DAY, DREAM BELIEVER

Check out my review of Spielberg's newest, Disclosure Day...

...online at Phoenix Magazine.

A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG BOYCHIK

In theaters for Thanksgiving (a safe and Happy Thanksgiving, by the way!):

The Fabelmans--It begins with little Sammy Fabelman being taken to his first movie, in New Jersey in 1952. A cautious, slightly fretful 7-year-old, Sammy (Mateo Zoryon Francis-DeFord) is not sure if he's up for the experience; he's heard the people onscreen are gigantic, and the idea worries him. So his adoring parents attempt to reassure him, from opposite sides: his practical-minded, scientific dad Burt (Paul Dano) explains how film works technically, while his whimsical pixie of a mom Mitzi (Michelle Williams) says that movies are beautiful dreams.

The dream in question turns out to be DeMille's The Greatest Show on Earth, and the big train wreck scene hits Sammy's psyche like...well, like a speeding train. He tries to re-create it with the Lionel train set he gets for Hannukah, and later he films his re-creations with a home movie camera.

As you probably know, this is Steven Spielberg's autobiographical coming-of-age movie, scripted by Tony Kushner from a synopsis they worked up together, and made by the usual gang: filmed by Janusz Kaminski with a score by John Williams. The episodes that follow depict the family's life as Burt, a computer genius, chases work in the budding industry from New Jersey to Arizona, where Sammy makes war epics, to northern California, where he encounters anti-Semitic bullies.

Mitzi, who gave up a career as a concert pianist to be a wife and mom, shows signs of restlessness and depression, except when she's interacting with Burt's best friend Bennie (Seth Rogen), or when she impulsively buys a monkey, who she names Bennie. All of these strands are filtered through the growth of the relationship between Sam (Gabriel LaBelle as an older kid) and the art and craft of moviemaking.

Even though he's one of the most commercially successful popular artists in the world, I think that Spielberg has, in a sense, been critically underappreciated for decades. After the initial, unprecedented splash he made with Jaws,  Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T. and Raiders of the Lost Ark, he went through a slump in the late '80s and early '90s and cranked out some real bummers; cloying, heavy-handed, trying-too-hard stuff like Hook and Always that made him seem like a phony.

I'm not sure that many critics noticed the way he rediscovered and deepened and sharpened his style with the films he's made in recent years, even when their scripts have sometimes been uneven. Works that range with seemingly equal ease from crisp yet almost invisible technique like The Post to Hitchcockian panache like Bridge of Spies to flashy showmanship like West Side Story suggest an artist who has matured, and who might have something interesting to say about his own life.

And so he does, by turning his gaze outward. Sammy is likable enough, but he's not a rich or idiosyncratic protagonist. What's important is his point of view on Burt and Mitzi. Spielberg here dramatizes the anger and terror, the sense of betrayal, that can result when you begin to see your parents--as Sammy does through his footage of them, while editing home movies--not as stock figures in your story but as complex characters in their own.

And Dano and Williams create vivid, warm portraits of imperfect but unconditionally loving people. So does Rogen, and so does Judd Hirsch in a showcase role as a crazy visionary uncle who tells Sammy hard prophetic truths. So do Jeannie Berlin and Robin Bartlett as the Grandmas, and so do the excellent kids who play the younger sisters. So for that matter, does the monkey.

Not everything in The Fabelmans comes off. There's maybe a scene or two more than is needed of Williams sadly playing sad piano, and the stuff with the bullies, who look like they stepped out of Nazi poster art, feels psychologically confused and uneasy. A scene in which Sammy has a fraught confrontation with a bully he's tried to flatter through moviemaking is potentially interesting for what it hints at about the director's willingness to use his art calculatingly, but it thrashes around and fails, somehow, to come into dramatic focus.

On the other hand, the scenes involving Sammy's early romantic encounters are livened up by the hilarious Chloe East as Monica, his both religiously ecstatic and sexually avid girlfriend, who sees Jesus as one more teen heartthrob. While chaste in the typical Spielbergian manner, they offer a peek at the character's, and the director's, bemused reaction to Christianity.

The movie closes with a depiction of Spielberg's familiar anecdote about his first brush with Hollywood greatness. It allows him to end the film with a self-deprecating "meta" joke that also slyly reminds us that what we've just seen, however honestly intended, is nonetheless a carefully curated official story.

BEST SPACE SCENARIO

Opening this Thursday:

Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens—The three Star Wars “prequels,” from 1999, 2002 and 2005, all started in the standard manner for the series, with the preface “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away,” followed by the blasting John Williams fanfare and the title. But then that crawl of yellow text would start, and it was a bunch of gobbledygook about trade alliances and congressional debates that would have seemed dry, complicated and confusing on C-SPAN.

The expository crawl for the new entry, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens, starts with the line…

Well, wait a minute. As we were leaving the press screening, the PR folks asked us for our reactions. One of the ushers, headed in to clean the theater, was holding his hands over his ears as he passed us, terrified that he’d overhear some “spoiler.” So if you’re of this guy’s mindset, maybe you’d better stop reading until after you’ve seen the flick. I’ll do my best not give away any specific plot points, but perhaps you’d rather go in completely uncontaminated.

OK, now: The opening crawl for The Force Awakens begins with the line “Luke Skywalker has disappeared.” It goes on to explain that Leia Organa (Carrie Fisher) has dispatched “her most daring pilot” to track down a clue to her brother’s whereabouts.

Now we’re talking. Much like in the original 1977 Star Wars, a hero has disappeared, and the good guys have to find him. It’s the sort of simple, fairy-tale set-up that’s implied by that “Once upon a time” opening line.

And it’s this approach that makes The Force Awakens so much more fun than the “prequel trilogy.” In those films, there would be shootouts and spaceship dogfights and light saber duels, but it was hard to know what was at stake at any given point—at times I almost wasn’t sure who I was supposed to root for. The spectacle was great, but the storytelling was muddled. It certainly didn’t seem like the feeling a Star Wars movie should give you.

With The Force Awakens, however, director J. J. Abrams, working from a script he co-wrote with Lawrence Kasdan and Michael Arndt, gets about as close, probably, as it’s possible to get to bringing us the feeling that the originals gave us back in the ‘70s and ‘80s—that sense of a new mythology, and a set of shiny new toys. The cinematography and set designs and props have a subtly retro look—one robot has a head that looks a lot like an old-school drive-in movie speaker—that links them convincingly to the original trilogy’s universe.

The actors have a retro look, too. The story, set decades after the end of 1983’s Return of the Jedi during a period in which the Empire is trying to re-assert itself as the “First Order,” allows for the presence of original cast members like Carrie Fisher, Harrison Ford and, buried under Wookie fur not noticeably gone gray, Peter Mayhew as Chewbacca.

But even the youngsters in the cast, like Daisy Ridley as a scavenger girl on a desert planet, John Boyega as a stormtrooper gone rogue with conscience, or Oscar Isaac as the aforementioned most daring pilot, seem to echo the gee-whiz young characters of the early films. There’s even a spherical, chirping-and-whistling robot, and a villain with a rumbling voice behind a dark helmet and mask.

All of the actors are proficient, but the standout—a little surprisingly, considering his supposed great indifference to these films—is Ford, who brings lightness and warmth to the middle-aged Han Solo that I don’t think he had back in the ‘70s. When he and Fisher’s Leia exchange their crooked, ruefully nostalgic smiles, it’s very charming.

There are innovative new characters, like a tiny, wizened, thousand-year-old barkeep (wonderfully performed, behind motion capture, by Lupita Nyong’o) who looks like a talking kumquat with coke-bottle glasses, but even she serves as a somewhat Obi-Wan-like mentor presence for Scavenger Girl. There are new creatures, too—a hornbill-like bird pecking at a helmet, an enormous boar-like beast at a water trough, tentacled horrors running amok on a cargo ship. But they, too, recall the barely-glimpsed fauna in the early movies.

This applies to the whole of Force Awakens. It starts on a desert planet, follows the search for a cute robot entrusted with vital information, involves mentors and pupils and family connections and a super-weapon and Jedi mind tricks and cringing underlings bringing bad news to scary bad guys and crosscutting between space battles and personal confrontations. It’s almost less a sequel than a series of variations on the original trilogy’s themes. That’s the shrewd and sensible method that Abrams, Kasdan and Arndt have used: Everything’s new, but everything’s old as well.

On the way to the screening, I saw, no kidding, an electric traffic sign on a Phoenix highway that read “AGGRESSIVE DRIVING IS THE PATH TO THE DARK SIDE.” For better or for worse, that’s how ingrained in mainstream culture this once-nerdy mythos has become. Oddly, the movie uses a variation on this metaphysic: The previous Star Wars films were heavily concerned with the allure of the Dark Side, but this film is about the seductions of the Light, the risks and perils of giving in to one’s better impulses. This, I think, it’s what gives the movie its vitality. It might be called A Franchise Awakens.

PARK & REX

The realization that Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park turns twenty years old this year left me feeling pretty prehistoric myself. I was in my early thirties when the film of Michael Crichton’s bestseller came stomping into theaters, but I had been a dinosaur geek since childhood, to which the movie sent me back.

Now Jurassic Park has returned to the multiplexes, in a re-mastered 3-D version. I still love dinosaurs, but two decades have made it easier, now that astonishment at the truly convincing special effects has faded, to pick the movie apart logically, and to acknowledge the middle-class banality of its dramatics. Granting all this, however, I still say that Jurassic Park is one of the most thrilling special effects spectacles of all time, and that it remains the best showcase of computer-generated effects to date.

I say this in full awareness of James Cameron’s Avatar, which astounded so many people a couple of years ago. Avatar was an absorbing sci-fi romance, preoccupied with the human ability to disrupt nature—a theme it shared with Jurassic Park. But Cameron used the story to wow us with CGI effects which, though impressive and sometimes even lovely, were always obviously virtual phantoms. Spielberg used his rock-solid virtual effects—seamlessly blended with animatronic puppetry—to draw us into the story.

In case you’ve forgotten or somehow missed it the first time, the film concerns a theme park on an island off Costa Rica featuring real live dinosaurs, cloned from blood extracted from ancient mosquitoes trapped in amber. Prior to opening this ill-advised attraction, the founder (Richard Attenborough at his jolliest), invites several scientists (Sam Neill, Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum) as well as his own grandkids (Ariana Richards and Joseph Mazzello) to endorse it. A bit of industrial espionage and a power outage lead to dinosaurs on the loose.

Because of Spielberg’s brilliant timing and theatrical flair, I didn’t notice until I’d seen the film several times how vague and malleable the geography of the park is: steep retaining walls suddenly appear when they are needed dramatically, characters strike out across open country when it would make more sense to wait where they are for help to arrive. But when you’re watching the movie, Spielberg’s confident touch, and the effects, hustle you past these inconsistencies.

There are eccentric moments that still play beautifully, as when one velociraptor quixotically lunges to the defense of another against a much larger tyrannosaurus. The gag involving the rear-view mirror, which even people who disliked Jurassic Park had to admit was pretty good, is now being used in the poster, presumably to tout the movie’s new 3-D status.

But here, alas, I have to note that the re-release gains nothing in particular from the addition of 3-D. I can’t think of one scene that was enhanced by the effect in any way I noticed. Again, not that it matters—my ten-year-old, no particular dinosaur fan, joined me for the screening and was properly spellbound. With or without 3-D, Jurassic Park still has teeth.

ABE PLUS

It’s understandable if, after endless months of venomous, bitterly divisive politics, you aren’t particularly in the mood for a movie about a venomous, bitterly divisive period in American politics. But it would be a shame if political burnout kept audiences away from Lincoln, Steven Spielberg’s amazing movie built around the performance of Daniel Day-Lewis as the 16th President.

Honest Abe has been irresistible to moviemakers for more than a century, depicted sometimes reverently, as in D.W. Griffith’s Abraham Lincoln (1930), Young Mr. Lincoln (1939) or Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1940), and sometimes irreverently, as in Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989) or this year’s Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter. His achievements in office, his unassuming manner and his tragic end have, in the movies, generally resulted in one extreme or the other—either he’s a secular folk saint, or else he brings out the urge to spoof. There was TV miniseries called Lincoln back in the ‘80s, based on Gore Vidal’s book and with Sam Waterston as Abe, that made some effort to delve into the man’s psychology, but as I recall it was pretty slow going.

Spielberg’s film takes its time, too, and it’s pictorially beautiful. The cinematographer, Janusz Kaminski, infuses his compositions with a muted radiance that still seems realistic and immediate—the whole movie feels like a spring thaw. Yet it’s no iconic hagiography, and the unhurried pace that Spielberg sets gives the story a rising hum of dramatic energy. It’s not a tour of wax-museum tableaux from the man’s life. Surprisingly, and to the movie’s great benefit, it’s a story of nuts-and-bolts politics: the seemingly insoluble legislative wrangle to pass the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, ending slavery in the United States.

The script, by Tony Kushner, is partly adapted from Doris Kearns Goodwin’s 2005 book Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln. The title suggests the difference in the new film’s approach. Political genius isn’t the first thing we associate with Lincoln. Yet the movie suggests that it was skill—at strategy, at marshalling favors and muzzling enemies, and at navigating the moral ambivalence of deep compromise—that, paradoxically, led him to accomplishments of moral grandeur.

Spielberg is at the top of his form here. I think film critics and buffs have, in a sense, underrated him for years. After his initial great success with Jaws and Close Encounters and E.T., he made some really terrible movies in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s—pushy, cloying, evasive stuff like Hook and Always—and many viewers naturally assumed that he was just going to be a sentiment-peddler forever. Some of them, I think, didn’t notice that Spielberg’s films in the ‘90s and early 2000s, though often highly uneven in terms of script or casting, were stunningly directed. Amistad and Munich and Saving Private Ryan and War of the Worlds were all flawed, but they were the often mesmerizing work of a master filmmaker—indeed, of a master filmmaker who had rediscovered and deepened his art.

We see this again in Lincoln, from the first images—of a horrifyingly bloody and brutal Civil War battle—to the first few lines of dialogue, as Lincoln converses with two black Union soldiers of very different temperament, and then with two awestruck white soldiers. There’s a weird and complex play of symmetry and conflicted agenda and formality and off-handedness, all presented with an effortlessness of revelation, that few other directors could have managed, or would even have thought to attempt.

What allows Spielberg to maintain this level of mastery through all that follows is the script. Kushner, who wrote the magnificent Angels in America plays, is one of the few contemporary dramatists who is both capable and unafraid of high-flown language, and the 19th Century idiom allows him to cut loose in this regard without sounding overly stylized.

Yet for all of Spielberg’s and Kushner’s brilliance, and for all the splendors of Kaminski’s camera, what makes Lincoln unique is Daniel Day-Lewis. Like the movie, his Lincoln will not suit all tastes, but for me, it’s one of the great performances in, maybe, the history of movies. It’s up there with Falconetti as Joan of Arc and Brando in The Godfather, and nobody but Day-Lewis could have given it.

A number of people I’ve talked to have been put off by the voice he uses—a thin, soft, upper-register drawl instead of a stentorian baritone. This is thought to be historically accurate, I believe, but it also works in the context of the character as Spielberg, Kushner and Day-Lewis conceive him. The movie operates on the premise that Lincoln was a compulsive raconteur. Again and again throughout the film, he stops, chuckles to himself, and launches a maddeningly digressive anecdote, and everyone in the room, even his friends and allies, look miserable as they sit there and wait for the punchline. This recurring gag, and the voice, connect to the idea that as a speaker Lincoln preferred quiet eloquence to thundering oratory, and as a leader preferred self-deprecating persuasion to conquest.

Day-Lewis doesn’t give the only fine performance in the film. Sally Field strikes the right strained yet sympathetic note as Mary Todd Lincoln; Joseph Gordon-Levitt is moving as Robert Lincoln, and Tommy Lee Jones lets it rip as Radical Republican abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens. Less flashy than Jones but just as essential to the movie is David Strathairn as Seward, and then there’s Bruce McGill as Stanton, and Jared Harris as Grant, and Jackie Earle Haley as Alexander Stephens and Gloria Reuben as Elizabeth Keckley and Hal Holbrook as Preston Blair and James Spader, John Hawkes and Tim Blake Nelson as three comically shady political operatives, among many other creditable turns.

Lincoln is, ultimately—and perhaps to its commercial peril—a movie of remarkable restraint. Spielberg, Kushner and Day-Lewis eschew almost every opportunity for melodrama. Even the score, by John Williams, keeps its voice down. Yet the cumulative effect of this low-key movie is, at least for one viewer, overwhelming.