Spielberg’s concentration on Frank’s painful attachment to his ne’er-do-well father and his anguished disaffection from his mother, who symbolically rejects him by having another child with her second husband (James Brolin), is a reflection of his own “Freudian” trauma. When he left Saratoga for Los Angeles at the time his parents divorced, Spielberg recalled, “I kind of ran away the way Frank Abagnale ran away.” Frank’s eventual rescue by a surrogate father figure, FBI agent Carl Hanratty (Tom Hanks), a largely fictitious character invented for the film, puts Catch Me If You Can even more squarely in the center of Spielberg’s personal and artistic obsessions, setting the story in the same time period (the 1960s) and the same time of life (his young manhood) when he underwent the trauma and began learning how to cope with it.
This story of an artist/faker can also be seen as a metaphor for Jewish identity in America, as Alan Vanneman points out in a 2003 essay for the online magazine Bright Lights. He notes that the film “begins deep in the heart of WASPland” and has a recurring motif of Frank being excluded from Christmas celebrations. It shows Frank trying out a variety of social identities to find acceptance in mainstream American society, as minority-group members are often compelled to do (this pattern links the film to Ralph Ellison’s great novel about African American identity, Invisible Man). Elements of the Spielberg family pathology are allowed to override Abagnale’s life story. Paula Abagnale, who did not cheat on her husband, is given a gentleman caller, like Leah Spielberg, who married their family friend Bernie Adler. “A close family friend who’s always there when Dad isn’t, who ends up marrying Mom? Well, you can do the math, and so could Steven, and he hasn’t forgotten,” writes Vanneman. Spielberg also “gives us a touching picture of a father and son who love each other but never find the right word to say…. But it’s not in the book…. Spielberg is giving us his dream of overcoming the alienation he’s felt from his own father.” Frank is finally caught by the French police when “it’s Christmas Eve once more, for the fourth time in the picture. The people are gathering at the church for evening service. Spielberg shows us eternal France—beautiful, centuries-old stone buildings, a church hung with glowing lights, an angelic choir singing on the soundtrack. It’s perfect, really, just perfect. Unless you’re a Jew, of course, in which case they turn you over to the Gestapo.”
With Carl Hanratty’s tireless protection (he’s both a benign Javert and the guardian angel in this twist on Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life), Frank finally goes straight and makes a success of himself working for the FBI, helping to catch check forgers. This ironic twist has a somewhat queasy feeling, since Frank is putting other people behind bars by using his craft to protect himself from his own criminal instincts. Spielberg seems to endorse this solution, at least on a conscious level; he said in an interview for the DVD edition that during the filming he listened closely to his FBI technical adviser so he and Hanks would “not do something that would embarrass the FBI.” But the director’s finer artistic instincts lead him to a contrary visual implication. He films the FBI office as a prison of conformism, populated by workers in drab uniform-like clothing, showing Frank behind bars and inside cagelike rooms, and shooting the setting with cold, funereal lighting. Spielberg-the-reformed-student at his college graduation resembled Frank-the-FBI-agent: the filmmaker was surrounded by half a dozen bodyguards at the commencement ceremony, and he was driven from the event in a police motorcade. Like Frank, he had become a prisoner of his own achievement.
For a comedy that keeps anxiously insisting on how buoyant it is, Catch Me If You Can is a remarkably somber moral fable of innocence corrupted, and for a work of covert autobiography, it is strangely cool and detached toward its protagonist. And though it is set in the past and provides a bittersweet look at a more trusting, less security-conscious time in American life (“something all of us are nostalgic about,” Spielberg observed), like all period films, it is also about the time in which it was made. Catch Me If You Can could be seen as an oblique metaphor for America in the Bush years, living beyond its means, reveling in fraud and criminality, pretending to be something it is not, and ultimately facing a disastrous moral reckoning.
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THE Terminal “is, again, me having a reaction to all the darkness of my films in the 1990s and into the 2000s,” Spielberg said. After Catch Me If You Can, rather than reverting to another grim subject, he “wanted to do something else that made me smile and could make other people smile. And this is a time that we need to smile.” Nevertheless, The Terminal is Spielberg’s most direct and pointed examination of the totalitarian aspects of contemporary America, a Kafkaesque comedy about an innocent foreigner held prisoner in an airport by irrational restrictions imposed by the Department of Homeland Security. Though The Terminal is, ultimately, a reaffirmation of the inclusive spirit that welcomed newcomers such as Spielberg’s grandparents to the United States, its sunny optimism is constantly shadowed by the repressive realities of its time. British reviewer Philip French aptly described the film as “Frank Capra’s The Trial.”
Like Frank Abagnale and so many other Spielberg protagonists, Tom Hanks’s Viktor Navorski is an outsider, someone struggling to find acceptance in a society that needs his ameliorating influence; and like E.T., he desperately wants to go home. Viktor is trapped at John F. Kennedy International Airport because his country, the mythical Krakozhia, has had a coup since he departed for a visit to New York. Bureaucratic regulations prevent Viktor from being issued a visa, so he waits weeks in the ironically cheery-looking, brightly lit terminal/prison, learning how to survive in a new environment and acquiring the language. In a plot development reminiscent of Capra’s Depression-era comedies, an array of multiethnic airport workers rally to Viktor’s aid, helping him run circles around the fanatically bureaucratic but not entirely unsympathetic Homeland Security official (Stanley Tucci), who ultimately looks the other way when he heads into the city. Spielberg’s direction brilliantly balances subtle shades of comedy and drama and makes the populist themes of the story genuinely heartwarming, despite occasional lapses, such as the goopy romance that develops between Viktor and a neurotic flight attendant played clumsily by Catherine Zeta-Jones. Although the character has her flaws, she is such an unreal beauty that the romance seems too much like traditional Hollywood wish-fulfillment, though it may also stem from Spielberg’s own (fulfilled) fantasies of being a nerd who manages, through his talent and force of personality, to win the hand of a glamorous actress.
The screenplay by Sacha Gervasi and Jeff Nathanson, based on a story by Andrew Niccol and Gervasi, was inspired by the bizarre real-life case of a man stuck in Paris’s Charles de Gaulle Airport from 1998 through 2006. Merhan Karimi Nasseri, an Iranian refugee, initially was forced to live in the terminal after his passport and refugee certificate were stolen. After a while, he refused to leave, and he published an autobiography and became the subject of documentary films and the 1993 French feature film Tombés du ciel/Lost in Transit. Although DreamWorks reportedly paid Nasseri $250,000 for the rights to his life story, no mention of him appears in the credits of The Terminal or its publicity material, including DreamWorks’ documentaries about the production. A Spielberg spokesman told the New York Times, “Mr. Nasseri’s story was an inspiration for the original treatment for The Terminal. The film is not his story.” The Terminal might have been an even sharper satire of contemporary political reality if its protagonist had been a Middle Eastern refugee rather than a tourist from Eastern Europe. Viktor’s citizenship gives the film a somewhat retro, pre-9/11 feeling (the footage seen on television screens of the Krakozhian fighting is actually taken from the 1989 Romanian revolution), and portraying him as such a lovable, non-threatening outsider tends to soften the challenge he represents to American authority, making the film seem too safely good-natured.
But one would not want to change any details of Hanks’s superb comic performance. His physical and psychological coping reactions to the baffling intricacies
of life inside his huge, alien environment are delightfully rendered. Alex McDowell’s masterful recreation of the maze-like terminal interior (a fully-operational set created in a Palmdale, California, airport hangar formerly used for building airplanes) reinforces the Chaplinesque feeling Spielberg draws from Viktor’s plight, giving his interactions with objects and architecture the kind of incongruities the Tramp found in the factory in Modern Times. Reviewers who predictably objected to The Terminal’s extensive use of actual brand names in franchise stores miss the point of its accuracy in surrounding Viktor with a microcosm of modern American life in all of its corporatized homogeneity. In the best immigrant tradition (even though he doesn’t intend to stay in America), Viktor proves infinitely adaptable to his new environment, ingeniously finding ways of feeding himself, earning a living as an artist making a mural, and constructing a personalized living space. His attempts to learn English are absurdly hilarious (J. Hoberman wrote that the film aspires to be an “exercise in Beckett lite”), but they also show how quickly and believably he manages his new setting. Like E.T., Close Encounters, The Color Purple, Amistad, and other Spielberg films, The Terminal largely revolves around the theme of communication, a humanistic preoccupation that always draws from Spielberg’s most passionate concerns. Viktor’s affinities with his group of working-class American friends, who include African Americans, a Latino, and an elderly man from India, demonstrate the strength of the nation’s ethnic diversity. Although this populist aspect of the film was mocked by some hostile reviewers, it goes to the core of what the film is saying about the importance of reemphasizing American multicultural values in a time of jingoism and ethnic scapegoating.
Viktor may be a man without a country, at least temporarily, but Spielberg may also have felt that way many times himself during this period, when the country he loved had evolved so strangely into a hostile environment. The revelation of why Viktor has come to America is also a reaffirmation of what Spielberg values most about American culture. Viktor’s late father collected signatures of leading jazz artists seen in Art Kane’s celebrated Esquire photograph “Harlem 1958” (the subject of the 1994 documentary film A Great Day in Harlem). Viktor aims to track down the last remaining signer, saxophonist Benny Golson, whom he finds still playing at a New York hotel at the age of seventy-five. No doubt “highly flattering to American culture,” as British reviewer Philip French somewhat skeptically observed, this “symbolic act of filial piety” identifies the best in American culture largely in its minority influence. Viktor’s homage to jazz also represents another Spielbergian tribute to fatherly heritage, with the African American Golson standing in as a surrogate cultural father figure. The Terminal looks back nostalgically (and with guarded hopefulness) to a time before America, as the Homeland Security official declares, became “closed.”
*
“SUPPOSE some beings from another planet were to drop out of the sky suddenly and begin laying about them here!” Frank Wells remarked to his brother H. G. one day as they walked through the peaceful English countryside. The author immediately thought of how, if that calamity were to occur, Englishmen would be in much the same position as colonial peoples: “Perhaps we had been talking of the discovery of Tasmania by the Europeans—a very frightful disaster for the native Tasmanians!” The conversation spurred Wells to write his 1898 novel The War of the Worlds, in which invaders from Mars lay waste to just such a placid English countryside and to much of London itself before being brought down by common Earthly bacteria.
“And before we judge of [the Martians] too harshly,” he wrote in the book, “we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its inferior races. The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?”
Though Wells’s own views were marred with vestiges of the same colonialist attitude toward “inferior races,” his vision of Earthlings besieged by alien invaders has proven a resilient metaphor for artists seeking to convey to their audiences what it is like for a people to be invaded. At the time of the Munich crisis that served as a warning of the coming of World War II, Orson Welles directed his notorious 1938 CBS Radio adaptation of Wells’s novel, relocated to New Jersey. Welles and writer Howard Koch panicked large segments of the American populace by adapting the novel in the form of a fast-paced news broadcast (Spielberg bought the original script Welles used in the broadcast, to go with his Citizen Kane sled). The 1953 Paramount film version of The War of the Worlds, produced by George Pal and directed by Byron Haskin, is also set in the United States and is one of the quintessential Cold War movies, drawing upon widespread fear of nuclear attack by the Soviet Union. Spielberg’s 2005 film version for Paramount, DreamWorks, and Amblin Entertainment, War of the Worlds, expands upon the fears Americans felt after their mainland was invaded for the first time since the War of 1812. In an analogy to Wells’s original didactic conception of the story, Spielberg’s film also puts Americans and other spectators in the vulnerable position of the Iraqi people whose land was invaded by the United States two years before the film’s release, as a misplaced act of retaliation for 9/11. “Is it the terrorists?” Rachel Ferrier (Dakota Fanning) asks her father, Ray (Tom Cruise), when the attacks begin. As A. O. Scott wrote in his New York Times review of this “nerve-rackingly apocalyptic” film, Ray is “perhaps too preoccupied to give the honest answer, which is: ‘Well, sort of, sweetheart. In a metaphorical sense, that is.’”
War of the Worlds is Spielberg’s vision of a contemporary Hell on Earth. Like Welles’s radio program, and like A.I., the film is set in New Jersey, the state where Spielberg spent part of his youth. Cruise plays a working-class divorced father, a longshoreman and crane operator whose rig resembles the buried alien tripods that come bursting out of the ground shortly after the story begins, rather than appearing from the sky as in the novel. Ray spends the rest of the film on the run with his young daughter as they and their fellow countrymen flee the invaders in a relentless succession of ultraviolent scenes. War of the Worlds is a horrific vision of social breakdown, demonstrating how fragile even an advanced technological society can be. With its increasingly escalating mayhem, the film becomes a disturbing vision of helplessness, brutality, and mob violence. The requisite Spielbergian emphasis on a flawed father figure trying to keep his broken family together (the group also, for a time, includes a surly teenaged son) raises moral questions about how far an ordinary person would go to protect his loved ones. That Ray is forced to commit murder in defense of his daughter puts a grim new twist on a familiar Spielbergian theme.
David Koepp wrote the workmanlike but rather soulless shooting script (following an earlier writer on the project, Josh Friedman). Unlike in the earlier adaptations of the novel, the protagonist is not a journalist or a scientist but another example of what Spielberg once called his “Mr. Everyday Regular Fella.” A dismayingly irresponsible, scattered, and childish father who lives in chaotic messiness even before the invasion and is treated with utter contempt by his son (Justin Chatwin), Ray has a lot to overcome to fulfill his parental role, but he comes through with such alacrity that he seems almost like a superhero. Cruise’s trademark fierceness carries Ray through all the story’s physical and emotional demands, but the characterization remains thin. Focusing on a single small family unit is dramatically convenient but gives a sense of disproportion to their problems in relation to the global catastrophe, a mistake Spielberg did not make with Schindler’s List. “Millions of deaths [actually ‘a billion,’ according to Morgan Freeman’s narration] and incalculable property damage seem like pretty expensive family therapy,” wrote Scott, “but it’s heartening to know that even an alien invasion can provide an opportunity for learning and growth.”
War of th
e Worlds is never anything less than a technical marvel, seamlessly blending large-scale physical effects with CGI to conjure up nightmare visions of endless destruction. Spielberg’s technical mastery is often breathtaking, as in the 360-degree tracking shot around Ray and his family as they race out of town in their minivan, a shot that echoes a similar camera movement in The Sugarland Express but at a much higher speed. But after a while all the virtuosity and mayhem become wearying, and the film, despite its breakneck pacing, plods along emotionally on a single dull note of terror and hysteria (Fanning has little to do but give bug-eyed looks and scream). War of the Worlds has little subtlety or complexity, reducing everything to what Spielberg called the “primal” level. As he said, the film “preyed on our fears and vulnerabilities, the idea of terrorism, which is still pretty foreign and alien to the American psyche of feeling protected.” Ultimately this is an ugly film, visually and emotionally, an overwrought, outlandish, mechanical piece of work with a dismal view of humanity as a species barely worthy of saving.
War of the Worlds bears an odd resemblance to an earlier, critically reviled Spielberg film, 1941. Both are grandiose exercises in mayhem and destruction, technically expert but emotionally stunted. Both show ordinary people reacting largely like hysterical idiots to an unexpected attack on the American mainland. The difference is that in 1941, Spielberg is spraying his characters with mockery. Although most of his attempts at levity in that earlier film are leaden, there’s such sheer joy in his wanton destruction that it keeps the film mildly diverting. Sitting through War of the Worlds, on the other hand, is simply an ordeal, one that makes the viewer feel harassed, beaten down, and exhausted. Spielberg’s attempt to blend a “serious” evocation of post-9/11 fears with what is, at root, a cheap-thrills horror film approach never finds the requisite balance of visual and dramatic elements to support its weightier intentions.
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