Steven Spielberg (80 page)

A
LWAYS
can best be understood as a movie about Spielberg's acceptance of loss. His on-screen surrogate in this loose remake of the 1943 movie
A
Guy
Named
Joe,
a reckless pilot played by Richard Dreyfuss, loses his life flying and is sent back to Earth to help his former lover and fellow pilot (Holly Hunter) find happiness with another man. In Spielberg's own life at the time he made
Always,
he was trying to come to terms with several kinds of loss—the loss of his wife, the aging of his parents, and the loss of his childhood—as well as with the inevitable feelings of failure a divorced man faces in his roles as husband and father.

Spielberg's interest in the story traces back to the time his own parents' marriage was starting to fall apart. He first watched
A
Guy
Named
Joe
on TV in Phoenix, and later said it was “a story that touched my soul… the second movie, after
Bambi,
that made me cry.” Written by Dalton Trumbo and directed by Victor Fleming, the MGM movie stars Spencer Tracy as a World War II pilot who dies in combat but returns to reassure his grieving widow (Irene Dunne) that it's not wrong to fall in love with another man (Van Johnson). The young Spielberg—whose fascination with airplanes always seemed to involve his feelings about his father—needed to hear the message that life would go on despite separation and loss. “I didn't understand why I cried,” he said. “But I did. [The Tracy character] is powerless, unable to influence events, like a piece of furniture. As a child I was very frustrated, and maybe I saw my own parents in it. I was also short of girlfriends. And it stuck with me.”

In remaking one of his most cherished childhood favorites, Spielberg also made one of his rare commercial missteps:
Always
grossed a relatively disappointing $77.1 million worldwide. The personal imperatives of the project blinded Spielberg to its irrelevance for contemporary audiences. He seemed not to understand that what gave
A
Guy
Named
Joe
its wide appeal in 1943 was its wartime setting and its audience's shared ethos of sacrifice. A nation of grieving families and war widows hungered for that kind of emotional boost; the audience of 1989 could not be faulted for finding the situation of
Always
little more than a curiosity. Setting the remake in World War
II would not have solved the problem, but Spielberg's decision to transpose the story to the present day, among pilots fighting forest fires in Montana, robbed it of the social context that had made its self-sacrificial fantasy acceptable and meaningful in 1943. The hybrid nature of the film is emphasized by Spielberg's use of World War II–vintage airplanes, 1940s slang (“dollface,” “you big lug,” “moxie,” “Your number is up”), and retro romantic scenes, demonstrating the director's overly literal fixation on his mood as a twelve-year-old child. From its spectacular flying sequences to its emphasis on romantic voyeurism and its obsession with surrogate fatherhood,
Always
is a smorgasbord of Spielbergian motifs and psychological hangups.

The project had begun taking shape in his mind in 1974, when he discovered that Richard Dreyfuss shared his fondness for the original movie. Although Spielberg thought of Dreyfuss as their generation's equivalent of Spencer Tracy, he hesitated about giving the role to his “alter ego,” whose persona seems a bit too cerebral for the part of a rough-and-tumble pilot. The director also considered such older, more conventionally romantic stars as Paul Newman and Robert Redford. Debra Winger (an old flame of Spielberg's) was discussed for the female lead and Harrison Ford for the thankless role of the other pilot.

After the project was first announced at MGM in 1980 as
A
Guy
Named
Joe,
Spielberg commissioned a dozen screenplays
‡‡‡
but kept delaying the start of shooting, making
Always
seem like one of those pet projects that somehow never get off the ground. “In a lot of the earlier drafts, Richard walked through walls,” Spielberg recalled. “He put his hands through things. He glowed. It was riddled with gimmicks and tricks and all the stuff that I guess I do really well. I guess that's why I didn't want to do it…. Every special effect that we had was written out of the movie…. I had a lot of false starts, but I think it all came down to the fact that I wasn't ready to make it…. If I had made it in 1980, I think it would have been more of a comedy. I'd have hidden all of the deep feelings.”

Hiding deep feelings is part of the problem Spielberg's alter ego faces in
Always.
Dreyfuss's Pete Sandich is unable to admit he loves his girlfriend, Dorinda (Hunter), until he finds himself in the afterlife. He is brought back to Earth for a dual purpose: to serve as guardian angel to the callow young flyer Ted Baker (Brad Johnson) and to let go of his unrequited emotional attachment to Dorinda. Pete's own guardian angel is a blithe spirit named Hap, perhaps an allusion to General Henry H. (Hap) Arnold, the World War II chief of the U.S. Army Air Forces, in which Spielberg's father served. When the father figure from
Last
Crusade,
Sean Connery, was unavailable to play Hap, Spielberg made the unconventional casting choice of Audrey Hepburn, figuring she “was closer to the maternal side of nature.”

The fantasy framework adds a level of poignancy to a triangular romance
that the director otherwise treats with the jocular tone of 1940s romantic comedy. But the fantasy elements also underscore the curiously asexual nature of what was touted as Spielberg's first “adult love story.” The most moving, and most genuinely romantic, scene depends on the audience's awareness that the two lovers are unable to touch each other. Dorinda's solitary dance to “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” is accompanied by the ghostly Pete, whom she cannot see. As Dorinda glides around her living room, wearing the clingy white “girl clothes” Pete gave her before he died, Spielberg's graceful, gently caressing camera movements wistfully express feelings of loss and remembrance.
§§§

But for some (perhaps most) contemporary viewers, unrequited love of the sort on view in
Always
may seem more annoying than charming. And for Spielberg's detractors, this old-fashioned, asexual plot was simply another sign of his arrested development, further proof that he wouldn't—or couldn't—grow up. When Dorinda makes her first appearance in her shimmering white dress before a roomful of comically awe-stricken fliers and grease monkeys, “It's the most purely sexless moment in Spielberg's long, long career as a boy,” wrote David Denby in
New
York
magazine, “and it made me realize to what extent sex in his movies is a matter of dreams and idealization.”

Spielberg, it is true, has yet to explore the full dimensions of adult sexuality on screen. His occasional forays in that direction, such as the lesbian love scene in
The
Color
Purple,
have tended to be shy and tentative. The director's handling of romantic scenes in
Always
is often marred by an excessively juvenile tone, with characters breaking into nervous giggles like high school kids embarrassed at playing grown-up. To compare Holly Hunter's girlish hysteria in
Always
with Irene Dunne's serene womanly grace in
A
Guy
Named
Joe
is to recognize how far Spielberg still has to go in dealing with mature female sexuality.

Spielberg is more in his element dealing with male anxieties, such as Pete's possessiveness toward Dorinda, his lack of emotional commitment, his discomfort with her career, and his masochistic jealousy over watching her being courted by Ted. The director imbalances the drama, however, by making Ted a cartoonish oaf, perhaps because making Pete's rival a man of equal stature would have felt too threatening. Pete eventually realizes that the happiness of the woman he loves depends on his own willingness to accept that she has found someone else. His process of letting go is a process of emotional maturation.

It's unlikely Spielberg could have found these feelings in himself without having first experienced the pain of separation and divorce. The paternal
way Pete learns to treat Ted seems to reflect Spielberg's own pleasure in his newfound role as a father. And by showing Pete acting as Ted's professional mentor, Spielberg is echoing the role he likes to play with younger directors.
Photographed by Mikael Salomon,
Always
contains some of Spielberg's most ravishing images, and the aerial firefighting sequences (partly filmed during the 1988 Yellowstone fires) are far superior to the studiobound visuals of
A
Guy
Named
Joe.
Where
Always
falters is in the wide disparity between the sophistication of its craftsmanship and the relative shallowness of its romantic relationships.

F
OR
a film that was widely anticipated as an artistic culmination for Spielberg—his definitive statement on the “Peter Pan Syndrome”—
Hook
mostly serves to demonstrate the middle-aged director's overwhelming sense of boredom with Peter Pan, the Lost Boys, and all they represent about the anarchic spirit of childhood. The filmmaker's passion is stimulated only by the more somber parts of the story, in which the grown-up Pan, Peter Banning (Robin Williams), movingly comes to terms with his failure as a father to his embittered young son, Jack (Charlie Korsmo). But otherwise
Hook
is a lumbering white elephant, marred by protracted, tediously chaotic tomfoolery in the pirate village and Neverland.

Perhaps Spielberg simply had waited too long to get around to making his Peter Pan movie. In one way or another, of course, he had been making it forever. Even Spielberg's first amateur feature, made twenty-eight years earlier, owes a debt to
Peter
Pan,
for Tinkerbell flies around in the form of a firelight. Henry Sheehan, one of the few critics to regard
Hook
as a major Spielberg work, wrote in
Film
Comment
that the movie “pulled together the many different thematic strands, visual motifs, and character types that had been haphazardly scattered through his first fifteen [
sic
] years of work, and patterned them into a rich, coherent whole.” But as revealing as
Hook
may be for students of Spielberg's life and work, most of it is far more “rich” and “coherent” in the abstract than in its execution.

During the early 1980s, Spielberg developed a live-action adaptation of
Peter
Pan
for Disney and, later, Paramount. He considered Michael Jackson for the title role (as a singing and dancing Pan) and Dustin Hoffman for Captain James Hook. “I decided not to make
Peter
Pan
really when Max was born,” the director explained in 1990, “and I guess it was just bad timing.
Peter
Pan
came at a time when I had my first child and I didn't want to go to London and have seven kids on wires in front of blue screens swinging around. I wanted to be home as a dad, not a surrogate dad.”

Spielberg had moved on to new problems and more adult concerns. As he showed in
Empire
of
the
Sun,
he no longer felt comfortable with mere celebrations of childhood innocence, but now was concerned about the death of innocence and the coming of manhood. Around that same time, he briefly considered directing
Big,
his sister Anne's screenplay (in collaboration
with Gary Ross) about a twelve-year-old boy who suddenly finds himself a grown man and becomes a phenomenally successful designer of toys. The boy-man played by Tom Hanks in director Penny Marshall's 1988 movie bears more than a casual resemblance to Steven Spielberg himself; indeed,
Big
can be seen as his sister's affectionately satirical commentary on his life and career. But what would have been the point of making it? He already had lived the tale, and now he was trying to outgrow it.
¶¶¶

Fittingly,
Hook
was the brainchild of a small boy. In 1982, screenwriter Jim V. Hart's three-year-old son, Jake, showed his family a drawing. “We asked Jake what it was,” Hart recalled, “and he said it was a crocodile eating Captain Hook, but that the crocodile
really
didn't eat him, he got away. As it happens, I had been trying to crack
Peter
Pan
for years, but I didn't just want to do a remake. So I went, ‘Wow. Hook is not dead. The crocodile is. We've all been fooled.' Four years later, our family was having dinner and Jake said, ‘Daddy, did Peter Pan ever grow up?' My immediate response was, ‘No, of course not.' And Jake said, ‘But what if he did?' And that unlocked all the doors that had been closed to me. I realized that Peter
did
grow up, just like all of us baby boomers who are now in our forties. I patterned him after several of my friends on Wall Street, where the pirates wear three-piece suits and ride in limos.”

Hook
was being developed by Hart and director Nick Castle at TriStar when the Japanese electronics giant Sony bought Columbia-TriStar in 1989. The following year, Sony hired Mike Medavoy to run TriStar. Medavoy, who had been Spielberg's first agent, sent Hart's script to Spielberg, who quickly committed to direct it. Castle, who had worked for Spielberg on
Amazing
Stories,
was taken off
Hook
and given a $500,000 settlement, as well as a story credit with Hart. Spielberg received unfavorable publicity for what some took to be an arrogant power play against a less prominent director, but Medavoy says, “He didn't want anything to do with taking another director off a picture. I said, ‘I've already done it.' Because Dustin and Robin weren't going to work with [Castle].”