Official acknowledgment of his gifts was a long time coming. There seemed a possibility that he might, like Hawks and Hitchcock and Raoul Walsh, never receive an Academy Award. That was an absurdity after he had made Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Goodfellas and The King of Comedy. I suppose it had something to do with the violence of these films. They were so painful. (And not necessarily hugely profitable.) They were not, on the whole, date movies—putting it mildly. But everyone noticed their expertise. How could you not?
Of this group of movies, I think Raging Bull (1980) and Taxi Driver (1976) are the masterpieces. The first asks no quarter, and gives none, as it recounts the career of Jake LaMotta, played brilliantly by De Niro. It opens with yelling between him and his mother and ends with the boxer quietly reciting the “I coulda been a contender” speech from On the Waterfront in his nightclub act. At the very least, it is the most brutal boxing picture ever made. The audience flinches and winces as it is taken through Jake’s career in the ring. I love the sprays of sweat and blood in the boxing arena. No fight film has ever been so intimately detailed, and none has asked more of its star.
But in a way, boxing is only the context of this picture. In my conversations about it with Scorsese, he has suggested that it is really about a man seeking grace without fully realizing that is his quest. He is, at best, stumbling, half-blindly, toward that goal. Scorsese thinks that if LaMotta attains some recognition of his humanity (which he does in time), that will be victory enough for him, all he can hope for—not that he ever fully articulates that aim. That is for us, watching, to impute to him—which we do painfully. I do not know of any movie that pulls us down this path in such dread. I think it is a great work.
So is Taxi Driver, powered by Travis Bickle’s terrible anger and incomprehension. He’s played by De Niro, who, to begin with, doesn’t know that Cybill Shepherd is toying with him. He thinks perhaps he may aspire to her, which is, of course, a mad idea, plausible only to a man who is probably as innocent as he is crazy. And then there is Jodie Foster, in a performance that seems almost unconscious (or uncalculated) in that she says things and does things that seem so unplanned, so shocking, really. There is no sentiment in her work. This child-woman has no pity. The story in some sense comes out all right—that is to say that some kind of “happy” ending is arrived at (in the sense that not everyone ends up dead or maimed) and Travis ends up a “hero” in the world’s eyes.
But the film does not really end. Here is Travis in his cab, still on his rounds, but uncured. He is a time bomb still ticking, ready to explode. Here is the city, still essentially rain-washed and malevolent, ready to extract its price from him—from anyone—who dares let down his guard in its presence. The center of the film, the half-improvised scene in which Travis challenges himself in a mirror, is a masterpiece of paranoia and of split personality—not uncommon movie topics—but, in effect, shot in a broom closet, which intensifies its terror (and its weird humor) to unbearable levels. This movie addresses things movies do not ordinarily speak about, and it achieves levels of nuttiness few achieve. I don’t need to see it again, because it is indelibly etched on my brain—broad strokes and dreadful details both. It is perhaps the most terrifying great movie ever.
There are other movies in the Scorsese canon that are nearly as good—Goodfellas (1990), for example, which takes its protagonist on the long path to the Witness Protection Program in an odd and witty way. In The King of Comedy (1982), De Niro is Rupert Pupkin, a man desperate for fame and, by God, achieving it—he kidnaps a talk show host, Jerry Lewis, the ransom being an appearance on Lewis’s show. The farcical elements in the film are spun brilliantly (who says Scorsese can’t be funny when he feels like it?), and the eerie confidence of De Niro’s playing is masterly. Written by movie critic Paul D. Zimmerman, the film has a mad self-confidence that never falters. It also has an element of terror that is held in check but is more than palpable. It’s a haunting film, the best part of which is that Rupert—God help us all—succeeds in becoming a star. It’s one of the more original comedies of recent times. One wonders what a sequel would bring.
Scorsese falters, of course—every director does. As I was writing this, he brought forth The Wolf of Wall Street, which I thought was both lame and frenzied. But we are always talking here about bodies of work, and I think we need to speak of his range, which is far larger than we think. His topic is largely the criminal class—but he has given us The Age of Innocence and The Aviator, too. One of the things I most respect about him (and the other directors we are discussing) is the expanse of his ambition, his willingness to come a cropper. Sure, there is room for comedy specialists and all the other genre operatives, too. But a willingness to fall flat on your face from time to time is vital. Not too often, of course. But some movies have to grow—sometimes for years—before they attain their true stature. And Marty is a director capable of making movies of that kind. Woody Allen famously said that mostly a career is about showing up ready to work on cockamamie projects. If you don’t, you just go stale. Ambition is everything—well, almost everything. I mean, surely we don’t judge Spielberg by 1941, do we?
39
Earning It, or, Spielberg’s Way
Steven Spielberg is, or was, a prodigy. The story of how he left the Universal Studios tour and wandered the lot for a summer, making people think he was an employee, is part of his legend. So is the astonishing fact that he began directing features when he was only twenty-four years old. There are far fewer prodigies in the movie business than we think there are, and fewer still who succeed so spectacularly at such a tender age.
He was making TV movies when he was only twenty-three, and he made his first feature, the admirable Duel, in 1971—a television movie that was transformed into a feature release in 1973, when he was twenty-six. A year later he made The Sugarland Express, which was his first official feature release. By that time he had made nine TV episodes and was zeroing in on Jaws. I do not think there is any filmography to match this one for productivity in its early years.
Steven is an agreeable man who keeps what must be a powerful energy in check. He drives (or drove) his kids to school, often left work early in order to spend time with his family and, in my many conversations with him, never has made me feel rushed or hurried.
It was Jaws, in 1975, that made him rich and famous, though it was a close call. As we all know, the shark kept sinking, and lots of other things went wrong. There was talk of canceling the whole enterprise. But, obviously, they did not. Years later, when the American Film Institute named its hundred best movies, Jaws was one of six Spielberg films on the list.
Taking nothing away from Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), the most significant subtext of which was the need to communicate (if we could do it with aliens, why couldn’t we do it with each other?), it seems to me that Spielberg’s first unquestionable masterpiece is E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982). It is the ultimate of Spielberg’s several “lost boy” films—except, of course, the lost boy is a cute alien desperate to return from Earth to his faraway planet, abetted in that aim by the good-natured youngsters from Earth but hindered in that desire by clumsy (grown-up) scientists who want to “study” him. I honestly think the moment when the kids on their bicycles achieve liftoff in their quest to return E.T. to the place where he belongs is one of the truly wonderful moments of cinema. (John Williams’s magnificent scoring of the sequence is an incalculable aid to it.)
I want to pause here to make explicit what has probably been implicit throughout this book: I believe in popular cinema, probably more so than I do in “art” cinema. Obviously, there is room for both kinds of expression in film, and I think I’ve given a fair shake to them both herein. But it seems to me that sequences like the liftoff in E.T. are every bit as rare as, say, the conversations (or their lack) in Persona. They come from the same inexplicable place in the artistic spirit and run similar risks of failure. The flight sequence could have been only so-so. Happily, it works beautif
ully. But the point is this: It has an infectiousness, a joyousness, that more aspiring efforts do not attain. We appreciate the latter, and we can analyze them forever, but something like E.T. just takes us over. I never see it without misting up over it. I don’t know what’s operating there, but I’m pretty sure it’s mostly instinct rather than close calculation. For all his other achievements, Spielberg himself never again soared to this height, in my view.
He was looking for something else. Movies like this one, he has said, carried a slight air of popcorn about them. He is perhaps being overly modest, but I’m persuaded by his argument that he was liberated for his other major works by relative failures. “I don’t think I could have made Schindler’s List or Empire of the Sun without The Color Purple,” Spielberg has said. “I didn’t have the maturity, the craft, and the emotional information to acquit the Holocaust in an honorable way without bringing shame to the memory of the survivors.”
Purple (1985), which tells the life story of a poor African American woman, does not soar in any of the typical Spielbergian ways. It is quite grim and more than occasionally plodding. But one takes his meaning. It never sells out to his instinctive impulses for adventure or comedy—for relief of some sort. It is, I think, a movie that in some sense we owed him. Call it, perhaps, a rite of passage that he more or less forced us to take with him. It paid immediate dividends in the form of a very good but slightly neglected movie, Empire of the Sun (1987). Based on a book by J. G. Ballard, with a script by Tom Stoppard, no less, it is another lost-boy story, part factual, part fictional, in which a boy, the excellent Christian Bale as Jim, becomes separated from his family as World War II breaks out in Asia and stumbles his way to maturity, with the significant help of John Malkovich. It is a handsomely realized film, and it essentially ends with one of Spielberg’s finest sequences, when Jim wanders into a stadium filled with the detritus of his past life: Biedermeier and Josef Hoffmann furniture, cheval glass, Rolls-Royce cars, all the vestiges of a lost empire—the refuse, now useless, of a society that did not see the war coming. You get the impression that Jim is prematurely aged (Spielberg stressed that his eyes are those of an old man) and that he will not stay long in this place, that he will become what Ballard became—a permanently rootless wanderer on this earth. The film presses as close to real darkness as Spielberg allowed himself to come in those days. It was not a commercial success, but he would say, correctly, that it was the first film he had made solely to satisfy himself, which means it was of the highest importance in his career.
Let’s talk about the little girl in the red coat, the most controversial shot (or short sequence) that Steven Spielberg ever made. It appears in Schindler’s List (1993). Aside from a short opening sequence of a flickering candle, it is the only touch of color in this black-and-white film. It was criticized as a shameless touch of show business in an otherwise austere, not to say bleak, masterpiece. Spielberg’s critics correctly admired the film, which is one of the two or three best he ever made, but this scene seemed to be a blot on Spielberg’s record.
It didn’t bother me. What do a few seconds of screen time matter in a film as powerful as this one? Virtually every movie contains some mistakes, although you try to keep them to a minimum. Spielberg kept his own counsel about the shot, defending it by saying it was fully calculated, fully meant. He explained that he simply wanted to say that the Holocaust was as obvious as a little girl in a colored coat, that people in vast numbers knew about it and could not blink it away. She was there, indelibly. By extension (I am imputing this to him), far from being a mistake, this little sequence was symbolically close to being the heart of his film’s meaning. I suppose the point is arguable.
Directors do such things. It is what their art is about. You can say it is showbizzy, but I do not believe that was his intent. To think otherwise is to call into question his integrity, and in my years of knowing him I have never had any reason to question his integrity. The fact that he has made so many larkish movies counts against him, I suppose, for some critics, but even those movies are made with great seriousness of purpose. We have to concede him this shot, its plainness of purpose, its strength.
It was five years later that Spielberg fulfilled a long-standing promise to his father and made a movie about Americans in World War II. In the interim, he had, I think, flagged a bit, making only two movies of his own. The notion of doing a war film still nagged at him, and one day a script was delivered simultaneously to him and to Tom Hanks; by the end of that day they had both committed to Saving Private Ryan. His father would grumble about it a little—it was not a story about his war, flying the hump in the China-Burma-Indian Theater. Spielberg thought that was irrelevant. The picture was to be a tribute to all the men who had fought in the war. It didn’t matter to him whether the film made a profit. He guessed it probably would not—too violent. He thought maybe Hanks would give him a profitable week or two.
War movies come in two basic modes. Those made when a country is at war endorse what we might call the heroic fallacy—the war is thought to be a good one, and no sacrifice, no brutality, is too much for its winning. Those made in peacetime take the opposite view: War is a madness, not to be endorsed. The military necessity is seen to be a tragic one. These films can be full of rip-roaring blood and guts, but their message must finally be a pious one: Never again!
Saving Private Ryan is actually pretty silent on that subject. The war simply is, no big questions asked. Private Ryan has gone missing and needs to be found. Hanks’s Captain Miller commands the nine-man unit charged with finding him amid the chaos of war. He is a schoolteacher and a low-key, dutiful, not particularly heroic fellow who in the American way will get the job done. The film begins with the D-Day landings at Normandy, with what I am convinced is the greatest combat sequence in the history of American film. Ironically, it’s atypical of Spielberg’s usual practice.
Normally he’s a director who likes to storyboard. In this case, he did not. D-Day was chaos, and basically he let the filming capture that. For close to a month, it was improvisation on a vast scale, probably as close as fiction ever comes to the confusion and horror of war’s reality. He found that, though the work was exhausting, it was also exhilarating, and that set the tone for the whole film. That spirit returned in the battle that concluded the film, when Captain Miller finally meets his end.
This being a Spielberg film, there was some controversy attached to it. That had to do with the sequences that bookended it, in which a soldier, many years after the fact, visits the Normandy cemetery, which stands on the onetime battlefield, to commune with his fallen comrades. The words “corny” and “sentimental” flew around. Spielberg said that those bookends seemed to mean more to the veterans he talked with than any other aspect of the film. They are old men doing what they do as their time shortens, and they seek to recall the heroic days of their youth. Their sentiment to me seems honest.
There is honest sentiment and dishonest sentiment. This seems to me to be of the former kind, and I think we ought to let it rest there. Saving Private Ryan deserved its success. At the end, the dying Captain Miller says, “Earn this,” by which he means that those who are spared must not waste the rest of their lives, must spend the years left to them decently, bearing in mind the unique experience they shared—not brooding, but not forgetting, either. This is an honorable, even an extraordinary movie about war, and it goes about its work—I am choosing this word carefully—in a manly fashion. Its heroics are not false. Nor is there anything in it of G.I. comedy or of romance sundered by wartime exigencies. It is neither pro-war nor anti-war. It is that rarest of war films, in that it simply accepts combat as an ugly thing that happens and must be borne with what grace we can muster.
40
Clint Again
In spring 1992, when Clint Eastwood was about to turn sixty-three, the Los Angeles Times published its customary preview of the movies forthcoming that summer. It mentioned that he was about to release a western that was
entitled, temporarily, “The William Munny Killings.” It was scarcely exciting news; he was no stranger to the genre. The piece identified him, however, as Warner Bros.’ “fading house star,” which probably hurt, if Clint happened to notice it—as I suspect he did.
It was not entirely an unfair characterization. His last movie had been his worst (The Rookie), and he was in a generally fallow period—a number of movies had not worked out too well for him in the preceding years, though two of them, Bird and White Hunter Black Heart, had been decent and ambitious, if not critical successes or box office winners. There was, however, this “William Munny” project. It had come to him as a sample of David Webb Peoples’s work something like a decade earlier, when the writer was being considered for another project. Clint judged the screenplay extraordinary and decided to purchase it. Among other things, it had a sound structure and a very good ear for vernacular dialogue.
He wasn’t eager to put it into production, though. He thought he needed to age some more to play the part. I suspect, without ever having talked to Clint on this point, that it was his ace in the hole, something to turn to when he needed a strong project in a genre he virtually owned. Colleagues around Malpaso, his production company, talked of it impatiently. They wanted very much for him to make it.
So he inched his way toward production. He tried some modest rewrites on his own but then told Peoples he was improving it to death and went back to the original script. The studio, aware that Clint had generally been the sole star of his films, argued that there were three strong supporting roles in this film and encouraged him to cast major actors in them. Clint did so, in the persons of Gene Hackman, Morgan Freeman and Richard Harris. A location in Saskatchewan was found, and the expert production designer Henry Bumstead outdid himself, building a picturesquely muddy western street down a Canadian hillside—very realistic it was.
Keepers: The Greatest Films of a Moviegoing Lifetime Page 24