funny, and even if the film suddenly suffers a severe lack of direction, the performances and dialogue ramps up and makes the proceedings tolerable.

To quickly bring together the various plot elements so as to avoid further summary and simply to cut through the meandering, the rest of the film plays thusly: Pete settles on being the angel for an ambitious young stud, Ted (Brad Johnson, who looks a bit like Josh Brolin only without that pesky talent), who appeared earlier in the film when all the pilots wanted to dance with Dorinda and he stared with that lovesick look in his eyes. Dorinda, Ted and Al end up in the same place, and Dorinda slowly starts a relationship with Ted. Pete has to watch this, because apparently one must be tortured into giving up one's vestiges of life before entering heaven. Or maybe God just likes cuckold porn.

OK, OK, I'm simplifying, but Always is such a vexing film. For everything it does right, something else drags, misfires or fails to find any concrete tone. Certain touches have a cleverness, even grace to them -- Pete and Dorinda classing it up by drinking their beer from champagne glasses, incorporeal Pete tricking Al into smearing his face with oil, Dorinda starting to write a "d" at the end of "Peter" so Ted's name appears in her husband's -- and the earnestness of both its romances are touching. But it's trying to be so many movies Spielberg loved as a kid that Always has all the structure of Jell-O. By the same token, Jell-O never falls apart, and the same holds true for the film.

If any one aspect of Spielberg's filmmaking has most caught my eye in this retrospective, it's the director's gift for lighting. When Dorinda jolts awake after having a nightmare of Pete dying, Spielberg cuts to Pete standing by a window in the pale moonlight, his bouncy countenance grows cold and distant. Compare that to the overwhelming orange that engulfs the frame when Pete, Al and, in the end, Dorinda, fly into the forest fires. Always is loosely based on the wartime melodrama A Guy Named Joe, and the explosions of cracking, spitting wood and sudden gush of heat allow the characters to feel like war heroes even when Al tries to get it through Pete's skull that what he's doing is not the same as charging into battle.

My favorite shot of the film captures Pete's attempt to let his wife move on as Dorinda sits in a crash-landed plane having stolen Ted's plane not only to prevent harm from coming to the second man she's loved but in a subconscious effort to kill herself in the same manner that took her husband. As Pete, finally matured through death, urges her to continue living and to find love again, Spielberg places Dorinda in the foreground with normal flesh tones and Pete just behind her. Yet the blackness that dominates the surrounding frame and the colder light on Pete alters the perspective, distancing Pete even as he sits right behind her, as if the director placed Dreyfuss in the background and used a telephoto lens to crush him against Hunter, emphasizing how close the couple are even in death but also Pete's decision to at last leave this world and free his wife. Always itself may be a mixed bag, but this is one of my favorite moments in any Spielberg film.

As a throwback to the melodramas of his youth, Always never manages to tie together its clashing moods of high romance, farce and intense longing, attitudes that those films could inexplicably contain. Though he fills the first act with broad sights such as the men on-base clamoring to wash their hands to dance with Dorinda in her beautiful dress, Spielberg cannot commit to the full spectrum of emotions expressed in a melodrama, afraid to go that far in a time when big and bold acting had long ago fallen out of style. Still, there's something to be said about the quiet delivery of a sappy line like "It's not the dress. It's the way you see me," a decision that makes the corniness of puppy-dog love into something deeper. Always features Spielberg's most subdued direction to this point, but here's a film that could have used his bombast. He was on the cusp on launching into his biggest attempt to be considered a serious filmmaker, but Always marks the first of a handful of entertainment features that exponentially grew in size as he temporarily purged himself of his desire to show people a good time. For that reason, Always marks yet another pendulum swing in the career of a director who could only oscillate so frantically between serious and lightweight because he's so good at both.

Steven Spielberg: Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade

After the garish, overly frenetic and borderline offensive Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Spielberg tried to make amends by producing what was quite possibly his best film to that point, Empire of the Sun. When that also failed to light audiences on fire, Spielberg returned to his adventure franchise to win back the crowd. Given how simple Last Crusade turned out, it's amazing to think that initial ideas, even drafts of the film involved haunted mansions and Scottish ghosts. At last, Spielberg acquiesced to George Lucas' proposal, to have Indy search for the Holy Grail. Oh, and sprinkle in some Nazis while you're at it. There's a good lad.

Of the four Indiana Jones films, Last Crusade may the most inane but also the best embodiment of the escapism the series sought to repackage. Raiders is such a masterpiece that you spend as much time breaking down each immaculate shot as reveling in the overall effect, but Last Crusade is sloppy enough to make it more relatable even as it injects Spielberg's usual themes into a franchise that previously existed to honor the serials of Spielberg and Lucas' youth.

The opening segment, a flashback to Indiana's youth, finds him as a Boy Scout riding horses in Utah. He and a friend stumble upon grave robbers uncovering the Cross of Coronado, causing Indy to swoop in and grab the artifact to place in a museum. After a lengthy chase that involves, for whatever reason, a train carrying circus animals (and some piss-poor animatronics, truth be told), Indy makes his way home, only to be shushed by his father, who wants to hear nothing of his son's adventures. The sheriff comes by and reveals himself to be bought by the thieves, and the head robber, dressed as Indy later will, expresses his admiration for the kid and even gives the boy his fedora. We never see the father, but we get plenty of looks at this man dressed the way our hero will later pattern his iconic outfit. In an instant, Spielberg moves from the silliest moment in any of the Indiana Jones films thus far -- though I am invoking the "chilled monkey brains" exemption -- to something that recalls his more serious aims as a filmmaker, and the sudden move from wide, John Ford-esque vistas and moving shots to static, cramped, uncomfortable moments inside the Jones household communicates how much freer Indy feels when anywhere away from his father.

Back in the present, Indiana, long estranged from his dad, returns to university after finally reclaiming that artifact that got the giant stone ball rolling in Indy's life. As usual, he can barely get through a class before getting the itch to go back in the field, and the verdant, tranquil grounds of the college look odder and more out of place behind Jones than the matte paintings and composite backgrounds that frame Indy's typical actions. So, when an old colleague, Donovan (Julian Glover), stops by to assign Jones a new task, he jumps at the chance. Even better, it concerns the artifact his father devoted his entire life to: the Holy Grail.

A spiritual line runs through all of the Indiana Jones movies, Last Crusade is the first to take anything seriously. Raiders of the Lost Ark only got down to the nitty-gritty of Jewish theology when it directly concerned the ark; everything else focused on the traps of ancient civilizations. Temple of Doom made a fun house roller-coaster of Eastern spirituality, recreating the racist caricature of old serials without ever commenting on it. Yet Christian imagery dominates Last Crusade, from giant stained-glass windows containing clues to specific religious instructions for avoiding booby-traps. Even the father-son dynamic, a conflict between a seemingly all-knowing father and the son who devotes his life to pleasing him, has a Christian undertone.

That Spielberg should take a more serious tack is amusing when you consider that Last Crusade is, by a long shot, the most comedic and lightweight of the four Jones movies. Even the slapstick of Temple had a veneer of dark horror to it, but Last Crusade works best as a comedy on a grand scale, effectively returning to 1941 and finally figuring out how to balance pratfalls with Spielberg's epic canvas. This is only more true when we are finally confronted with Henry Jones, none other than Sean Connery. The mismatch between Ford and Connery, only 12 years older than the actor playing his son (and, more importantly, Scottish), is inherently comedic. But Connery himself appears to have signed on for a comedy, all goofy faces and dry one-liners. The hackneyed dialogue that makes the early parts of film stilted suddenly gives way to an unlikely double act that livens up the proceedings immensely.

Compare the gallows humor of the German being sliced by an airplane propeller in Raiders to the farce of Henry shooting down the plane he and Indy are flying by tearing up the tail. The catacomb crawling with rats just isn't as terrifying as a floor covered in serpents, and the creepy-crawlie sequence here comes with its own punchline when Indy and his latest lover, Dr. Elsa Schneider (Alison Doody), emerge in the middle of a Venetian café. Perhaps the funniest aspect of the film is how befuddled and clumsy Henry is; you begin to question why Indy feels the need to prove himself to this dolt, until the son makes his own slip-ups. When the two are first reunited, Henry beams that his son picked up his research and successfully hid the diary containing all his Grail research from Nazi capture, only to learn immediately that his son brought that diary all the way back to the lion's den. "I should have sent it to the Marx brothers!" Henry spits. Besides, the fact that they both slept with Elsa makes for a surprisingly complex take on Spielberg's usual father-son relationships. I mean, you don't see that in E.T.

The action sequences are not as impressive, nor as numerous, as I remember, as if Spielberg intended it to be a comedy all along. A chase involving a tank is more funny than suspenseful, and the final challenge tests Jones' intellect over his ability. And yet, the film never flags, kept alive by its silliness and genuinely engaging performances from both Ford and Connery, actors not normally known for comedic timing. The Scottish accent Ford puts on in a hilariously misguided attempt to dupe a castle servant slays me, and I love that he can beat up a blimp usher five inches shorter than him, steal his clothes and emerge with a perfectly fitted outfit. It's also nice to see Spielberg questioning just what happens to Indy's archaeology class in his absence, as students swarm his office when he returns begging for their long-overdue midterm grades. Even the young women who fawn over him would rather get their essays back than spend a lovely evening with the good doctor.

The climax is grandiose enough to appeal to everyone but takes the material serious enough to give the franchise an emotional stake for the first time. Wounding Henry gives Indy a concrete reason to go after the grail where previous films have relied solely on Indy wanting an artifact to have it -- Temple, with its subplot of enslaved children, was too murky to effectively create tension. Spielberg ingeniously shoots the immortal knight deep within the cave that holds the cup in ghostly white that clashes with the golden hues of the burning fires and light reflecting off the ostentatious adornments surrounding the true Cup of Christ as decoys, communicating the dark side of eternal life in an instant.

The most significant development in the film, however, is the introduction of a more positive side to Spielberg's usual theme of absent fathers. For the first time, the director opens the possibility to reconciliation. Roy Neary left his family behind to go to space. Elliott's dad remained removed. James finds his way back to his family, but he's too scarred by life in an internment camp to ever readjust. Here, Spielberg slowly comes around: maybe a distant father and a son can reconcile, but so far this can only happen far down the road, after a rotten childhood is set aside. It would be a few years yet before the director would let a child forgive his father.