Steven Spielberg
From E.T. to Munich, the boy wonder of the movie industry
grows up.
By Saul Austerlitz
For years, Steven Spielberg was Hollywood's boy wonder. Boy
wonder because everything he touched turned to gold, undoubtedly, but also for
the irrepressible innocence of his outlook on the world--which revolved around
childhood hopes and fears--and the boyish sense of adventure found in his films.
For many fans, the touching naiveté of Spielberg films like E.T. (1982) was the attraction, while
for others, the director's seeming immersion in Saturday-morning serials and
the romance of the Hollywood studio system revealed an artist willfully
blinkered to the adult world.
It was no secret, in the early years of Spielberg's
ascendance, that he was Jewish (his mother was something of a celebrity in her
own right in Jewish Los Angeles for owning a kosher restaurant), but his films
contained little that would explicitly tie him to his religious heritage. Nonetheless,
he was embraced by the Jewish community as a hero as few others have been--a
Jewish kid from southern California who had become America's preeminent
showman, and a filmmaker and businessman nonpareil.
Blockbuster Hits
Spielberg had occasionally interacted with serious matters
in his films, from Robert Shaw's gripping story of the sinking of the USS Indianapolis in Jaws (1975) to the Nazi bad guys of Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), but his seeming inability to tackle
the world's ugliness with any seriousness made him a whipping boy for critics,
who saw him as the root of Hollywood's new love for brain-dead summer blockbusters
over heartier fare. Having emerged at the tail end of the American New Wave
film movement of the 1970s, Spielberg (along with his sometime collaborator
George Lucas) was offered as evidence of that cinematic flowering's early
demise.
Of course, much of this attitude was unfounded, and simply
unfair. Bashing Spielberg for the works he had not made, rather than honestly
assessing those he had, was nonsensical, and led to hasty judgments of early
Spielberg films like Jaws and Raiders. Demanding seriousness of a born
entertainer like Spielberg was missing the point of where his talents lay--or
so it seemed.
A Turning Point
Schindler's
List (1993) marked the crucial turning point in Spielberg's career--the
moment when he simultaneously embraced seriousness and Jewishness in his work. Spielberg
had attempted straightforward drama before, in The Color Purple (1985) and the underrated Empire of the Sun (1987), but Schindler's
List was the first of his dramas to assume responsibility for the past, and
for Jewish history. When Raiders of the
Lost Ark had first hit theaters, critics had been puzzled, and sometimes
offended, by the jokey, cartoon-villain Nazis on display, and in many ways, Schindler's List was a long-delayed
response to those critics, and a mea culpa for the understandable but
still lingering offense of Spielberg's youthful lack of historical grounding. For
the Spielberg of Raiders, the Nazis
were conveniently well-dressed baddies available to dog Indiana Jones' steps;
for the Spielberg of Schindler's List,
the enormity of Nazi evil was too great to possibly be contained within a
single film.
Much has been written about Schindler's List (see here), but perhaps the most surprising aspect
of the film is its awe-inspiring rigor--something Spielberg, always intent on
pleasing his audiences, had never been capable of before. Naysayers made much
of Schindler's List being Spielberg's
Holocaust, in which the hero is a Nazi and the Jews all survive, but this glib
response misses much of the nuance of the film, which owes more to the searing
simplicity of austere French filmmaker Robert Bresson than E.T. Schindler's List finds hope in even the darkest moments of the
Nazi genocide, but it also understands the mind-numbing everyday brutality of
otherwise placid-seeming Germans, and the ways in which time, and especially
money, could be translated into another life saved. Schindler's List grasps the economy of the Holocaust and its
frightful trafficking in human lives, and honors high-minded celebrants of the
sanctity of human life less than the calculators--men like Oskar Schindler, and
his assistant Itzhak Stern--who intuitively knew just what it would cost to
save a life.
Following Schindler's
List, Spielberg invested his newfound cultural capital in a series of
dramas that, like his Oscar-winning picture, were intended to wrestle with
history. Boy wonder no longer, Spielberg sought to address American slavery (Amistad, 1997) and World War II (Saving Private Ryan, 1998), and perhaps
even more courageously (at least in the eyes of film buffs) took on an
unfinished Stanley Kubrick project (A.I.)
and brought it to the big screen in 2001. Not all these films were as
critically or commercially successful as Schindler's
List. Saving Private Ryan was an
enormously moving tribute to the wartime Greatest Generation and a remarkably
frank evocation of battle, but Amistad lacked
the fire of Schindler's List and Saving
Private Ryan, and A.I. was a substantial misfire. At the same time, he also faced Schindler’s critics head-on by funding
and overseeing the enormous Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation,
which has now compiled more than 50,000 eyewitness testimonies from Holocaust
survivors. This has become an invaluable resource for historians and those
interested in preserving a record of history’s horrors.
Twelve years after the enormous critical and commercial
success of Schindler's List,
Spielberg returned to explicitly Jewish material with Munich (2005), which sought to tell an unfamiliar tale from
contemporary Israeli history. Munich begins
with a horrifically realistic recreation of the kidnapping of 11 Israeli
athletes and coaches at the 1972 Munich Olympics, with Spielberg's new footage intermingled
with the now-familiar television coverage of the unfolding events. The tense
hostage stand-off ends in the death of all eleven Israelis, and leaves the
country and its leaders mourning their dead and thirsting for revenge against
the Black September terrorists responsible for the athletes' deaths.
Based on a controversial memoir by an ex-Mossad agent, Munich details the hunting down and
killing of each of the terrorists associated with the Munich disaster by a
crack team of Israeli secret agents. Spielberg's technique in Munich is as fine as it has ever been;
there are moments that rival the best of Hitchcock for suspense, and Janusz
Kaminski's photography is exceptionally beautiful. But the movie that Spielberg
thought he was making is very different from the one he actually made, and Munich functions far more smoothly as a
tense action-thriller taking place on the margins of reality--and plausibility--than
a philosophical drama of Israeli and Palestinian cycles of violence and
counter-violence.
Munich desires to
be taken seriously, to be Spielberg's equivalent of Schindler's List for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But some
combination of the dubious source material, Spielberg's shaky grasp of the roots
of the violence, and the film's own unconscious taste for bullets over
broadsides makes for a movie more adrenaline-fueled than thought-provoking. Wonderfully
stirring, Munich has little at all to
say about the seemingly endless battle between Israelis and Palestinians, and
the little it does offer is jumbled and tentative. Part of the problem is that Munich takes place in the 1970's, which
may as well be another century for its relevance to the contemporary landscape
of the Middle East.
All in all, Munich is
more proof of Spielberg's desire to be taken seriously than impetus for us to
actually do so, and it is only a successor to Schindler's inasmuch as it marks yet another step away from the
entertaining but unintellectual adventurism of his early career. In one of the
more unlikely and wonderful transformations in film history, the boy wonder has
turned himself into the great historical chronicler, taking American film on a
guided tour of the past, and leaving no stone unturned in the process.
Saul Austerlitz is a writer and film critic in New York.
