“Teachers of Literature are apt to think up such problems as ‘What is the author’s purpose’ or still worse ‘What is the guy trying to say?’ ”—Vladimir Nabokov, “On a Book Entitled Lolita,” 1957
“Spielberg’s movies are undeniably powerful. His films function as supreme audience entertainments, almost by definition. But when I revisited them, I wanted to find their ideas: What, after all these features, has Spielberg really said?”—Bill Wyman, “I Watched Every Spielberg Movie,” Slate, January 30, 2012
None of those sentences even convey an actual idea so I can’t wait to see what Bill “In Another Land” Wyman has to say about Spielberg’s ideas.
” Still, I couldn’t understand, watching it, why a propensity by a highly commercial filmmaker to include in his films religiously lit close-up shots of the human face looking up in wonder would be considered anything more than axiomatic.”
Axiomatic? In all sincerity, I don’t understand what he means by that. Self-evident? Relating to axioms? Wouldn’t any such visual trope be self-evident? Or maybe not; if it’s self-evident, why was Kevin apparently the first person to pile up a string of examples and give the device a name? If Wyman is saying the “Spielberg face” is there, and once you have identified it there is nothing more to be said on the matter, that is also dismantled by Kevin’s essay, which Wyman had just called intelligent and elegant.
And then again, Wyman is also saying (I think) that this would be true of any “highly commercial filmmaker,” not just Spielberg. And that adds to my confusion.
That sentence is like a brick wall. What am I missing?
Bill Wyman!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYHZUlf_z6o
So if E.T. is Spielberg’s LOLITA, what’s his PALE FIRE?
Does he mean “idiosyncratic” maybe? I can’t read that thing. It’s as exhaustive as that dumb multi-part Spielberg video essay that some other outlet with content diarrhea produced late last year.
“A.I.” is his “Pale Fire.”
God bless you. The idea that an artist must have “something to say” is practically the bane of my existence, but it’s, er, axiomatic by this point. The kicker of course being, as BobSolo points out, that those who demand an artist “say something” are rarely able to describe what they believe is being said.
What I’m getting it is, saying things is really overrated.
Damn. Took the words right out of my mouth, Keith.
That Slate piece is just the worst. If Wyman really thinks that “Minority Report” and “War of the Worlds” are nothing more than “noisome randomness,” he must have some awfully poor comprehension skills.
Glad we agree on that one, Glenn. Such a rich, multilayered work. And says plenty.
Part of what really annoys me is that Wyman out and out ignores my two favorite Spielberg pictures – DUEL and MUNICH – two of the ones with the kind of recognizable literary chops and thematic maturity that might have easily refuted his dumbass anyway argument.
“I’m really glad this articles acts as a counterpoint to those damn Seitz and Arkin video essays. We can’t have people going around thinking that Spielberg is a bold and original filmmaker!” ‑Kois, I assume, when he heard the pitch.
You think Slate would take the time to attack some other filmmaker that is actually universally loved instead of highly contentious. Wyman seems to think he’s the first person ever to state that *gasp* he doesn’t like Spielbergs films. Oh, and he’s also an idiot.
“When Spielberg plays with such things—Pinocchio in A.I.,[…]—the resonances are one-note. (E.g., will the robot become a real boy?)”
Yep, that’s what A.I. is about. It’s about if the robot will become a real boy. This dude nailed it.
I also love this:
“He takes images and archetypes he knows will work—because they have in the past—and presents them without additional nuance or complication. (His partisans will say that they are nonetheless effective. Fine; the artistry remains second-rate.)”
There’s nothing like inventing the argument against your points so you can shoot them down. Never mind that he does no such thing. Wyman’s definition of first-rate artistry is never forthcoming, because I don’t think he knows what it is. Hell, I know he doesn’t know what it is. His jumping off point for this whole article is the “surprisingly uneven” track record Spielberg has with Oscars. Stick to playing the bass, you idiot!
The age title that appears at the top of my browser – Steven Spielberg’s Complete Movies: I’ve seen every one, and I almost wish I hadn’t – is like a parody of a AICN piece. Structurally, grammatically, conceptually… I guess it’s a fair warning.
And that should be “page title” .. I guess I shouldn’t be throwing rocks in my glass house.
He also needs to realize that a phrase like “concert cum monster” should never be used without hyphens (or at all).
I love A.I. For me, it’s his great masterwork.
And I think “axiomatic” in that case does mean self-evident or obvious. But if we are gonna nit-pick I nominate “Beneath all his technical wizardry is only a simulacrum of aesthetics.” Now that’s sentence that doesn’t really mean what (I presume) the author intends to say which is “not a lot going on”
And Woody Allen’s films are “technically indifferent” – I guess he means unambitious (which is untrue of Zelig, for one)…
I think the most demented stuff is about how Spielberg doesn’t get great performances, which turns out to be about how he doesn’t use big stars, oh, except when he does.
What’s great about Slate’s “contrarian” stance in general is how everything begins with the premise that “X” is overrated, or something, and then critical goalposts are trotted all over the field to hammer down the point. Wyman’s miffed that Spielberg’s films have no “ideas.” Like he’s so big on Straub and Huillet or something. If Spielberg’s films DID have ideas, they’d have to be the WRONG ideas, then. And so on, and so on, and so on. The pretzel logic is a feature, not a bug, at that particular outlet—Jonah Weiner’s showboating “Wes Anderson is a racist” thumbsucker was a particularly unforgivable example. But Wyman, who I’m almost NEVER on the same page with but who usually goes to the trouble of building a much better case, takes a particular case in the scattershot department. When he finally gets around to citing continuity errors as narrative holes you can tell he’s really grasping at straws.
Paul Giamatti could play Charles Kinbote in Spielberg’s film of Pale Fire.
“What’s great about Slate’s “contrarian” stance in general…”
But ‘Spielberg is a lousy filmmaker’ isn’t really a contrarian stance, is it? I certainly endorse the general viewpoint, and I don’t imagine I’m alone. It seems more cliché than contrarian.
I’m not a fan of Slate, but I’m not a fan of Spielberg either. The article in question is not particularly good, (it badly misunderstands Woody Allen’s oeuvre, among other things), but at least its heart is in the right place, which is unusual for Slate…
I wish he would have looked at his television films. Duel and Something Evil are a lot of fun.
I wish he would return to whatever high school newspaper he was cherry-picked from. Who cares what this twit has to say about Duel or anything else? Read his responses in the combox. He just keeps enlarging his vapid vortex. I think he wants us all to be impressed that he’s seen – and even enjoyed/“got”! – Lynch films.
I’m with Petey on this. The notion that Spielberg ISN’T overrated is the actual contrarian viewpoint.
There are people who actually like A.I.? Seriously?
“…heart in the right place”? How’s this for “axiomatic”, or at least hypothetical? IF the Academy doesn’t like the most successful producer/director of films in Hollywood history, THEN something can’t be right with him! Although, say, that Scorsese fella didn’t get no kind of Oscar for a while, neither, and he wasn’t half as successful! Guess it’s not about financial success OR inherent artistry! Mmm. Yeah. And now, I don’t feel well…can’t keep the contrary contrarianistisms straight without a scorecard over there in Slate-land. The Oscars are stodgy and need a bathing-suit contest or something but are Exhibit A and springboard for a barer-than-thread (page) hit job on little Stevie more revealing of the hit man than his intended target.
Though, like Petey, I do think Spielberg’s work deserves to be knocked and on the regular, though Wyman’s critiques are as superficial as he maintains Spielberg’s films are. Spielberg’s craft is so superior that you rarely feel the manipulation, but it’s so often there, leading you by your nose and bloodying it with the John Williams two-by-four. And the mantle of artist rests on him sometimes amusingly – recall his public agon about how he could go on as a pop director after SCHINDLER’S LIST, a condition deliciously skewered in Stuart Klawans’ Nation review of Spielberg’s actual follow-up, JURASSIC PARK 2, which he treated as though it were a sequel to SCHINDLER’S. But, Good Lord, there’s so much great, serious work after E.T. alone – I’ll add EMPIRE OF THE SUN, about which you could almost feel the heat from Pauline Kael’s tears of gratitude in her review – he’s not only the most successful American director of all time, he’s the damnedest and so much more worthy of a genuinely engaged consideration than this armchair shrug of a gloss.
I mean, what are we to do with this episteme: “I’ve never understood the complaints about the consequences Spielberg’s early hits—Jaws, Close Encounters, and the like—supposedly had on the movie business. What’s wrong with unforgettable action movies with imaginatively conceived sequences and snappy writing—films that, for a time, brought an entire country together in a shared aesthetic experience? Pulp Fiction still got made, and so did Blue Velvet.” Seriously, shut up already! Just ’cause you hate on shared homeland aesthetics and like A.I. and shit, well, back when Steve was cool we all stood in line and afterward you got blockbusters AND two left-of-center films over the next two decades – you know, plus RAGING BULL! That’s THREE! – and all I hear is your pissing and moaning and your inability to perceive an arc of failed promise…Jesus, I think! It’s not exactly TINKER TAILOR but it is an effing puzzle and my brain hurts and I’m upset and I’m going to go be mean to people all day now. Thanks.
Straub/Huillet, you say, Glenn? As Tom Cruise put it in RISKY BUSINESS: no, I do not believe so.
Well, James, you can’t deny those two had IDEAS.
And yes, I LOVE “A.I.,” and have no problem saying so. I remember going to an early screening with my Première colleague Howard Karren and being rather awed but also kind of confused: had I, in fact, seen what I thought I had seen? And no, what I thought I had seen had zip to do with any kind of “Pinnochio” concern over whether the protagonist would become a “real boy” but instead a rather wrenching and deeply pessimistic conundrum on the nature of both “reality” and mortality. So we saw it again at our earliest convenience and were both surprised and gratified to run into a critic for a major newspaper who was having the same intimations, whose resultant review is here:
http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9C0DE2DD1739F93AA15755C0A9679C8B63
Anyway, I stand by my own review as well. I understand that “A.I.” is “polarizing” (I have a funny story about HOW polarizing, but I can’t tell it, which in itself should indicate how polarizing), but I’m unshakably pro.
Oh, I very much love A.I. I’m with Glenn in thinking it’s a deeply pessimistic film. Wyman must have turned the film off early– you know before humanity comes to an end– if he thinks the point was whether it’s about a robot becoming a real boy. Or perhaps he only becomes a real boy at the end when he basically dies, which is hardly a reassuring sentimental idea.
Josh Z.: I also love A.I., so with Glenn, Howard Karren, ZS and A.O. Scott, that’s at least five of us. Oh, and I’ll bet Armond White is on board, even if we’d like to leave him out of it.
Heck, until the last year or so, I was under the impression that Spielberg’s critical rep had gotten rather healthy. In the aughts alone, you can find lots of good will toward A.I., MINORITY REPORT, CATCH ME IF YOU CAN, MUNICH and even WAR OF THE WORLDS if you know where to look. Maybe that CRYSTAL SKULL débâcle undid all that for some folks.
I think WAR OF THE WORLDS is his most purely realized film of the Oughties and certainly one of the best examples of 9/11-as-horror-film.
I think A.I. is like Armond White’s favorite film.…which is almost enough to ruin it for us defenders. Of course, he likes Neveldine/ Taylor so the broken watch principle could be at work here.
>I’m with Petey on this. The notion that Spielberg ISN’T overrated is the actual contrarian viewpoint.
One can object to Spielberg’s preferred themes or his methods of emotional manipulation or what have you, but I have a very hard time understanding the viewpoint of people who don’t at least acknowledge his skill (in my opinion, ‘mastery’ is a better word) with the technical aspects of blocking, camerawork, composition, etc. His body of work is problematic, but he’s a major talent. I haven’t unreservedly loved any of his films in a long time, but when he cracks his knuckles and gets to building a standout sequence (Normandy beach in Private Ryan, tripod attack in War of the Worlds, etc.) he has a tendency of making the rest of the summer-blockbuster director set look like amateurs. Even Tintin, as an example of purely kinetic action filmmaking, is a pretty dazzling piece of work. I can’t reconcile his best sequences with the appellation ‘lousy filmmaker’ – too much cognitive dissonance for me to handle.
>I think WAR OF THE WORLDS is his most purely realized film of the Oughties and certainly one of the best examples of 9/11-as-horror-film.
I think it contains his best sequence of the ’00s, and one of the greatest action sequences ever filmed, full stop, though I prefer Munich overall.
“There are people who actually like A.I.? Seriously?”
This is basically Slate, summed up in two sentences.
(I know, it’s CRAZY, right?! Can you imagine liking something so CLEARLY awful?!)
“One can object to Spielberg’s preferred themes or his methods of emotional manipulation or what have you, but I have a very hard time understanding the viewpoint of people who don’t at least acknowledge his skill (in my opinion, ‘mastery’ is a better word) with the technical aspects of blocking, camerawork, composition, etc.”
Who cares about ‘technical aspects’? His movies, (with a few exceptions), tend to just be boring. And in this medium, torpor is the enemy. Flat and simple. Solaris isn’t boring. Most Antonioni isn’t boring. But most of Spielberg’s oeuvre is simply boring.
Being an upgrade on Michael Bay isn’t much of a compliment. Stevie is our generation’s Cecil B. DeMille – a few interesting things in his youth, followed by a career of boring. (Catch Me If You Can, which is among his best non-youth work, merely rises to the mediocre…)
I can’t believe we live in a world where A.I. still needs to be defended.
Bill: “I can’t believe we live in a world where A.I. still needs to be defended.”
Let alone (however conditionally or problematically) Spielberg.
Yeah, that too, obviously. MUNICH, to take another example, contains some of the best directing the man has ever done. It’s packed with superb compositions and imagery, and the violence is wonderfully and gut-churningly staged. Hey, but he made HOOK! Boooo!
“Flat and simple(…) But most of Spielberg’s oeuvre is simply boring.”
I get the impression some people think the use of “simple” or “simply” ends an argument. But it simply isn’t true.
“Hey, but he made HOOK! Boooo!”
Starting from 1983, I count around 15 outright lousy movies, and around genuinely 5 debatable movies, none of which rise anywhere near excellence.
And, again, I don’t think this is a a contrarian viewpoint. 4 out of 5 worthwhile critics agree…
The definition of “worthwhile” is up for some debate as well, apparently.
“The definition of “worthwhile” is up for some debate as well, apparently.”
Well, you sorta know it when you see it when it comes to critics, no? Some critics thought Drive belonged amongst the year’s best. De gustibus non est disputandum and all that.
But just because critical debates are not resolvable via dispute to the satisfaction of every soul on the planet doesn’t mean everyone is equally correct.
Well,since ranking seems to be the thing, here’s mine:
UNIMPEACHABLE
Duel
Sugarland Express
Jaws
Close Encounters
E.T.
Empire of the Sun
A.I.
Catch Me If You Can
PRETTY GREAT
Raiders
Jurassic 2 The Lost World
Minority Report
War of the Worlds
Munich
PROBLEMATIC
1941
Color Purple
Jurassic
Schindler’s List
Amistad
Saving Private Ryan
The Terminal
Tintin
DRECK
Temple of Doom
Crystal Skull
Always
CRAP
Hook
Last Crusade
HAVEN’T SEEN
War Horse
Whoa whoa whoa…LAST CRUSADE crap? I protest. But okay:
Unimpeachable:
JAWS
CLOSE ENCOUNTERS
ET
EMPIRE OF THE SUN
AI
WAR OF THE WORLDS
MUNICH
Pretty great:
RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK
MINORITY REPORT
CATCH ME IF YOU CAN
DUEL
SCHINDLER’S LIST
Pretty good:
SAVING PRIVATE RYAN
JURASSIC PARK
LAST CRUSADE
ALWAYS (I like it)
Problematic:
SUGARLAND EXPRESS
THE TERMINAL
Dreck and crap:
TEMPLE OF DOOM
CRYSTAL SKULL
1941
AMISTAD (the slave ship stuff is great, everything else is deadly)
LOST WORLD
Haven’t seen:
WAR HORSE (I don’t get out much)
TINTIN (I don’t get out much)
THE COLOR PURPLE (didn’t like the book, keep putting it off)
HOOK (Robin Williams)
Also, Glenn, I thought you liked CRYSTAL SKULL.
@Petey – “But just because critical debates are not resolvable via dispute to the satisfaction of every soul on the planet doesn’t mean everyone is equally correct.”
Indeed not.
I liked Crystal Skull which I admit needs way more defending than A.I.
I suppose Duel and Jaws would be my favorites after A.I.
“Well,since ranking seems to be the thing, here’s mine”
The only post-’83 ones I’d rank as definitively “non-lousy” are:
Catch Me If You Can
Jurassic 2 The Lost World
Minority Report
A.I.
But even with any of those, we’re not talkin’ in even the vicinity of greatness, in my book. His mawkishness and torpor invade even those to some degree. It’s really the Cecil B. DeMille disease.
Let’s try it this way: Scorcese’s worst movie is better than than any post-’83 Spielberg movie. That’s not a low bar to cross, but it’s not the highest bar in the world to cross either.
(And hell, I even find his early work uneven, to be honest, though with some real inspiration mixed in. I could never get behind E.T., and Close Encounters goes way off the rails in the third act. Duel and Jaws are quite good, though, and Sugarland Express had some real moments. And 1941 is better than its rep.)
@Petey: I’d happily sit through 10 screenings of A.I. in a row before watching The Departed again.
I’ll play along:
UNIMPEACHABLE
Sugarland Express
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Raiders of the Lost Ark
E.T.
Schindler’s List (I’ve even come around on the scene where Neeson says he could have saved more)
Saving Private Ryan
A.I.
Munich
PRETTY DAMN GREAT
Duel
Jaws
Amistad
Minority Report
Catch Me if you Can
War of the Worlds
PRETTY GOOD
Empire of the Sun
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
Jurassic Park
The Lost World: Jurassic Park 2
PROBLEMATIC
Twilight Zone: The Movie (his segment)
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
The Color Purple
The Terminal
War Horse
CRAP
Hook
NEVER SAW
1941 (can’t explain why)
Always (hated the original)
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (my Spielberg-loving former co-workers didn’t like it at all)
Adventures of Tintin (haven’t gotten around to it yet)
Now, if you want to make a case against Spielberg the producer, that’s firmer ground to stand on. But the fact is, even in the last decade, supposedly his “weak” decade, even given the fact I haven’t seen the last Indiana Jones movie, of the six other films he directed in that time period, THE TERMINAL is the only one I wouldn’t willingly revisit. That’s a pretty good average.
And please, let’s not go through the whole “Scorsese vs. Spielberg” argument again. I love HIGH FIDELITY as a book and a movie, but I don’t want to have to live it everywhere I go.
I think that it’s a trap to defend A.I., and other Spielberg films, against the charge that they are sentimental, or that they have “happy endings.” The dude has a sentimental worldview, and he defends it vigorously. There’s nothing inherently wrong with sentiment. When done well, a sentimental story taps into great popular emotional. If you read the lyrics to a Motown song, they probably read like drivel, but if you listen to those lyrics set to a great Holland-Dozier-Holland melody, then they become transcendent. A.I. is one of my favorite films, and it makes me cry every time I watch it. A lot of lesser filmmakers could have shot a mawkish version the scene where David’s mother leaves him in the woods. Spielberg, though, has a sensitivity with actors, and a precision of lighting and framing, that makes that moment perfect in A.I. I remember not only David’s uncomprehending tears, but also his mother’s confused horror at how much she has come to love a machine, even though she knows that abandoning that machine is the “right” thing to do. Does this count as an “saying something,” in the Wyman universe?
“The Wyman universe.” I shudder at that concept. I’m sure it’s ruled by gibbering, octopoid Elder Gods too dumb to form complete sentences or really do much other than stir up comboxes and page hits.
Spielberg: “5 unarguable classics… which is one more than anyone else including Hitchcock and Kubrick”
– Unnamed ‘Hollywood Elsewhere’ poster, whose name I have withheld to protect the imbecilic/sycophantic
@BobSolo – Don’t trash the Elder Gods like that. Those guys are pretty sharp, living in space and waiting for the right time to return and consume us all, and whatnot.
@Oliver C – I saw that comment, and it’s very foolish, I agree. Doesn’t really count as an argument against Spielberg, though.
Why is crap worse than dreck and how could anyone put TEMPLE OF DOOM in either category?
This will not stand!
xox,
Committed lover of Temple of Doom
“Dreck” in this case is my categorization for stuff that’s irritating in a number of ways but sometimes enjoyable in spite of itself. No offense against the actual Kate Capshaw, who is lovely and I’m sure a formidable person, but her character AND her performance in “Temple of Doom” drive me right up a wall, as does Short Round, the dinner scene, all that. And yet, there are bits. As there are in “Crystal Skull,” which I enjoyed somewhat in Cannes, largely due to the classics it took inspiration from, frankly. “Last Crusade” got right up my nose in so many ways I couldn’t have any fun with it. Which is what, for the purposes of my ranking list, is what distinguishes “dreck” from “crap.” Hope this makes everybody happy!
@John M: “This is basically Slate, summed up in two sentences. (I know, it’s CRAZY, right?! Can you imagine liking something so CLEARLY awful?!)”
Well, you’ll have to forgive me for not having time yesterday to write a thesis paper on the topic in the minute I had available to make my blog comment. I’ll try to do better now.
@bill: “I can’t believe we live in a world where A.I. still needs to be defended.”
I’m not a hater of all things Spielberg by any means. Every once in a blue moon, he manages to impress me. But the man’s reputation as a whole has certainly been overrated considering the actual quality of most of his movies. And yes, I find A.I. to be CLEARLY awful. I’ve seen it twice, once in the theater and then again recently on Blu-ray, hoping to revisit it from a fresh perspective (in light of the fact that it does have some defenders). It turns out that my feelings for it hadn’t changed much in the ensuing years.
The movie is an infuriating mess. It has some interesting ideas in it, primarily in the first half. Most of those were probably left over from Kubrick’s involvement. And it has that truly wrenching scene where the mother abandons David in the woods, which is very powerful and moving. But then it turns needlessly cheesy during the Mad Max section of the story, and of course ends with that ATROCIOUS last act.
Yes, apologists will claim that the ending was Kubrick’s idea. I might believe that he came up with the basic concept of jumping the story forward in time, but he certainly didn’t write any of those reams of groan-inducing technobabble BS dialogue about “space-time pathways” and the like. That painful need to EXPLAIN everything, and utterly wipe away any trace of ambiguity, is pure Spielbergian pap at its absolute worst.
In an earlier comment, Glenn called the movie a “deeply pessimistic conundrum on the nature of both ‘reality’ and mortality.” The problem (for me) is that, like most things Spielberg, the director only approaches those ideas on a shallow and superficial level. He’s afraid to really engage with them, and has to temper them with pointless action movie beats and a thick coating of his patented schmaltz.
Despite the fact that it ends with the human race extinct, I don’t find the movie pessimistic, and I doubt Spielberg does either. It’s a recurring issue in Spielberg’s works that he is obsessed with the happiness of his main protagonists to the exclusion of everything else. This tunnel vision basically ruined the ending of Close Encounters (any version), where Roy Neary abandons his family to take a joyride in the spaceship, as well as the ending of Minority Report, where Det. Anderton saves the precog and dismantles the entire Pre-Crime network, apparently oblivious to the consequences that doing so would mean the reintroduction of crime and murder to the city.
Any of these could have been played for effective dramatic irony, or at least ambiguity, if at all acknowledged within their stories. But Spielberg doesn’t understand irony or ambiguity. He’s a literalist and a sentimentalist. So long as his characters are happy (and that’s a requirement in his book), the world is by definition a better place. The ending of A.I. is extremely optimistic in that regard. David gets his wish. He gets his mother back for that one moment of pure happiness, and dies knowing that she loved him as much as he loved her. The extinction of the entire human race pales in comparison to that.
Sorry, I don’t buy it, and I found Spielberg’s handling of the material to grow increasingly dopey as it goes, until concluding with that epilogue of howlingly awful ineptitude. You may not believe that we live in a world where A.I. still needs to be defended. I don’t believe that we live in a world where it CAN be defended. Though I’m sure that I’m unlikely to sway you to my opinion on this, just as you’re unlikely to sway me to yours. So it goes.
Although my drunken A.I. defense now looks kind of incoherent, I just wanted to join the anti-Wyman gang before this thread goes cold. This “nothing to say” thing really bugged me, if only because Wyman never tries to figure out what Spielberg might be trying to stay. So what if every backyard has a clothesline, or if crowds don’t behave according to some bizarre Wyman logic of crowds? In three pages, there is very little about the content of the films.
“Despite the fact that it ends with the human race extinct, I don’t find the movie pessimistic”
Well, CLEARLY that’s a mighty high standard you have for defining pessimism then!
“He gets his mother back for that one moment of pure happiness, and dies knowing that she loved him as much as he loved her.”
But she didn’t, though. See, that’s the thing.
“those reams of groan-inducing technobabble BS dialogue about ‘space-time pathways’ ”
Maybe you just don’t like science fiction, and I mean SF as it exists in literature, which rarely matches up to the SF that appears on film.
And to describe the ending of CLOSE ENCOUNTERS as a “joyride”…I mean, I know Spielberg says he would never end the film that way now, but I’ve never understood why some people find it so hard to view the film as a little more skewed. He abandons his family, yes. Where does it say we have to blindly support his decision? From the other view, is it impossible to understand why someone would make that decision? To be the only man in history to explore that kind of environment? Why does it have to be read as so cut-and-dried?
“This “nothing to say” thing really bugged me”
Well, it’s what bugged Glenn as well.
And it’s generally a bad bit of criticism.
But…
Without aligning myself with the viewpoint of the Slate piece, I will say that the “nothing to say” knock actually is a bit of a key to unlocking What’s Wrong With Spielberg. He’s a guy who made some quite good early action movies, and then he decided he really did Have Something To Say. But he was wrong. That’s why, after a certain point, his movies become filled with empty meaning. And that’s why the torpor and mawkishness take over.
When you get a good young energetic filmmaker who receives acclaim and misguidedly starts pumping in a heartfelt worldview that doesn’t quite work, you end up with a body of work like that produced by Cecil B. DeMille, Elia Kazan, or Steven Spielberg.
A filmmaker needs to play to their strengths, not weaknesses. That’s why I read Spielberg’s first decade of features as having some real inspiration, and why I read his last three decades of features as mostly alternating between dreck and crap.
Petey: But Glenn and his re-purposed Nabokov quote were bothered for a different reason. Wyman’s complaint bothered me because I think that Spielberg does have plenty to say, especially in his post-Schindler career, in his Walter Scott-like mix of romantic storytelling and historical inquiry. People mock his “framing” devices in SPR and Schindler, but I actually think that this is where his ideas are. Like Scott and Cooper and a bunch of other authors that no one except me likes anymore, Spielberg often shows how the past bleeds into the present, how we remember. This even pops up in Last Crusade. I understand the complaint about “mawkishness,” but I’m not sure what “torpor” refers to. And “empty meaning” just confuses me. If something has meaning, then how is it empty?
THIS – > “But Spielberg doesn’t understand irony or ambiguity. He’s a literalist and a sentimentalist. So long as his characters are happy (and that’s a requirement in his book), the world is by definition a better place. The ending of A.I. is extremely optimistic in that regard. David gets his wish. He gets his mother back for that one moment of pure happiness, and dies knowing that she loved him as much as he loved her. The extinction of the entire human race pales in comparison to that.”
Josh didn’t mention them, but among the other movies that identical flaw tarnishes, to one degree or another, are WAR OF THE WORLDS, SAVING PRIVATE RYAN and SCHINDLER’S LIST. Are we really supposed to care about this one clueless dad Learning to Reconnect while New York is being destroyed? The line (paraphrasing from memory) “maybe if we can save Ryan, this’d be the one good thing to come out of all this” has to be the worst line ever in a mostly-great film. And who can forget Neeson’s “I could’ve saved more” bit, though SCHINDLER’S LIST is hurt less than the other titles I mention – partially because of Red Coat Girl counterpoint and partially because the speech at least does make present and grapple with the (apparent) contradiction in the very concept “a Spielberg Holocaust film.”
Should clarify – by “worst line” in re SAVING PRIVATE RYAN I mean both “most morally clueless line” (um … defeating Hitler? stopping the Holocaust? doesn’t count) AND “line most at odds with what the rest of the film shows and is about”
Victor: I like Josh’s point, even if I disagree with it, but that line in SPR wasn’t meant to be a thesis statement. In the context of the film, was Ed Burns or whoever supposed to stop and take an objective world-historical view of the shit that he was currently mired in? I think the counterpoint to that line, or to the much-derided “earn this” is that we–Ryan and everyone in the audience–can’t possibly live up to the sacrifice that was made to win WWII.
I personally love the tired chestnut that any “interesting ideas” in A.I. just HAD to be a result of Kubrick’s participation. Because the people who trot that one out always have very concrete evidence to back it up.
Couldn’t Slate have just reprinted William Goldman’s detailed smackdown of ‘Ryan’? Less sweeping but memorably devastating.
“In the context of the film, was Ed Burns or whoever supposed to stop and take an objective world-historical view of the shit that he was currently mired in?”
It was said by Sgt. Horvath (Sizemore).
I agree that one shouldn’t expect world-historical analysis from grunts in the field while in mid-fight (one reason I loved BLACK HAWK DOWN is it’s much clearer about the hard-headed existential in-the-moment motivation “in the end, it’s all about your brother next to you,” or something close to that). But this line in RYAN was not said in the heat of anything particular. It WAS said while the characters were in a reflective “What Does It All Mean” mode with no bullets flying around, and it comes in the midst of a speech that’s rather literary. And at that level, in the mouth of a 1944 NCO, it IS absurd. It was a 1998 director trying to think like a 1944 NCO.
“But the man’s reputation as a whole has certainly been overrated considering the actual quality of most of his movies.”
If everything about the issue were “certain” and “actual,” there’d be no conversation here.
When the naysayers are making specific points, I’ve got no problem, even if I disagree. But some of you guys sound like you’re trying to reason with children, who just can’t see what is CLEARLY the truth about Spielberg, bless their little hearts.
I forgot that it was Sizemore. The “morally clueless” part of your comment confused me. Why is it morally clueless for someone fighting a war–even if isn’t in mid-fight, he is still in the thick of battle, moving from one fight to the next–rationalizing a ridiculous sacrifice that he might be making. I’m sure that 1998 Spielberg felt that defeating the Nazis or stopping the Holocaust were the reasons for fighting the war. For a 1944 NCO, though, the only reason would have been to fulfill the mission that he was just given. And what’s really so morally clueless about wanting to fight for the return of one woman’s last surviving son? It might be foolish, or reckless, or it might deny the larger context of WWII, but it seems morally sound to me.
On the other hand, thanks for the argument, Victor and Josh. If only Wyman would have actually attempted something similar, I don’t think anyone would have really complained. Sorry to clog up the comments today. I really really need a job.
…Then there’s the whole issue of whether you’re going to take a line of dialogue uttered by a beleagured character as the lead indicator of a movie’s “mission statement, or what have you. If you insist that what Hanks says is also what the movie is saying (and I grant that there’s sufficient genre precedent to support such a reading) then, yes, Vicint is spot on. However, like the song says, it ain’t necessarily so…
Joel:
Saying “we need to get this woman her last son back” … fine. Saying “this is the fucked-up mission my asshole commander gave me, but ours not to question why etc.” … fine. Saying (and I just looked it up) that “saving Private Ryan was the one decent thing we were able to pull out of this whole godawful, shitty mess” … not fine. It’s the “the one” part that strikes me as clueless 1998 writing to the point of moral offense on … well, the grounds Josh says.
I should add as well that I actually do agree with Joel that the overall “moral” turns out differently and I also think the events in RYAN’s drama wind up being a little more sophisticated (Ryan does, after all, refuse the “special treatment”) and that the film is a great film, in net. But that moment is fingernails-on-the-chalkboard.
>Who cares about ‘technical aspects’? His movies, (with a few exceptions), tend to just be boring. And in this medium, torpor is the enemy. Flat and simple. Solaris isn’t boring. Most Antonioni isn’t boring. But most of Spielberg’s oeuvre is simply boring.
As you can’t make a movie without technique, I think anyone who cares about movies ought to care about it.
As for Spielberg being boring, what can I do but say that he doesn’t bore me?
>Are we really supposed to care about this one clueless dad Learning to Reconnect while New York is being destroyed?
No, but we are supposed to be terrified and astonished by the sense of utter helplessness and carnage in the tripod attach, and I, at least, was.
War of the Worlds is a flawed, indifferently written film that contains some astounding filmmaking. Seems simple enough to me.
@Bill:
> Maybe you just don’t like science fiction, and I mean SF as it exists in literature, which rarely matches up to the SF that appears on film.
What I don’t like is pseudoscience technobabble that sounds “scientific” but actually means nothing. It’s like bad Star Trek. “Captain, they’re phasing in and out of the space-time continuüm” (actual dialogue from Star Trek: Generations).
> And to describe the ending of CLOSE ENCOUNTERS as a “joyride”…I mean, I know Spielberg says he would never end the film that way now, but I’ve never understood why some people find it so hard to view the film as a little more skewed. He abandons his family, yes. Where does it say we have to blindly support his decision?
Where does it say this? John Williams’ sweeping score says this. The sheer rapture and awe on Neary’s face says this. The fact that his family has been completely written out of the film and forgotten by that point says this. Everything about the scene says this is the most amazing thing that any man has ever done, and don’t you wish you were him?
> From the other view, is it impossible to understand why someone would make that decision? To be the only man in history to explore that kind of environment? Why does it have to be read as so cut-and-dried?
As I said earlier, if Spielberg allowed any note of ambiguity in his movies, I’d appreciate them a lot more. If there was ANY acknowledgement in Close Encounters that Neary’s actions were kind of a*holish, but that he made the decision to go anyway, and it’s up to us to decide how we feel about that, I’d be fine with it. As it is, Spielberg pounds you with a sledgehammer to instruct you how to feel, and to let you know that this is indeed the happiest of happy endings.
@BobSolo:
> I personally love the tired chestnut that any “interesting ideas” in A.I. just HAD to be a result of Kubrick’s participation. Because the people who trot that one out always have very concrete evidence to back it up.
Look at all the movies that Kubrick made, and then look at all the movies that Spielberg made. Then you tell me which parts of the movie feel more Kubrickian and which feel more Spielbergian.
“Look at all the movies that Kubrick made, and then look at all the movies that Spielberg made”
I am. And one of those films is AI. There’s nothing in it that suggests it was (literally, in this case) ghost-directed. Plus, your faulty logic/false dichotomy doesn’t allow for the contributions of Ian Watson or Brian Aldiss.
I’m not going to grapple with Wyman’s banal AI comment; I think its quite “axiomatic” why it’s wrong.
But I’ve always disagreed with the criticism brought up by Victor re: one vs the many. I’ve always been confused to why Spielberg should forgo characters and their smaller problems to try and grapple with something too big for any single film. I feel like one could turn this argument toward any great filmmaker to take on a situation–why do we care only about Henry Hill in the mafia? How come we witness the pain of Adrien Brody’s experience of the Holocaust?–we relate to films THROUGH characters do we not? Characters we can identify with, who we can follow their actions. If we simply became witnesses to the full scale tragedy of WWII, the Holocaust, 9/11-Aliens, it would simply be shock value without meaning. Isn’t this why we never invest ourselves in Michael Bay like destruction? It’s just a lot of explosions without meaning, and if the characters weren’t simply supermodels to go with the robots, I think we wouldn’t rag on Bay as much.
What Peter Labuza said. Cruise and his family are there for us to identify with. Some “disaster” movies split the focus among multiple characters (e.g. DEEP IMPACT), but usually with the same intent – to put a human face on the dire event. An more impersonal approach might be of technical interest (or have great satirical merit, as with DR. STRANGELOVE), but it’s certainly a bigger commercial risk (not that there’s anything wrong with that, but Spielberg would rather move us than just coldly document what an alien invasion might “really” be like).
Beware, haters – Director Joseph Kahn recently tweeted this: “3 reasons for the death penalty: 1. Rape. 2. Genocide. 3. Trashing Spielberg’s work.” 🙂
“Why do we care only about Henry Hill in the mafia? How come we witness the pain of Adrien Brody’s experience of the Holocaust?”
Because in those cases, we experience the Mafia through Henry Hill, and Henry Hill’s story is very much about his … Mafiaism. Rinse and repeat with Wladyslaw Szpilman.
But what Josh and I are complaining about is how Spielberg directs certain scenes – typically climaxes or “payoff” scenes – as if only the “one” matters. It’s not even that the “many” are marginalized (that’s inevitable for exactly the reason you state), but it’s as if they don’t exist AT ALL. That the final “takeaway” is that Tom Cruise learned to be a better father, that David gets his happy day with Mom, that a soldier might think that saving Ryan was “the one” good thing in that awful war, that the horse made its way back to Devon, etc.
Or to put it another way, Peter … I guess when the story of the One (turns out happily for them) is so very different from the story of the Many (particularly on the scales we’re talking about), a director has to betray SOME ambivalence or acknowledgement of the bigger. From the way Spielberg shoots and scores these scenes, it is reasonable to infer he does not.
I agree with Victor about that line (“Saving Private Ryan was the one decent thing we were able to pull out of this whole godawful, shitty mess”): it sounds like 1998 crashing into the past. But it’s a knack that Spielberg’s big morality plays often have, where the characters speak from some place larger than themselves, with ahistorical clarity, making their lines sound less like spontaneous dialog than clarion calls. “SPR” contains the worst offender, though–it’s so clear that “Earn this” isn’t just a private message between Captain Hanks and Private Damon. Instead, it’s the movie talking to all of us post-Greatest Generation slackers, and what it’s saying is that *we* need to get our act together. It’s a yucky thing to do.
(I went into this, and my bigger problems with “Ryan”, in this old blog post:
http://tomblock.wordpress.com/2010/08/30/hazing-private-ryan/)
I see where you’re coming from Victor, but I’m not convinced that we don’t get those feelings, as much as Spielberg doesn’t leave those as the final emotions we get. I certainly get that during the shot at the end of the Normandy sequence as Spielberg slowly pans across what’s left at the beach, the moment of Tom Cruise realizing the dust on his face in “Worlds,” and the 30 minute sequence of the cleansing of the ghettos. Maybe I’m being taken for a sucker that I can walk away with some sort of happy feeling by the end (the whole end of “War Horse” didn’t work for me; really only the stuff before the war actually stuck with me), but I think he’s able to have his cake and eat it too.
Also, as long as this whole debate was started by Slate, let me offer this golden nugget of an exchange from this week’s Slate Culture Gabfest, which is now #1 on my unsubscribe button on iTunes.
Stephen Metcalf: “Film as a medium shouldn’t be designed to arouse pity and fear.”
Dana Stevens: “You mean catharsis?”
Metcalf: “Exactly!”
“Then there’s the whole issue of whether you’re going to take a line of dialogue uttered by a beleagured character as the lead indicator of a movie’s “mission statement, or what have you.”
Exactly! This is something I tell my students all the time. I’d also add the literal-minded interpretations of plot (especially conclusions) fall prey to the same mistake.
In the case of A.I, I think you would have to read very literally to miss the irony (or pessimism) of a robotic boy granted a wish which we know is a falsehood. It’s already established in the film his mother doesn’t love him as much. So he gets to experience a delusion or fantasy before dying. If I remember the lighting (especially the shadows) and staging certainly undermines the notion that this is a big triumph especially one to make us forget the extinction of humanity. It suggests what we see is a fantasy projection of David’s. This mother is pure wish-fulfillment. This doesn’t seem sentimental at all to me.
So the ending is very much ambiguous and open to conflicting interpretations.
Z5, how long has it been since you’ve seen the film? The mother does come to love David, and is devastated by her decision to leave him in the woods. Further, the Ben Kingsley explainer robot explicitly tells David that his mother in the final scene is NOT a projection or a fantasy. They used the magical space-time pathways to resurrect his actual mother. That is really her, as recreated through trilithium microparticle dewobulation rephasing or somesuch pseudoscience gobbletygook. But they can only resurrect her for one day, because the space-time pathways close at midnight Eastern Standard Time, apparently.
If the scene had been staged differently, and almost all of the dialogue cut, I could very easily believe that it was intended to be ambiguous (and perhaps it was in Kubrick’s original conception). But Spielberg goes out of his way to systematically eliminate any possibility of the scene being read other than the way he tells it.
Look, I found the actual dialogue passage, courtesy of IMDb:
“David, I often felt a sort of envy of human beings, of that thing they call ‘spirit’. Human beings have created a million explanations of the meaning of life- in art, in poetry, and mathematical formulas. Certainly human beings must be the key to the meaning of existence. But human beings no longer existed. So, we began a project- that would make it possible to recreate the living body of a person long dead from the DNA in a fragment of bone or mummified skin. We also wondered would it be possible to retrieve a memory trace in resonance with a recreated body. And you know what we found? We found the very fabric of space/time itself appeared to store information about every event which had ever occured in the past. But the experiment was a failure. For those who were resurrected only lived through a single day of renewed life. When the resurectees fell asleep on the night of their first new day they died, again. As soon as they became unconcious, their very existence faded away into darkness. So you see, David, the equations have shown that once an individual space/time part had been used it could not be reused. If we bring your mother back now it will only be for one day. And you will never be able to see her again.”
Just reading through that block of text gives me a headache. Imagine how much better the scene would play without this. What’s the purpose of it being in the scene at all? Spielberg was terrified that the audience wouldn’t understand exactly what was happening, and needed to bring in a character who only exists in the film to explain it to them. There is no ambiguity. There is no conflicting interpretation. Kingsley’s character was created expressly to prevent that.
@Josh: I just looked at the scene again now. And my memory about the visuals and staging (by which I mean framing, lighting, and mise-en-scene not dialogue) stand. It comes across as wish-fulfillment before death, which given that all of humanity has died, doesn’t strike me as especially sentimental, especially not that last camera movement which does distances us somewhat.
You’re analyzing the screenplay and the plot and ignoring the visuals. It’s in the visuals and in how they express the story elements that ambiguity is introduced.
If you don’t wish to consider conflicting interpretations that’s fine. But I do suggest you move beyond just thinking about character and plot. Whatever talent Spielberg has (and I’m not particularly a fan) lies in how he expresses himself through visuals.
The other thing: As someone who has dabbled in Kubrick scholarship there is a good record of how far Kubrick got in his development of A.I. The film that exists was inspired by Kubrick’s visual ideas (at times) but it’s Spielberg’s creation. So assigning the parts you like of the film to Kubrick (just because you prefer him)isn’t really legitimate.
I’m not gonna argue from script or visuals, but the last time I watched AI (I believe near the end of 2009 when I was trying to solidify my decade list), I was in tears that entire last scene and because I felt both sides—this wish fulfillment that Spielberg was giving his protagonist, and this dark side that it was all meaningless, an artifice that a robot who could feel real emotions but not real consequences; the exact opposite of what we normally think AI should do. All these thoughts and emotions poured through my tear ducts as I watched those final scenes. So I have to argue there is SOMETHING there; otherwise, I’m just a big cry baby.
Yes, the “sci-fi technobabble” at the end of A.I. does eliminate a layer of ambiguity. That’s a good thing! We aren’t meant to be wondering WHAT is happening or HOW it is happening or WHETHER it is actually happening. Those questions just get in the way and distract from what we should be thinking about, which is something more like “How should I feel about what is happening?”
More ambiguity is not always a good thing, and that sequence is plenty ambiguous as it is. Sure, I can understand having a distaste for that kind of sci-fi gobbledygook, and I can totally understand if that dialogue makes it all seem silly or contrived to you. But I just can’t agree that this “over-explaining” in any way reduces the thematic richness of A.I.‘s ending.
@Peter: I agree with you about the ending. I’m not saying it can’t be considered moving. I’m saying that there is more to the ending than just sentiment. That’s why it’s a rich and ambiguous ending especially given all that we’ve seen come before.
@Z5, I guess we just have completely different readings of the scene. Yes, it has a dream-like tone, what with its soft focus photography and lighting, because it represents David’s greatest wish come true. To him, the moment is pure magic. However, I don’t believe that this contradicts the text of the scene, as bluntly delivered in reams of expository dialogue.
Why Spielberg would put that dialogue in the scene unless he wanted to hammer home to the audience that “THIS IS WHAT IS HAPPENING HERE. THERE IS NO OTHER EXPLANATION. I’M TELLING YOU WHAT IT MEANS RIGHT NOW”? That dialogue serves no other purpose. It’s painfully clear what Spielberg wants us to believe is happening, because he TELLS us. This doesn’t conflict with the dreaminess of the staging. It plays hand-in-hand with it. I see no ambiguity in the scene at all.
Just imagine how much better the entire epilogue would work if Spielberg had cut all of the voiceover narration and dialogue, and just let it play out in images that the audience would have to interpret. Unfortunately, he doesn’t trust the scene or the audience, and has an unstoppable compulsion to EXPLAIN everything and tie it all up with a neat little bow. We see this again and again in his works, and it is, in my opinion, his greatest failing as a filmmaker and a storyteller.
I have to say that I find it pretty amusing that one of Glenn’s shortest of recent posts, and one for which all he did was quote a couple of other sources without writing anything new himself, has inspired this much discussion and debate. 🙂
“I have to say that I find it pretty amusing that one of Glenn’s shortest of recent posts, and one for which all he did was quote a couple of other sources without writing anything new himself, has inspired this much discussion and debate.”
Meh. Seems about right to me. The referenced piece touched numerous exposed nerves.
It was a typical Slate piece centered around bad reasoning and bad arguments.
It was a “contrarian Slate piece” that actually parroted the conventional wisdom on a topic while thinking it was being contrarian.
It was about Spielberg, a highly prominent director who has a core of ardent defenders despite turning out a mostly horrendous body of work over the past several decades.
Next up, Slate will publish a “contrarian” piece on how Meryl Streep is a tremendously underrated actress, and that everyone who thinks her work is bad are actually wrong. Glenn will blog about it. And a core of folks who can’t stand Streep will take to the comment section to attempt to make the case for why they hate her work.
“It was about Spielberg, a highly prominent director who has a core of ardent defenders despite turning out a mostly horrendous body of work over the past several decades.”
Sigh. If you feel this way, why do you even bother attempting to reason with the rest of us misguided souls?
“Next up, Slate will publish a ‘contrarian’ piece on how Meryl Streep is a tremendously underrated actress, and that everyone who thinks her work is bad are actually wrong. Glenn will blog about it. And a core of folks who can’t stand Streep will take to the comment section to attempt to make the case for why they hate her work.”
No, no, and no.
“No, no, and no.”
I know. Just a modest proposal.
But my only real point in this thread is that Slate’s “contrarian” piece, no matter how wrongly argued, pretty much echoes conventional wisdom.
(Now, I happen to be firmly on the side of the conventional wisdom on this particular topic, but I’m well aware that that doesn’t somehow validate my viewpoint as ‘correct’. I’m just sayin’ that it ain’t a contrarian stance…)
Hey, I’m so old I remember when STICKING UP for Spielberg was a “contrarian” stance! Like the guy in “Losing My Edge,” I WAS THERE when Armond White compared Spielberg to Mozart, and then told a couple of guys that if they didn’t agree with him, he FELT SORRY for them. (Which makes White’s evolving new anti-Spielberg stance kind of funny providing you don’t look at it as some kind of pathological development…which I do…)
Evolving? I know you avoid White, but he has not cooled off on Spielberg at all, if his review of the Tin Tin and War Horse are any indication. By the way, his review of The Last Crusade in his book is a classic; he remains the only person I’ve read who prefers Last Crusade to the other Indys.
The love is back!
Ouch, Joel. That was PAINFUL. Especially the part where he compares watching TINTIN (which I enjoyed better the second time around, in 2D) to reading Bazin. Here, lemme share the discomfort:
http://www.nyfcc.com/2012/01/tintin-and-war-horse-spielbergs-game-changers-reviewed-by-armond-white-for-cityarts/
Although speaking of “evolving,” I see that White has reached a point where he can no longer be bothered to format titles.
I was taking a break from a piece I’m writing because I was fretting about losing credibility by making too-extravagant claims for its subject. After clicking on that link, I’m not so worried.
“Movie-watching can never be same…” Really? “Never”? Should have held off on making that sandwich; I seem to have missed the revolution.
From a summary of Kubrick’s 1994 treatment of A.I. (The Stanley Kubrick Archives, page 507):
“A lock of Monica’s hair that Teddy had kept in his pouch allows the robots to resurrect her. David soon finds himself with Monica in a virtual environment created from his memory to resemble exactly the house they had lived in. After an idyllic day, Monica finally falls asleep, telling David the words he has been waiting two millenia to hear: ‘I do love you, my sweet little boy. I have always loved you.’ Holding her in his arms as she sleeps, David hopes for a miracle. The next morning, his wish comes true: Monica wakes up. The robots search for an answer to why, for the first time, a resurrectee has survived more than one day. ‘Was it the love of a robot child? No other resurrectee had ever before had someone who loved them to hold onto them.’ The treatment ends as Monica waltzes around the room with David ‘as she had done the day of his imprinting.’ ”
Andrew, do you imagine that Kubrick would have filmed the scene with an Explainer character whose sole purpose is to talk David (and the audience) through a detailed technical explanation of what had happened to him, where he was, and what would happen next? I picture the scene more like the ending of 2001, very enigmatic and open to audience interpretation. The cloying, simplistic way that Spielberg handled the epilogue simply does not work for me – or, frankly, anyone I know in real life who has ever seen the film. Your mileage, as they say, may vary.
“Anyone I know in real life who has ever seen the film?” Whoa, way to up the ante, sez the bot who writes this blog.
@Josh: “The cloying, simplistic way that Spielberg handled the epilogue simply does not work for me – or, frankly, anyone I know in real life who has ever seen the film. Your mileage, as they say, may vary.”
Good for you Josh. You’ve totally changed my mind and all my film-buff friends who like the film. I’ve always suspected we weren’t real anyway.
Josh: What was it the woman said – great movies are rarely perfect movies? Yes, the dénouement of A.I. (*not* the ending, mind you) has some clank in it, and yes, I don’t have to imagine Kubrick doing something like that because I saw him do pretty much *that* in the big Pollack/Cruise scene in EYES WIDE SHUT and read it in the bit Andrew helpfully quoted above. But I don’t damn them for the passages that don’t play; it would be like tossing out the entirety of PSYCHO because of that Simon Oakland whatever-the hell-it-is. And while we’re citing anecdotal experience, I’ll tell you that most women I know can’t bear A.I. – they reject it like a duff kidney transplant. David’s rejection and his trials cut too deep; it hits marrow and they can’t hang with it. I find it a deeply strange, sad film, and to my mind there’s always something to be said for something that makes people CRAZY.
And this is the part where I say that I don’t mean to slam you; I admire the sticktuitiveness you bring to your argument. And *this* is the part where you say, “Geez, dude, people cried at NEW YEAR’S DAY and I don’t see anyone calling it a masterpiece…”
“Andrew, do you imagine that Kubrick would have filmed the scene with an Explainer character…”
Normally, Spielberg just uses John Williams for that purpose.
I’ll be here all week. Don’t forget to tip your waitress. (The Williams/Spielberg collab is like watching a reel of Max Steiner lowlights.)
“Anyone I know in real life who has ever seen the film?” Whoa, way to up the ante, sez the bot who writes this blog.”
I was dragged to Minority Report by someone in real life who really liked the film. The person was real. I didn’t feel sorry for his enthusiasm. But I did point out to him that it was a fun first act that then dragged and finally went into cardiac arrest while inexcusably wasting Samantha Morton. There’s usually a fun stretch in any given Spielberg movie. They just tend to be stretches of movies that aren’t quite so much fun to sit all the way through…
“I have to say that I find it pretty amusing that one of Glenn’s shortest of recent posts, and one for which all he did was quote a couple of other sources without writing anything new himself, has inspired this much discussion and debate. :)”
So … to keep it going …
Santorum in ’12
#ducks
I’d say Petey for the win, but I gotta contest the shot…
Turin Horse walks into a bar. Bartender says, “Hey, buddy, why the long film?”
TRY THAT VEAL, PETEY.
Which begs the question, Victor Morton – “Santorum” in twelve… what?
Lest I be accused of being a threadkilla, let me suggest to Petey on the “fun stretch” of MINORITY REPORT is nearly the whole thing, or at least about ten minutes before Max von Sydow is UNMASKED. Seriously, that I thought he was going to start ranting about meddling kids or something.
Hey, I said I didn’t want to kill the thread – I made no claim to elevating it.
“I don’t have to imagine Kubrick doing something like that because I saw him do pretty much *that* in the big Pollack/Cruise scene in EYES WIDE SHUT and read it in the bit Andrew helpfully quoted above.”
And I love that scene in Eyes Wide Shut as well especially because Pollack may simply be lying.
More generally, the idea the Kubrick would never be sentimental or emotionally affective is strange. I’m always moved by Barry Lyndon which is one of my all-time favorites. And let’s face it Brian’s death scene in the film is as sentimentally staged as anything in Spielberg’s films.
And what is wrong with sentiment anyway?
Spielberg-Santorum in ’12: ‘Mutaween Report’
“And what is wrong with sentiment anyway?”
It may or may not have been Ridley Scott, during one of his DVD commentary tracks, who said something along the lines of, “Sentimentality is *un*earned emotion. When it *has* been earned, it’s not sentimentality.”
If the ending to A.I. is so simplistic, why have so many people found it to be ambiguous, even confusing? Is Spielberg’s ineptitude so prodigious he can be both on-the-nose and enigmatic in the same scene?
Like Glenn, I can recall a time, not so long ago, when defenses of Spielberg (even those NOT made by Armond White) were often met with scoffing, disbelief and condescension. Maybe what goes around has come around again. It’s probably worth mentioning, though, that assertions about the “conventional wisdom” on this topic are based solely on anecdotal evidence. As far as I know, there exists no survey that ‘proves’ the majority of critics or viewers consider Spielberg to be overrated, or underrated, or rated “just right.”
Ridley Scott?? Man, can’t argue with that. Uncle!
“If the ending to A.I. is so simplistic, why have so many people found it to be ambiguous, even confusing? Is Spielberg’s ineptitude so prodigious he can be both on-the-nose and enigmatic in the same scene?”
Well as Josh says he knows no-one in real-life who doesn’t think the ending is simplistic so, you know, the rest of us who find ambiguity don’t exist or are just wrong.
Also, that’s a terrible definition of sentimentality.
“Max Steiner lowlights”? Thanks, Petey, I was surprised the inevitable, gratuitous Williams-bashing took so long to appear.
The harmonica theme of Sugarland Express, the moody (and Indy theme-free) main title of Raiders of the Lost Ark, the delicate getting-to-know-ET cues, the minimalist music in AI, the jazzy opening of Catch Me If You Can…yep, just a bunch of Max Steiner lowlights. (Chee-rist).
“I should not like to hear the charge of sentimentality made against this strain that runs through ‘Bleak House.’ I want to submit that people who denounce the sentimental are generally unaware of what sentiment is.” – Vladimir Nabokov, LECTURES ON LITERATURE
(Thanks to Glenn for doing all the work on this one)
Jesus Fucking Christ, so sorry I was born, you cunts!
That’s okay!
Well, I think the treatment provides evidence that Kubrick’s concept for the ending was, if anything, less ambiguous and more upbeat. Which is not to say the finished movie wouldn’t have been very different – he toyed with the idea of having Dick Halloran turn into a monster, and Joker was originally going to die at the end of Full Metal Jacket. But clearly, this wasn’t a case of Spielberg adding exposition that contradicts Kubrick’s intent. You can integrate this evidence into your reasoning for why A.I. sucks, or you can double down on your unsupportable argument.
@Jim, unlike your Psycho comparison, I find a lot more wrong with A.I. than just the epilogue. That just happens to be the most egregiously awful part of the movie. And honestly, that part is so very, very awful that I consider it indefensible. Take this anecdote for whatever it’s worth, but during my opening weekend theatrical screening, people in the audience (no, not me, though I shared the sentiment) were groaning and booing at the screen as the end credits came up.
Both sides of this debate (myself obviously included) have gotten sidetracked with speculation about what Kubrick would or would not have done with the movie. Ultimately, that’s a red herring. We have what we have, and (in my opinion) it does not work.
It’s unfortunate that I’ve let myself be pigeonholed here as the Spielberg hater, when that isn’t really the case. I like some of his movies a great deal, and I’m willing to forgive others their flaws. Minority Report, for example, also has a lousy ending, as well as several stupidly illogical plot turns and a critical scene obnoxiously lifted almost verbatim from L.A. Confidential. Yet I enjoyed the first 3/4 of the movie enough that I can give it a pass.
Not so much with A.I., unfortunately. The movie feels like a conflation of all of Spielberg’s worst tendencies: the sloppy plotting, the heavy-handed schmaltz, and his distrust for the audience’s ability to understand the story without being spoon-fed his explanations for it. Despite a few interesting ideas in the early sections, that powerful scene where the mother abandons David, and the occasional arresting image (that hot air balloon that looks like the moon is a stunner), the film is one of Spielberg’s biggest disappointments.
As I said in an earlier comment, I don’t expect to sway people who love the movie to my opinion, just as I don’t expect them to sway me to theirs. This has been an interesting discussion nonetheless.
Take this anecdote for what it’s worth: Every time I’ve seen “Night of the Hunter” at New York’s Film Forum, the audience laughed and practically hooted with derision at the shot of the frog on the lily pad during the scene in which the two kids float down the river on that raft.
Petey, I can top you on seeing “Minority Report”… Some friends and I were going to see Tarkovsky’s “Solaris”, but it was sold out, and we decided to see “Minority Report” instead. Now, I probably would’ve disliked “Minority Report” anyway, due to its lazy futurism (horizontal highways, and no construction?), flat characters, stupid plot, and ugly product placement (the mall ads sequence almost made up for the Bulgari plugs, but not quite). But seeing it instead of “Solaris”—especially with that final shot that pays homage to the end of “Solaris”— made it much, much more painful.
P.S.: Film Forum audiences suck. Every time their programming drags me in, everything else about them—seat height, snobby snacks, and atrocious audiences—reminds me why I never go.
That frog-on-the-lily-pad shot was the point at when my high school best friend checked out of Night of the Hunter. After that, he only referred to it as “That dumb kids’ film” and I couldn’t convince him otherwise.
On the other hand, running counter to the generalization, the Film Forum crowd for a recent screening of “Four Nights of a Dreamer”—a sellout, thronged with luminaries from the worlds of the arts AND criticism—was immaculately well-behaved and laughed at all of the “right” parts. Which just goes to show…well, I actually have no idea what it goes to show.
Night of the Hunter at the Film Forum is a perfect storm.
A certain percentage of the Film Forum audience looks for camp value in old films. And Night of the Hunter is a VERY target-rich environment for those looking for camp value.
The painful sincerity of Night of the Hunter, which works quite well for me, makes it a particularly challenging film for a non-cinephile modern audience.
“Film Forum audiences suck.”
Weekday afternoon screenings are recommended, if you can get away. But even if you have to put up with a questionable audience, it’s still an irreplaceable venue. As Shakespeare, or perhaps it was a bad hair metal band once said, every rose has its thorns.
That settles it, I’m watching A.I. again tonight.
“Every time I’ve seen “Night of the Hunter” at New York’s Film Forum, the audience laughed and practically hooted with derision at the shot of the frog on the lily pad during the scene in which the two kids float down the river on that raft. ”
Ok, now I’m a patient guy and I’ve learned to play nice with people with all sorts of opinions about movies, but if I witnessed this, I would run amok with a shiny cutting instrument, and make sure those defective freaks didn’t reproduce. It’s the only responsible thing to do.
For me, one of the most amazing moments in AI (not a perfect film, but one of my all-time favorites – perhaps the only perfect Spielberg film is Jaws, which is absolutely wonderful but certainly much less ambitious than Empire of the Sun, or Schindler’s List, or Munich) is when David meets one of his robot doubles and bashes the robot’s head in. Absolutely stunning, and as far from what most people think of as “Spielberg” as one can imagine.
Of course, one can always claim that it’s just him following Kubrick, the way that Anthony Mann partisans (and I say this is a Mann fan myself) claim the best parts of Spartacus should actually be credited to Mann, not Kubrick.
And to continue my knee-jerk John Williams defense, to really appreciate how much he brings to Spielberg’s films (in a good way), one has to see the only Spielberg film he DIDN’T score – The Color Purple (with a score by Quincy Jones and about a dozen collaborators). Now there’s a score that sounds like an homage to the Max Steiner era.
I’ve seen Hugo and War Horse twice now (both of which I found more emotionally affecting on second viewing), and Hugo is so overtly emotional (or “sentimental,” if you’re in a less forgiving mood) that it almost makes War Horse look like The White Ribbon.
And what the hell’s wrong with Max Steiner, anyway?
My reaction to A.I. in the theater was lukewarm at best. What was with the ending? I couldn’t have agreed more with Hoberman: “For an unforgettable moment, I imagined that Spielberg might really leave us with a bizarre, albeit truly dispairing image: Pinocchio frozen forever in a world where Jiminy Cricket is mute and Walt Disney dead, praying through all eternity to a dead icon of the irretrievable mother.”
Then, a year or so later, I was sleeping on a friend’s couch. I decided to watch a movie; the only DVD lying around was A.I., so I popped it in. Almost immediately, a feeling of disquiet set in. Was this the same movie? As it continued, I was struck utterly cold. I found myself in tears during the final moments, not of happiness or gratitude, but of loneliness, despair. (It was gratifying to later find folks who had a similar reaction: James Naremore, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Stan Brakhage.)
Subsequent viewings have made me a wreck from start to finish. In fact, it’s one of the few movies which can make me tear up just thinking about it. Yikes.
FWIW: A movie which comparably devastated me, and which I always find myself linking together with A.I., is Mother and Son. Try this: Mother and Son is A.I.‘s final moment stretched out to 73 minutes; the final moment of A.I. is Mother and Son in a moment.
Many years ago, I saw The Night of the Hunter with an audience that groaned, booed, giggled and sniggered throughout. At high volume. When the lights went up, a friend I’d dragged to the screening turned to me and said, “Wow. Thaaat was a piece of shit.” I forgot what happened after that.
Lord knows I don’t advocate breaking up a friendship over a disagreement over a movie (although usually when that sort of thing happens, it later turns out that a lot of other factors have in fact been in play) but in the “Night of the Hunter” cases, well, I dunno…
I had no idea that Night of the Hunter was this divisive. As for the continued (and excellent) A.I. debate, I agree with nearly everything Josh says about the film, both his criticisms and his favorite parts, and yet it’s one of my favorite films. I can take a little clunky exposition by Ben Kinglsey’s voice, as long as it leads to the transcendent moment where David, who may not be human but whose “love” program is the last remaining vestige of humanity, is treated like a holy relic by his ancestors because of his ability to blindly and stupidly love the person who first pushed his buttons. The sci-fi speech may be “spoon-fed,” but the emotional complexity, the religious implications, and (above all) the beauty of the final image really just washes that Kingsley-speech away. Spielberg rarely takes sole screenwriter credit for a reason.
Since a small portion of viewers react passionately to this film, I always wondered if this has anything to do with our relationships with our mothers, but I’ll leave that for each of us to think about on our own. And yes, nearly everyone else in the theater with me (NYC–maybe Union Square) laughed and booed at the end. That happens some time. I laughed throughout Michael Clayton, and was shocked to hear applause at the end.
“I had no idea that Night of the Hunter was this divisive.”
It’s not. Everyone who loves movies loves that particular movie.
But, as stated, it’s a particularly challenging movie for folks who don’t have much exposure to pre-’67 cinema/culture.
“the transcendent moment where David, who may not be human but whose “love” program is the last remaining vestige of humanity, is treated like a holy relic by his ancestors because of his ability to blindly and stupidly love the person who first pushed his buttons.”
Yes! I love the sentiment mixed despair that you describe here. It’s my experience of the film as well.
The thing about the Kingsley-speech anyway is that, as narration, it’s consciously mythic and fairy-tale like while the images tell a darker story. I don’t think we have to take the narration as an interpretative authority over the images. There is a disconnect.
Can we please stop talking about people who laugh at NIGHT OF THE HUNTER? The very idea depresses me. I’m looking absently out a window as we speak.
Joel’s description of that “transcendent moment” in A.I. is one of the best I’ve seen. Perhaps even those who were not similarly affected can now at least understand why some of us were.
Petey: I sometimes think that just about ANY pre-’67 film is particularly challenging for those with limited exposure to the culture of that time (heck, pre-’87 might be too much for some). But then my girlfriend (born in ’83) will unexpectedly get hooked when I’m watching THE KID or THE DEVIL IS A WOMAN or THE BROWNING VERSION or KANSAS CITY CONFIDENTIAL or whatever, and I feel cause for hope.
Just to eliminate any last doubt about where Dan Kois is coming from…
“And I am excited about how angry everyone will get about your rankings!” he writes to Wyman here:
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/the_chat_room/2012/01/bill_wyman_takes_questions_from_steven_spielberg_fans_about_his_contentious_spielberg_takedown_.html
“But then my girlfriend (born in ’83) will unexpectedly get hooked when I’m watching THE KID or THE DEVIL IS A WOMAN or THE BROWNING VERSION or KANSAS CITY CONFIDENTIAL or whatever, and I feel cause for hope.”
She’s just humoring you, jbryant. She’s just humoring you.
(Josef von Sternberg in on the record as considering most of Speilberg’s post-’83 work as tripe. You can look it up.)
But seriously, are we down to defending post-’83 Spielberg with Minority Report and Catch Me if You Can have their moments, A.I. has fervent defenders, and The Lost World: Jurassic Park basically works? Cuz if so, it’s pretty thin gruel. Even an excellent fielding shortstop can’t stay in majors with that average.
Why is that thin gruel? I’m mean he isn’t Robert Bresson (whose Four Nights of Dreamer I shall see tomorrow!) but as a big-budget populist film-maker he’s often effective. Does the guy create masterpiece after masterpiece? Hardly but exactly how many “great” or rich films is he supposed to create in 29 years?
I guess I don’t understand the frame of reference here.
Ha, you may be right, Petey – but for what it’s worth, I’m not making her watch those films. She’ll be in the room playing a game on the computer, then gradually get pulled into the movie with no prodding from me. Maybe she’s just weird. After all, I know she liked MINORITY REPORT, A.I. and CATCH ME IF YOU CAN (I’m having no luck getting her to see WAR HORSE with me though). 🙂
Whoa, I missed all this! Let’s reduce the whole discussion to Nabokov quotes!
“Remember that when we speak of sentimentalists, among them Richardson, Rousseau, Dostoevski, [Señor Spielbergo,] we mean the non-artistic exaggeration of familiar emotions meant to provoke automatically traditional compassion in the reader.”
“Gogol was a strange creature, but genius is always strange; it is only your healthy second-rater [like Señor Spielbergo] who seems to the grateful reader to be a wise old friend, nicely developing the reader’s own notions of life. Great literature skirts the irrational”
The text between brackets appeared neatly written in pencil on my copy, along with several “Screw Upham” crudely scrawled all over the pages, and whose meaning to this day I am unable to ascertain. All I remember of its former owner was discussing with him whether a screwdriver contained orange juice or lemon juice when he, rather unexpectedly, delivered the following tirade: “Spielbergo as an institution, Spielbergo as an auteur, Spielbergo as bait for a Slate polemic, Janusz Kaminski’s color palettes as subtle – all this is something I find too tedious for words. Let us skip Spielbergo”.
Whatever he meant by that, I still favor the lemon.
“all this is something I find too tedious for words. Let us skip Spielbergo”
Plus ça boring.
The thing is: The Kid or The Devil Is A Woman play as modern movies for a non-cinephile modern audience.
Things like Bresson or Tarkovsky don’t in certain ways, but they’ve got subtitles, so at least the hindbrain of a non-cinephile modern audience is prepared for some work on their part.
But when they walk into Night of the Hunter, they’re walking into something very strange, in their native language, that doesn’t play like any reality, narrative form, or tone that they’re used to.