Steven Spielberg

by Joseph McBride

  A.I. received generally respectful, if not especially appreciative or fully comprehending, reviews, but its box-office returns dropped precipitously in its second weekend, a sign of disastrous word of mouth. Though the film grossed $235.9 million worldwide (only $78.6 million of that in the United States), on a production cost of about $100 million, it was widely perceived as a failure. The largely abstract publicity campaign and the film’s title, with their echoes of E.T., may have been partly responsible for misleading audiences into thinking A.I. would be another heartwarming Spielberg movie with a child protagonist. When A.I. opened in Japan, a retooled ad campaign showing more scenes from the actual film and pictures of the characters in the print ads rather than simply a drawing of the robot child helped it do considerably better business and gave it more appeal to young audiences. But A.I. belongs in the category of films that shake up audience expectations and as such are not destined to be immediate crowd-pleasers. It is not only a Steven Spielberg film but also a Stanley Kubrick film, and most of Kubrick’s films were coldly received at the time of their release and only gradually became regarded as classics once the public had grown into understanding and accepting their groundbreaking dimensions. Unfortunately, that hasn’t happened yet with A.I., but the film should remain one of Spielberg’s most towering and enduring achievements.

  The gathering darkness evident in Spielberg’s body of work since Schindler’s List, a mood that persisted in Saving Private Ryan and gained force with A.I., took on a new urgency over the next few years as the director dealt with the chilling new atmosphere in the United States following the attacks on New York, Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania on September 11, 2001. Those attacks occurred only two and a half months after the opening of A.I., whose depiction of the ruined New York skyline shows the damaged Twin Towers of the World Trade Center jutting out of the ocean. Despite public and industry pressure on filmmakers to obliterate images of the Twin Towers from their films after 9/11, an odd response in denial paralleling the attacks themselves, Spielberg admirably refused to participate in that pseudo-patriotic charade and kept the Twin Towers in A.I. for its home video release. He also would show the Towers in the ending sequence of his 2005 film Munich, the most explicit symbol of his concentration on the effects the catastrophe has had on world politics and the American way of life.

  NINETEEN

  LIGHT IN THE DARKNESS

  I BARELY recognize this country anymore,” a character laments in one of the films Spielberg made in the aftermath of 9/11. And that is from one of his lighter films, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Even in his “entertainments,” Spielberg addressed the national trauma and the repressive political climate of the George W. Bush–Dick Cheney era with a pointed and probing intensity. The attacks on the United States and the ensuing assaults on American civil liberties were reflected metaphorically (and sometimes more overtly) in film after film as Spielberg questioned what had become of his country in the new century and challenged it to remember and live up to its former ideals. The role of political artist that Spielberg assumed with Schindler’s List, and the extraordinary public responsibilities that went with it, helped lead him into this position, and rather than run away from it when national trouble came, he reacted with fervor and dedication.

  Spielberg’s examination of the policy of preventive detention in Minority Report, his horrific depiction of an invasion of the “homeland” in War of the Worlds, and his questioning of the morality of targeted assassinations of terrorists in Munich are the most overt examples of how the darkness that descended after 9/11 colored his work as a director. But his good-natured Tom Hanks comedy The Terminal is just as vigorous a confrontation with these issues, using Kafkaesque black humor to critically examine the premise that “America is closed” to newcomers. Other Spielberg films from the Bush era find only guarded hope at the end, but The Terminal allows him to triumphantly reassert the inclusive, welcoming principles he grew up with, celebrating what John F. Kennedy called “a nation of immigrants.”

  No filmmaker resting on his laurels or coasting in midlife could have shown the ambition and courage to take on the challenges Spielberg shouldered with his post-9/11 body of work, which actually began, somewhat presciently, when he went into preproduction in 1998 with his chilling futuristic film Minority Report (filmed in 2001, before the attacks, and released in 2002). Spielberg risked his popularity repeatedly to make a series of films boldly addressing his fellow citizens, and his audience throughout the world, about the radically changed political and social circumstances in which they found themselves. He recognized how difficult that journey was for some of his audience: “You wouldn’t believe how many people come up to me in the street and repeat almost verbatim the lines the Martians say to Woody Allen in Stardust Memories: ‘You know, we like your earlier, funnier films.’” That Spielberg still managed to draw wide audiences, despite some spectator resistance, for his challenging explorations of such troubling themes is another tribute to his range and depth as a popular artist. He occasionally vacillated in his political positions during this period but still produced a rich body of work whose power and significance should stand as a powerful commentary on the cultural turmoil of its time.

  And he did so in a period of general escapist frivolity in the American film industry, a time when audiences tended to avoid adult subject matter (including most of the infrequent movies about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan) and studios relentlessly pandered to juvenile tastes, as Spielberg’s own DreamWorks did with much of its production slate. The uneasy relationship between Spielberg-as-mogul and Spielberg-as-artist became increasingly schizoid in the 2000s, buttressing the argument that the aging filmmaker consciously used his often crassly commercial business enterprises to enable his personal ventures into increasingly risky artistic terrain. If DreamWorks movies such as Meet the Fockers, Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, and The Cat in the Hat seemed to exist in an alternate universe from Minority Report and Munich, that was a price Spielberg was willing to pay for the high level of artistic freedom he managed to maintain during this period, sometimes against considerable odds.

  “I look at the world in which my children are growing up, and when I see darkness I can’t make funny films about it,” he reflected after making his 2005 film Munich. “As I get older I feel the burden of responsibility that comes along with such a powerful tool as filmmaking. Now I want to tell stories that really mean something. On the other hand, providing good entertainment for a large audience is also very nice. I have often and willingly made movies by popular demand. There is a distinction between moviemaking and filmmaking—but both are attractive, and I want to do both.”

  *

  THEN he began preparing his film version of the 1956 Philip K. Dick short story “The Minority Report,” Spielberg knew that one of his principal tasks would be to create a believable future world. So in 1999, over three days in Venice, California, he assembled a think tank of experts from various fields to help him brainstorm for the film, which is set in 2054 in Washington, D.C., rather than in the New York City location of the story, a change that heightens its political dimensions. Time reviewer Richard Corliss described the film’s visual style as a “mix of future and retro,” a blend of elements from the contemporary world (such as Washington’s monuments and recognizable commercial brands) with speculative elements (multi-touch screen interfaces; automated, high-speed, elevated roadways; jetpacks for flying; miniature police surveillance drones; interactive newspapers; personalized electronic advertisements), some of which would actually come to pass not long after the film’s release. Taking the approach of heightened contemporaneity serves to make the film’s themes less remote.

  Other than in the scenes dealing with the criminal demimonde on the fringes of the capital, Minority Report does not create its dystopia with as grungy a look as Ridley Scott brought to his celebrated 1982 futuristic film noir Blade Runner (based on a Dick novel). The visual style of Minorit
y Report instead relies on an expressionistic, chilly portrait of a totalitarian future, with Janusz Kaminski’s cinematography and Alex McDowell’s production design relying heavily on blue and other monochromatic tones to create the atmosphere of a bloodless, inhumanly theoretical approach to the problem of crime and punishment. Unlike Spielberg’s hopeful view of futurism in Close Encounters, his more mature vision mostly lacks warmth or consolation, though the denouement of Minority Report is less despairing than Dick’s even bleaker view (the film’s sentimental coda seems a jarringly out-of-context afterthought and was described by Slate reviewer David Edelstein as “Dick-less … a mushy declaration of humanism”).

  The screen adaptation by Scott Frank and Jon Cohen revolves around the issue of “precrime,” the society’s ability to predict when its citizens will commit murders (through the use of precognition by mutant “Precogs”), and its resulting policy of arresting people before they can break the law. Tom Cruise plays a police chief, John Anderton, who heads a precrime unit but finds himself a target of suspicion, forcing him to go on the run to try to clear himself. Spielberg made Anderton younger and more active than the character in the story and characteristically added a family trauma to help motivate Anderton’s fanaticism about law enforcement and provoke his subsequent moral crisis (Anderton’s son was kidnapped and is presumed dead, an event that shattered his marriage). A further level of emotional identification between Spielberg and Anderton is suggested in the way the police chief manipulates his screen interface to create pictures of crimes-in-progress, waving his arms like a director conjuring up sequences of visual imagery. Cruise’s performance, though limited in its emotional range, is grippingly intense, drawing the viewer into his tormented psychological state while still allowing critical perspective on his actions. Spielberg and his writers give Anderton a foil in his mentor Burgess (Max Von Sydow), the august but deranged creator of the Precrime operation, a flawed Spielbergian father figure who also seems its equivalent of Bush’s first attorney general, John Ashcroft. Von Sydow brings his own Bergmanesque gravity to the film.

  Portraying the Precrime policy as experimental and controversial, the film simplifies some of Dick’s labyrinthine and ironic plot twists to focus its investigation more tightly on the nature of free will and the discarding of civil liberties for the sake of expediency. That Spielberg began planning a major cinematic exploration of such issues even before the Bush regime took power in 2000 and instituted the USA Patriot Act in 2001, with its sweeping restrictions on traditional American constitutional rights, showed that the liberal filmmaker was keenly attentive to the underlying philosophical questions and had his ear to the ground in a time of already-increasing encroachments into civil liberties. The filmmaker who had suffered invasions of his own personal privacy from stalker Jonathan Norman and others said he was drawn to the short story because “the whole notion that technology is getting closer and closer to probing the sanctity of our homes and lives and minds concerns me. I thought there was a way to take those themes and collapse them into an old-fashioned murder-mystery.” The deeply moving climax of Minority Report shows Anderton coming face-to-face with the man he believes has killed his son and refusing to kill him, instead reading the man his Miranda Rights. That simple gesture of homage to the rule of law, in the context of the world of 2002 in which the film appeared, served as a powerful rebuke toward the police-state policies of Bush and Ashcroft and their assaults on the Constitution. Along with the subsequent revelation in the film that the man Cruise is tempted to kill was not guilty of the crime, the scene challenges the Bush administration’s decision to hold foreign prisoners without charges at Guantánamo and elsewhere on the grounds that even if cases could not be proven against them, they allegedly were dangerous and might commit crimes in the future.

  The unexpectedly high degree of relevance the film assumed between the time of its shooting (from March to July 2001) and its release nine months after 9/11 evidently caused Spielberg some alarm. The changed political climate put him in the position of mounting a braver critique of the current administration than he had anticipated while shooting it. As if to forestall possible backlash against the film’s advocacy of civil liberties in the anxious post-9/11 climate, Spielberg offered a dismaying statement to the New York Times shortly before the film opened in June 2002: “Right now, people are willing to give away a lot of their freedoms in order to feel safe. They’re willing to give the FBI and the CIA far-reaching powers to, as George W. Bush often says, root out those individuals who are a danger to our way of living. I am on the president’s side in this instance. I am willing to give up some of my personal freedoms in order to stop 9/11 from ever happening again. But the question is, Where do you draw the line? How much freedom are you willing to give up? That is what this movie is about.” Spielberg’s panicky backtracking calls to mind the words attributed to Benjamin Franklin: “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”

  Interviewed at the premiere of Minority Report, Spielberg said, “We’re giving up some of our freedom so that the government can protect us.” Anyone tempted to give him the benefit of the doubt for that somewhat ambiguous statement would be disappointed by other comments he made in amplification: “Thematically, it was a compelling message—and, of course, this was all before 9/11,” he said in January 2003. “All of a sudden, when Ashcroft was suspending our personal freedoms in order to better protect us as a nation of scared Americans, the ACLU [American Civil Liberties Union] and other groups began to worry that these privacy rights were being violated. My hope is simply that some day in the very near future, when this crisis has passed, we will return to the privacy rights that our founding fathers guaranteed us.” Spielberg made his rightward turn even clearer in another June 2002 interview: “I’m not an advocate of pulling back the CIA’s and the FBI’s far-reaching powers right now. I think this is a time of war, and they need to do what Lincoln did when he suspended the writ of habeas corpus in 1862…. During times of war, things like that have to happen. What I’m worried about is when we have finally gone beyond the brink, where we are right now, and things start to settle down. Will the government pull back those powers of surveillance? Or are they going to say that’s the new standard for them? Like, ‘Hey, you’ve lived with them for five years. Sorry, folks, but that’s just the way it’s going to be from now on.’ I hope that doesn’t happen. That would be very sad. If this doesn’t end, then we’ll have to go back to the college campuses and hold up signs.”

  Spielberg did not have the full courage of his artistic convictions. Like many liberal Democrats in that period, he even offered public support for Bush’s preemptive strike on Iraq. At a press conference promoting Minority Report in Rome, he said, “If Bush, as I believe, has reliable information on the fact that Saddam Hussein is making weapons of mass destruction, I cannot not support the policies of his government,” adding that those policies were “solid and rooted in reality.” By 2005, Spielberg had come to his senses, telling the German magazine Der Spiegel, “I criticize the Iraq War, the restrictions placed on citizens’ freedom. I criticize it because I love my country.”

  As D. H. Lawrence once observed, “Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.” Despite Spielberg’s own misgivings about what he had wrought, and though Minority Report sometimes seems to get distracted by the mechanics of high-speed chase sequences and elaborate special effects, the film’s popular success showed that he could take his audience on a serious moral journey while entertaining them with an ingenious deployment of genre conventions, riveting visual imagery, and impishly entertaining black comedy. With Minority Report and his subsequent films dealing with the threat to American values, Spielberg identified that threat as coming mostly from within a traumatized society that had come to doubt its own founding principles.

  *

  SPIELBERG�
�S busy directorial agenda saw him making two films for release in 2002 (the other was the comedy-drama Catch Me If You Can), but his corporate allegiance again was split by making Minority Report in conjunction with Twentieth Century Fox, which released it in the United States and other countries. Spielberg had long had a practice of not being paid upfront for the films he directed but instead taking a large share (usually 20 percent) of the box-office gross; he and Cruise reportedly earned a total of at least $70 million from Minority Report, compared with less than $20 million each for Fox and DreamWorks.