Steven Spielberg (78 page)

Even some who praised it seemed uncomfortable as they tried to deal with Spielberg's cinematic maturation process while being stuck with a warehouse of outmoded critical clichés. “There are almost too many brilliant, climactic moments; Spielberg hypes the emotions he wants to create rather than just letting them emerge from the marvelous story he's been given,” thought David Denby of
New
York
magazine. “… But what a prodigious visual imagination!
Empire
of
the
Sun
is a great, overwrought movie that leaves one wordless and worn out.” Expecting something quite different from the maker of
E.
T.,
Sheila Benson complained in the
Los
Angeles
Times
that “we don't have a single character to warm up to. They are either illegal, immoral or fatally malnourished…. Surely the least sentimental young ‘hero' ever to occupy the center of a massive movie, Jim isn't shaped by the horrors of his surroundings into a more loving, more admirable or more humane person. He becomes a slicker and more accomplished little con man.”

Such complaints must have seemed strange to a filmmaker who previously had been pilloried by many critics for his supposed sentimentality about childhood. His latest attempt to move beyond his familiar suburban milieu was received with more of the supercilious sneering that greeted
The
Color
Purple:
“I hope Steven Spielberg's
Empire
of
the
Sun
wins him that damn Oscar so he goes back to making movies that give real and lasting pleasure to people,” Peter Rainer wrote in the
Los
Angeles
Herald-Examiner.

Spielberg also was attacked for downplaying Ballard's details of disease and starvation in the prison camp, and for minimizing the brutality of the Japanese guards. The film ‘treats the hell of the prison camp as if it were the background for a coming-of-age story,” Kael contended. “… Spielberg seems to be making everything nice, and, as with
The
Color
Purple,
there's something in the source material that's definitely not nice.” Such comments betrayed a fundamental misunderstanding of the complexity of Spielberg's, and Ballard's, perspectives on childhood. “I have—I won't say
happy
—not unpleasant memories of the camp,” Ballard explained. “I was young, and if you put 400 or 500 children together they have a good time whatever the circumstances…. I know my parents always had very much harsher memories of the camp than I did, because of course they knew the reality of the circumstances. Parents often starved themselves to feed their children. But I think it's true that the Japanese do like children and are very kindly toward them. The guards didn't abuse the children at all…. I was totally involved but at the same time saved by the magic of childhood.”

Empire
of
the
Sun
was a major commercial disappointment, bringing in only $66.7 million at the worldwide box office, considerably less than even
1941.
Spielberg said he knew going in that “my large-canvas personal film … wasn't going to have a broad audience appeal.” But he consoled himself by feeling, “I've earned the right to fail commercially.”

Receiving six Academy Award nominations, all in the craft categories,
Empire
failed to win a single award. It was nominated neither for Best Picture nor for Best Director. Allen Daviau publicly complained, “I can't second-guess the Academy, but I feel very sorry that I get nominations and Steven doesn't….. It's his vision that makes it all come together, and if Steven wasn't making these films, none of us would be here.” Spielberg's feelings about the critics were made clear to George Lucas, with whom he was planning another Indiana Jones movie. Lucas wanted to start the movie with a sequence showing Indy as a boy, but Spielberg initially demurred because, as Lucas put it, “Steven had been really trashed by the critics for
Empire
of
the
Sun,
and he said, ‘I just don't want to do any more films with kids in them.'”

S
PIELBERG
admitted he was “consciously regressing” in making
Indi
ana
Jones
and
the
Last
Crusade
(1989). If many critics and large segments of the public didn't want him to grow up or scoffed at his attempts to do so,
then he would stop fighting them. His run for cover would last for the next few years, an uneven creative period that saw him indulging in various forms of cinematic and personal regression in hopes of reconnecting with his audience.

In making
Last
Crusade,
Always
(1989), and
Hook
(1991), Spielberg seemed to be giving up, for the time being, on courting the critics or the members of the Academy. Part of him could not help being concerned about his future as a popular artist. He knew how fickle the moviegoing public could be, and his anxiety about maintaining a high commercial profile drove him back to escapist subject matter—a pulp adventure, a ghost story, a pirate movie—as he recycled tried-and-true material from movies past.

But there was another dimension to those movies. The battering he had taken in attempting to expand his horizons forced him to turn inward, both for self-protection and as personal compensation for playing the commercial game. Those three films examined the wellsprings of his artistic personality in a more covert fashion, treating some of his most cherished psychological obsessions within the framework of genre conventions. Rather than taking daring risks with subject matter as he had with
The
Color
Purple
and
Empire
of
the
Sun,
he bent traditional genres to express his own style and feelings, like the studio directors he admired from Hollywood's Golden Age. By disguising his increasingly personal filmmaking as popular entertainment, Spielberg was conducting creative experiments that would help advance him along the path toward
Schindler's
List.

In light of the major changes taking place in Spielberg's personal life during the second half of the 1980s—fatherhood, marriage, and, eventually, divorce—it's not surprising that the most interesting and unusual thematic elements in
Last
Crusade,
Always,
and
Hook
revolve around troubled relationships between fathers and sons or father-son surrogates. Spielberg's belated personal maturation forced him to examine the meaning of manhood as it applied to his own life, both as the son of a broken marriage and as the father in what would become a disintegrating marriage. The fact that he seemed to be imitating his own parents' failure must have caused him to rethink some of his condemnatory attitudes toward his father, as well as giving him a greater understanding of the cost of his own workaholic tendencies.

The career vs. family conflict so central to baby boomer psyches figures largely in these three films, along with Spielberg's increasingly critical examination of male characters who, like him, suffer from the “Peter Pan Syndrome.” What J. Hoberman (writing of
Empire
of
the
Sun
) sarcastically called Spielberg's “Peter Panic” became the director's explicit subject matter in the aesthetically unsatisfactory but nakedly autobiographical
Hook.
Peter Pan himself finally occupied the center stage of a Spielberg movie, but the character was no longer the rebellious little boy who won't grow up. He was a boy in the guise of a fully grown man, a perfectly miserable failure in his roles as a husband and father.

The depth of Spielberg's involvement in his characters' neuroses in these transitional films makes them resemble cinematic Rorschach inkblots. Spielberg went through psychotherapy around 1987, the first time he had done so since adolescence. “All my friends went to therapy and I thought that maybe I would learn something about myself, so I went for a year,” he said. “But I can't say that I found the discoveries conclusive. Everything I learned about myself I knew already or I'd guessed for myself.” Shortly after the release of
Hook,
it was reported that Spielberg had met privately with psychologist John Bradshaw. Bradshaw's emphasis on dysfunctional families and getting back in touch with one's “inner child” made him a guru for Hollywood celebrities undergoing midlife crises. Spielberg solicited Bradshaw's advice on the script of
Hook;
he also had the psychologist on the set for part of the shooting, and cast Bradshaw's daughter in the film.

Moviemaking, not formal psychotherapy, has always been Spielberg's preferred method of working out his personal problems. He may have shared his psychological discoveries somewhat sketchily in
Last
Crusade,
confusedly in
Always,
and clumsily in
Hook,
but for viewers alert to reading nuances between the lines, those films are fascinating because they reveal so much about their maker.

F
ULFILLING
his obligation to George Lucas for a final movie in the Indiana Jones trilogy meant that Spielberg had to abandon
Rain
Man.
He had been working for several months in 1987 with Dustin Hoffman, Tom Cruise, and screenwriter Ronald Bass, developing the project about an autistic savant and his mutually enriching relationship with his outwardly normal but (in Spielberg's words) “emotionally autistic” younger brother.

Spielberg was not yet satisfied with the script of
Rain
Man
by the time he left to begin preproduction on
Last
Crusade,
which had to begin shooting in May 1988 to ensure its scheduled Memorial Day weekend release in 1989. Barry Levinson eventually took over the direction of
Rain
Man,
which won Academy Awards for Best Picture, Director, Actor (Hoffman), and Screenplay (Bass and original writer Barry Morrow). “It's a shame that people who are involved with a film in its interim can't have their name[s] connected with it,” Bass said. “Spielberg really did a tremendous amount.” Though he could not have helped feeling somewhat jealous over the Oscars
Rain
Man
received, Spielberg was not alone in finding the film “emotionally very distancing. I think I certainly would have pulled tears out of a rather dry movie…. I was very upset not to have been able to do
Rain
Man,
mainly because I've wanted to work with Dustin Hoffman ever since I saw
The
Graduate.
”

Lucas initially suggested making
Indy
III
“a haunted-house movie.” He had such a script written by
Romancing
the
Stone
screenwriter Diane Thomas before her death in a 1985 car accident, but, Lucas said, “Steven had done
Poltergeist,
and he didn't want to do another movie like that.” Fearing further accusations of racism, Spielberg and Lucas both rejected the script
they commissioned from Chris Columbus about an African Monkey King (half man, half monkey). Taking the safest route, they finally decided to reuse the cartoonish Nazi villains from
Raiders
of
the
Lost
Ark.
But Menno Meyjes's draft about Indy's quest for the Holy Grail, a plot device suggested by Lucas, left Spielberg dubious.

Spielberg recalled telling the producer that he would make a movie about the Holy Grail, “but I want it to be about a father and son. I want to get Indy's father involved in the thing. I want a quest for the father.” In the film, Indy's father, Dr. Henry Jones, a professor of medieval literature, is cut from a sterner, more Victorian code of right and wrong. Unlike his son, whose interest in precious objects stems from a mixture of greed and intellectual curiosity, the elder Dr. Jones has a truly religious obsession with finding the Holy Grail. “I wanted to do Indy in pursuit of his father, sharing his father's dream,” said Spielberg, “and in the course of searching for their dreams, they rediscover each other.”

Screenwriter Jeffrey Boam gives a different account of how the storyline evolved. Boam, who wrote the final draft,
***
worked mostly with Lucas, since Spielberg was busy on
Empire
of
the
Sun.
The father-son story “came from George,” the writer insists. “I think maybe George has his own father fixation. I don't think Steven had a personal point of view to impose on the material at all. Steven knows these are George's movies. Steven has no problem with that. He approaches them as what John Ford used to call ‘a job of work.'” In the earlier draft of
Last
Crusade
by Meyjes, “the father was sort of a MacGuffin [a Hitchcockian device that provides an excuse for the plot],” recalls Boam. “They didn't find the father until the very end. I said to George, ‘It doesn't make sense to find the father at the end. Why don't they find him in the middle?' Given the fact that it's the third film in the series, you couldn't just end with them obtaining the object. That's how the first two ended. So I thought, Let them
lose
the object—the Grail—and let the relationship be the main point. It's an archeological search for Indy's own identity. Indy coming to accept his father is more what it's about [than the quest for the Grail].”

The Indiana Jones movies all begin with a cliffhanger action sequence whose underlying function, Boam explains, is to “tell us something new about Indiana Jones.” For
Last
Crusade,
Lucas suggested, “What if we learn about his childhood?” The film opens in 1912 with the adolescent Indy, played by River Phoenix, on a trip to Monument Valley with his Boy Scout troop. Besides performing outlandish feats of derring-do atop a speeding circus train, young Indy acquires his trademark fedora hat and whip and his passion for archeology.