The Master (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2012)

Joaquin Phoenix's Freddie Quell is a man so wracked by his carnal urges that he walks in convulsive, post-coital spasms and pants in ragged thrusts when he runs. At the conclusion of World War II, the seaman joins his comrades on a beach in the Pacific, wrestling, copulating with a woman made of sand and masturbating in a grimly violent celebration of peace. Back home, Freddie reports for a military psych evaluation, a farcical conveyor belt that feeds disturbed soldiers through a handful of perfunctory, still-new techniques in a one-size-fits-all approach to mental health. The results clearly show an unwell man, but director Paul Thomas Anderson cuts abruptly to the sailor working as a mall photographer, posing families into the waxy, beaming photos that define the period. Freddie effectively applies mortar to the bricks of postwar conformity, cementing it by turning every family into a false, overlit, eerie perfect image. Eventually, the irony gets to this loner, and he finds himself thrown into the wildernerss to drift.

Unable to fit in with even smaller communities, Freddie eventually stumbles his way to a yacht about to set sail, Anderson follows behind the man and racks the background in and out of focus, signifying Freddie's desire to be a part of the gathering on-board and his knowledge that he would not fit in. (In a less abstract way, it may also just be a visualization of Freddie's perpetual state of drunkenness, brought on by his homemade, paint-thinner-laced hooch.) Soon, Freddie wakes up in a cot on the ship, invited to meet the man in charge. The man (Philip Seymour Hoffman), does not give his name. Instead, he quizzes Freddie with a tone of disappointment, like a father whose boy has come home late. This puts Freddie at ease as much as it fills him with an embarrassment he does not typically feel as a freely fighting and fucking scoundrel. The man invites Freddie to remain with him, and the spastic, vulgar seaman soon finds himself the right-hand man in a burgeoning cult movement.

Hoffman brilliantly lays out the appeal of such a man. His booming, clear oratory stands in sharp contrast to Phoenix's jagged mumbling, and his paternalistic warmth gives outcasts all the love they never received from their actual authority figures. To divert attention from his tyrannical thought control, Hoffman's Master even lets his believers feel as if they get to contribute to the truth that he sells: when Freddie confides that he does not know what the Master is saying at one point, Hoffman responds that neither does he, which is why he needs everyone's help. But this man also relies on the unbending loyalty of others, and he can barely start a debate with a skeptic before his logical fallacies leap into full aggression. At the halfway mark, his name, Lancaster Dodd, is finally spoken by a police officer serving a warrant. The mere mention of his name momentarily breaks the spell of his omniscience as much as the fact he is being charged with a crime.

The extent of Dodd's thirst for control reveals itself in his "processing" of Freddie, a method of interrogation that crosses a psychiatric evaluation with a confessional. The processing starts benignly, with Dodd principally making Freddie repeat yes/no answers to innocuous questions with a game Freddie amiably playing along. After Freddie asks him to continue, Dodd does, and the close-ups that merely relayed a shot/reverse-shot relationship between the two men suddenly pulls back to show Dodd's head in the foreground looking at Freddie as he asks the man much more personal, penetrative questions. The shot holds on Freddie for extended lengths of time as it watches him, per Dodd's instruction, not blink as he answers. Dodd uses the exercise to strip away Freddie's boundaries, but it unmasks the Master as well, laying out plainly the manner in which he sucks in those who cannot conform to society into a life that will demand even more conformity. This agonizing scene shatters for Freddie but also cleanses him in a way the impersonal psychiatric care did not, making him feel as if he finally found a place where he belongs even as he is visibly enslaved by this new master.

From such patches of gripping material, Anderson makes...what? Rather than develop these teasingly strands of setup into a focused narrative or theme, The Master stalls out. Phoenix, so captivating as an outwardly imploding animal, does not turn his performance inward so much as he completely shuts down for periods at a time until he unleashes violence as his old self tugs at the community he feels around others for the first time. Anderson simply repeats a basic formula—Freddie acts as Dodd's most fiercely loyal follower, threatens to apostatize out of his inability to behave, then slowly comes back in with renewed faith—to the point of tedium. The metronomic wood block of Johnny Greenwood's score comes to represent the flow of the film: initially off-beat and jarring, but ultimately repetitive and directionless. Dodd gives this method purpose, the unmaking and rebuilding of converts, but he has the advantage of not ultimately caring about the meaning of his words, while Anderson seems to search for a point to all this at every turn.

The Master is a film of close-ups and almost relentlessly centered compositions, set within postwar interiors that lack the satirical claustrophobia of the decade's melodramas. Nicholas Ray, for example, used CinemaScope more for his domestic dramas than his expansive, exterior pictures, using the extra width to probe the confined bourgeois space around the actors, finding emotional voids in consumerist milieux that only drove those who resided in them to dizzying heights of uncontrollable feelings. Nothing exists in Anderson's close-ups outside the faces, initially captivating (especially Phoenix's, with one side slack and the whole of it criss-crossed with lines and a cleft-lip scar), but eventually powerless through overuse. The detail of the shots is undeniably gorgeous, but compositionally, this is easily Anderson's weakest outing, as well as that of cinematographer Mihai Malaimare Jr., who previously brought formal dazzle to Francis Ford Coppola's digital comeback films.

But perhaps the static, centered frames and languid pace of the film serve to reflect the nature of Dodd's approach, seemingly ordered by logic and rationality but, as Dodd's son would say of his father, "making it up as he goes along." The Master itself operates like a cult, introducing tantalizing tidbits of information presented in an aesthetically pleasing manner. When it comes time to link these pieces together under a cogent, unified philosophy, however, the film leaves only blanks. All the better to lure in the sufficiently intrigued to fill in those blanks with whatever they please, strengthening their bond to the material by making them think what they brought to the movie was there all along. A scene in The Master actually illustrates this: Dodd, in a literal song-and-dance moment to hook his assembled followers, soft shoes around a parlor singing to his guests before the camera cuts to Freddie watching. Cut back to Dodd, and now all the women in the room are stark naked, standing around the Master in a carnal, if still banal, paradise. Constantly cautioned away from his base, "animal" instincts by Dodd, Freddie nevertheless sees the perfect fulfillment of the Cause as Dodd, merry and warm, speaking to a whole room and yet just to him, and a bevy of female flesh to sate his hunger. Similarly, the directionless drift of Anderson's film can be ignored and indeed even repurposed to suit the needs and observations of any viewer who chooses to project into its void.

The muddled themes of the film recall There Will Be Blood in the manner in which it presents two main interpretations: one social, one intimate, both half-baked. The Master both is an isn't a critique of cults and the manner in which this country and its social orchestration facilitates such organizations. Hoffman's subtle snake-oil salesman touches (the constant greasing of his hair into place, his close relationship with Freddie, who effectively makes his own snake oil) hint at a nuanced skewering of such a figure, but Anderson focuses on Dodd's fickle servant so completely that Freddie's constant temptation away from the Cause undermines its foundation as an infectious, consuming idea for social outliers, making the fanatical loyalty of Amy Adams' Mrs. Dodd and Laura Dern's devotee seem airdropped into the film for effect rather than a developed. As a much simpler story of a father-son/master-pupil/Platonic lover relationship, The Master treads such predictable ground that that the "insert profundity here" gulfs it leaves amid Phoenix and Hoffman's most focused scenes serve only to destroy the film's already shaky momentum.

Anderson's work constantly tugs between the juvenile and frenetic and the mature and analytical. The Master makes this split the foundation of its narrative. But by separating out these elements so fully into each lead, the director leaves a hole between these attitudes that only widens and widens as the film wears on. Not until the end do the two fully join for a tossed-off but wickedly brilliant dénouement in which Freddie uses Dodd's processing method as foreplay, debasing the mind control exercise even as he inadvertently reveals that is all the process ever was from the start. It is the most devilishly clever moment of the entire film and, placed of the film, almost gives the impression that The Master was building it all along. But then, it's easy to write to a punchline, less so to craft the setup to get to it.

A Perfect World (Clint Eastwood, 1993)

A Perfect World takes plays in the days before John F. Kennedy's assassination in Dallas as a prison breakout in Huntsville leads to the taking of a hostage and a manhunt across Texas to bring the escaped to justice. This setting is no accident: with the shadow of Kennedy's literal and symbolic demise hanging over the film, Clint Eastwood's portrait of stunted, doomed innocence is all the more poignant, and it's no wonder this simple but powerful psychological study emerges as one of the director's finest works.

After a tranquil but confusing shot of a man lying in a field next to a Casper mask and some fluttering cash in the wind, Eastwood moves back in time to show a strict Jehovah's Witness keeping her children inside on Halloween and refusing candy to any kids who wander onto her doorstep. Eastwood breaks up these scenes with shots of the prison breakout, as Robert "Butch" Haynes (Kevin Costner) and Terry Pugh (Keith Szarabajka) crawl out through the ventilation system and hold up a prison official to make him drive them off the grounds. The connection is clear: for the young, repressed son, Phillip (T.J. Lowther), his home is as much a prison as the literal institution, though he's done nothing to deserve his incarceration. When the two cons break into the house and take him hostage, they ironically facilitate his own freedom despite using him as leverage. Along the way, he and Butch affect each other in profound ways, mainly because Eastwood, a director I've often found overly insistent, never forces the point.

Being on the road unleashes the ids of not only the pent-up convicts but Phillip. Pugh, an uncontrollable fiend, is only made more wild: he fires a pistol at water towers, even into the roof of the getaway car. One suspects that Butch takes the boy hostage instead of the mother or the daughters as much to ward off any sexual shenanigans on Terry's part. When that proves to be insufficient, the trio is quickly reduced to two, and the protective bond between Butch and Phillip is sealed. Phillip's freedom is far more joyous: Lowther's look of longing and sadness as he watched neighborhood kids vindictively egg his house for receiving no candy laid the groundwork for his desire for rebellion, and he experiences the first real happiness of his life riding with Butch. Junk food, riding on top of a car, going on trick-or-treating (amusingly facilitated by Butch threatening confused adults), Phillip finally gets to experience a bit of life.

On paper, this film sounds like the worst kind of pop psychology, the notion of a criminal becoming the father he never had for a boy who also lacks a true father figure opening up the possibility for sub-Spielbergian schmaltz. But Eastwood's workmanlike elegance has rarely, if ever, served him better. The scenes between Costner and Lowther are natural and in the moment. Costner's own limited range actually serves the film well in this respect; a more confident and versatile actor might have tried to show off, to make sure we saw the symbolic importance of the warming relationship between criminal and hostage, boy and man. Instead, he simply reacts off Lowther, bringing out Butch's own hangups in natural, contextual ways instead of telegraphing them at every step. His parental issues manifest in the form of sharp but brief glances at yelling mothers or abusive fathers, while Lowther also proves to be an understated performer. The boy actually progresses in his affection for the man who holds him hostage rather than resist until some vague shift that turns him into a devoted companion.
 
I've never been the biggest booster of Eastwood, but even in his weakest moments, he has a command of the camera that finds an unlikely balance of simple construction and grace. In the film's early moments, he connects the prison, Phillip's home and, shortly thereafter, the Texas Rangers who take on the case to track the escapees; disparate locations all, but the director always finds some way of smoothly linking them. The aforementioned metaphorical significance links the prison with the house, and Eastwood transitions between wholly non-matching shots of the suburbs to the office in Dallas by maintaining the same elegant track-forward, cutting from the camera moving toward the devastated mother to moving with a Ranger walking toward the office of Red Garnett (Eastwood), the Ranger in charge of the case. This steady progression makes sense of the spatial leaps, and this almost unnoticeable display of professionalism sets the bedrock for the film's human complexity.

He also knows how to set up a layered joke, and A Perfect World does much of its character building through moments of human comedy. Butch flashing his gun to get a housewife to play along with Phillip's belated trick-or-treating, or his subsequent stick-up of a family riding in their brand-new car, are funny, but these moments deepen the characters. In the case of the latter, Phillip himself cannot help but laugh at the sight of the family gaping dumbly after the stolen car, but Butch admonishes him, nothing that the father did the right thing by surrendering a material good rather than starting an altercation that might have led to Butch shooting the man or even the whole family. The scene where Butch has to explain sex to the boy after the kid witnesses him making out with a waitress is predictable, but Eastwood trusts the actors to make something amusing and fresh out of the situation, and to see the escaped convict suddenly blanch is indeed funny.

Likewise, Eastwood builds the relationship between Red and Sally (Laura Dern), a criminologist assigned to his search party to his annoyance, through comic tension. Eastwood has never had that strong a grasp on progressive women, and Sally could have been an absolutely horrid stereotype of a career-driven woman trying to prove herself. Instead, Dern plays her as someone so confident in her abilities that she does not remotely care what Red or the other men think. Her indifference only makes them look more foolish, such as the scene where Red has the driver of their mobile command center keep inching forward as she tries to get in. And because she simply does her job, Red comes to respect her much faster and to see her as more than just a bureaucrat weighing down the investigation*.

At his best, Eastwood's camera not only pulls back to let the actors do their thing but actually works in harmony with the performances. While riding in the trailer with the other lawmen, Sally abruptly starts playacting as Butch, relating facts from the man's past. The cuts in this scene only move away to catch the reactions of the confused men, who start to address her as Butch the way baffled audience members will often speak to a puppet rather than the puppeteer. Dern never oversteps her boundaries, never goes for OTT histrionics or analysis of Butch's life. She just relates the facts to gently guide the men to interpretative conclusions, and without Eastwood's simple but effecting cutting scheme, it would have been too suggestive and obvious. Elsewhere, Eastwood places a lot of faith in Costner to sell the suspenseful scenes, the judicious editing working with Costner's small but unmistakble gestures of worry and menace rather than around them. His camera subtly positions itself as a series of shifting perspective shots of nervous bystanders catching sight of his gun or a threatening gesture and Costner keying in on a radio newscast that will alert someone to their real identity or of a hand reaching for a telephone.

The film's climax is perhaps the most bravura moment in Eastwood's filmography, an extended hideaway at a farmhand's home that begins innocently and escalates so smoothly that the sudden snap somehow seems inevitable in retrospect. Costner has never been finer, the slow burning of long-repressed feelings finally exploding on this poor family as Phillip suddenly has to come to terms with the sort of man Butch can really be. The wife pleads with the criminal, saying she knows he's a good man, and the matter-of-fact coolness with which Costner replies "No, I ain't a good man.  I ain't the worst neither.  Just a breed apart" is horrifically troubling. The sequence appears to end several times before it does, finally culminating in a payoff that is both dynamic yet oddly anticlimactic.

As much as I've criticized Eastwood's works, that sensitivity to his weaknesses is offset by my total inability to pin down just how he pulls off his best stuff, which is typically better than anything any other director, at least in this country, can do. Eastwood essentially devotes the last half hour to the extended climax, which moves through multiple moods and payoffs between Butch/Phillip and the poor black family whose own behavior is not so clear-cut as we are first led to believe by the patriarch's kindness to strangers. And then Eastwood can maintain that climax into the confrontation with the law, which itself subverts expectations despite the expected outcome, and outcome that also contextualized the bizarre opening shot and replacing the strange beauty with intense tragedy. When at last we learn of the true reason for Butch's intended destination, this haunting frame recalls another great auteurist statement from 1993, Brian De Palma's Carlito's Way. Both films depict men chasing impossible dreams, perfect worlds away from their constricting, fatal lifestyles. But like Sally earlier told a condescending lawman, "In a perfect world this wouldn't have happened in the first place." Just as Carlito Brigante's fantasy of the perfect, tranquil retirement is borne of the imperfection of his occupation, so too is Butch's dream the result of unhealed psychological wounds, wounds that only began to be treated by the boy who ultimately symbolizes a dream no less intangible for him.


*Eastwood's disregard for bureaucratic justice might seem like a conservative hatred of desk jockeys: when the team discovers the prison official forced to help the men escape murdered in his trunk, Red casually says, "Well, there's our bureaucrat." But it is worth noting that his depiction of a flawed system does not stem from a belief that paper-pushers and regulations hold back the sweet revenge of rough justice but that broadly applied laws allow for no leeway in extenuating circumstances and emotionally and psychologically varied scenarios. Ergo, the problem is not, unlike in Michael Bay films, that ball-busting bureaucrats take all the fun out of executing someone, it's that they expedite disproportionate responses and then bury the outrage in paperwork.

Steven Spielberg: Jurassic Park

At five stages in his career, Steven Spielberg has directed two films in the same year. In each case, both are targeted at a large crowd -- whenever is a Spielberg feature not? -- but one clearly exists to be a massive crowd-pleaser while the other, however grand in scope, is more personal. Usually, the films also offset each other, tackling some unifying aspect from different angles. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade showed Spielberg setting his father themes to rest for awhile, and, appropriately, the more low-key Always dealt with the theme of letting go. Nearly two decades later, War of the Worlds sought to capture the pandemonium of being trapped in the sensory overload of a sudden assault, while Munich dealt with those 9/11-inspired themes with a more analytical oversight.

The link between Jurassic Park and Schindler's List is not immediately as clear, for reasons one can only hope are obvious. Yet the adaptation of a Michael Crichton thriller about recreated dinosaurs and a biopic of a key symbolic figure of the Holocaust do have one element in common: both deal with the arrogance and tyranny of mankind. Schindler's List surveys our capacity for evil against each other; Jurassic Park demonstrates man's constant exploitation of the Earth.

Of course, the film is also, first and foremost, a thriller, and it demonstrates that Spielberg lost not an ounce of his ability to terrify in the two decades separating this film from Jaws. The opening scene sets the mind a-reel: a giant cage being shoved against a gate as men who look like mere foremen carry guns and tasers looking uneasy. Some kind of beast is inside the lumbering metal box, and when a worker lifts a gate for transfer, the unseen creature charges, knocking back the cage and sending the poor man plummeting into the the animal's mouth. The ensuing frenzy bewilders: what is in that cage? How can it move so fast yet be powerful enough to toss a large man around like a rag doll? The suspense still works years later, after we all know what's in that cage and, furthermore, that the tossing around is honestly ridiculous and more a blatant nod to the woman being whipped to and fro in the water. Spielberg, master of effects, makes them felt even in a scene where the dinosaurs are not visible.

Where Jurassic Park breaks from Jaws, however, is in the weakness of the actual human beings in front of the camera. Technical delays permitted constant rewrites of the Jaws script into one of the best screenplays of all time, a mainstream blockbuster with fully realized characters with motives and pathos. Everyone in Jurassic Park now looks less fluid than the 20-year-old computer animation, which has held up astonishingly well. Indeed, the dinosaur animation of this film, save for a few iffy spots generally involving too many creatures on-screen, looks better than a great deal of current work.

But those damn characters. The issue is evident immediately: in the badlands of Montana, paleontologist Alan Grant (Sam Neill) and paleobotanist Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern) dig up a velociraptor fossil as a group of tourists inexplicably hangs around the site. Well, I assume they're tourists; they cannot be dedicated paleontology buffs, as Grant gets into argument with a child unimpressed by the raptor and terrifies him into respecting a creature that went extinct 71 millions years ago. It's an absurd scene, serving to introduce these characters via their half-written traits that substitute for actual humanity: Alan hates kids and computers, Ellie has the smarts to match him but also serves as the mediator between Grant and the rest of humanity. Then, a Scottish version of a leprechaun arrives announcing himself as Mr. Hammond (Richard Attenborough), the beneficiary of Grant's dig. Hammond exudes "kooky eccentric billionaire," and he insists the two come out to a theme park he's devising. Along the way, they meet Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum), a mathematician who appears to have taken fashion cues from Miles Davis' '80s wardrobe.

But once they arrive on the Latin American island and a jeep pulls into a clearing, for one brief moment the turgid anti-momentum of the film's plot setup gives way to one of the most magical moments of Spielberg's canon, one that takes me right back to a childhood of obsessing over dinosaurs and the sense of complete wonder and awe this movie instilled in me at age 5. That brilliantly laid out sequence of the dinosaurs revealed first through gentle but forceful surround sound whoomps, then the facial reactions of stunned characters and finally the glorious shot of a brachiosaurus as the music swells. In that instant, nothing else matters, and one sympathizes with Grant going weak at the knees.

More than any modern director, Spielberg understands the power of cinema as spectacle. Spectacle does not automatically connote simplicity, and the power to please millions should not be written off as proof of hackdom. Just because Jay Leno builds his audience by diluting his once caustic brand of verbal peroxide with water doesn't mean everyone who become a household name sold his soul. Look at how perfectly Spielberg reaches for the audience's collective jaw and gently pulls it down; this movie began with suspense and fear, gave way to stiff narrative exercises, and then it morphed into this?

The director finds his groove here, using the next scenes, all of which build as much plot as the scenes leading to the arrival at Isla Nublar yet feel lighter, more engaging. A dated but fun segment answering the questions prompted by the sight of a dinosaur walking around -- chief of which being, "How the hell did this happen?!" -- and also tempers the fantastical element of the preceding reveal with genuinely clever pseudo-science from novelist Michael Crichton. Though his explanation is not only impossible but far-fetched even if one were to accept some degree of plausibility, the idea that scientists could get the DNA needed to clone dinosaurs from the drunken blood preserved in fossilized mosquitoes beats the hell out of any previous reason given in dino films for the presence of terrible lizards.

Crichton's setup also allows for explorations of the morality of genetic engineering in a time where scientific breakthroughs made work in the field possible -- two years after Jurassic Park, scientists cloned Dolly the sheep. Hammond expects to be worshiped by his assembled experts, but instead they all express reservations. Malcolm, who specializes in chaos theory, outright lambastes the park and notes that all the genetic safeguards do not guarantee perfection and cryptically forewarns, "Life finds a way." Grant and Sattler note the variables and unseen dangers as well, but they agree to go on a tour of the place. By this point, however, Spielberg has subtly meshed the excitement of the film's trademark scene with the earlier suspense, gracefully intertwining curiosity and terror as the genetic talk deepens.

The tour itself epitomizes the inability to manufacture life to be entertainment. The scientists might be controlling breeding by restricting gender to female, they might even orchestrate a fail-safe protein deficiency in case a creature gets off the island, but they can't make the dinosaurs show up at the edge of the fence in each paddock waiting to dazzle the audience, which by now includes Hammond's tween grandkids, the bookish, dino-loving Tim (Joseph Mazzello) and the hacker tomboy Alex (Ariana Richards). The group does not see the first dinosaur, nor the second. When they all finally come across one, it's a sick triceratops that can only be seen when Ellie spots it and gets out of the automated electric car and everyone follows suit.

Meanwhile, the head programmer of the park's advanced computer system prepares to betray his boss. Dennis Nedry (Wayne Knight) sits at his computer bank surrounded by food wrappers and cola cans, his keyboard likely sticky with grease. Swimming in debt despite being a key staff of the park, Nedry blames Hammond for not paying him even more and decides to sell embryos to a rival genetic engineering firm. If life can be manufactured, life has a price. Not only does cloning raise moral issues of playing God, it turns life into a commodity, a copyright other businesses try to steal.

Looking to cover his tracks, Nedry hacks his own system to shut down all the security features of the park so he can escape. In the process, however, he turns off all the electric fences, letting the dinosaurs get out. At last, the plot thickens, though it still has the viscosity hot sauce. For the rest of the movie, the humans run, hide and run some more from unleashed dinosaurs, either trembling at the onslaught of a T-Rex or waiting for an ambush by the smaller but smarter raptors.

Both predators offer more potential for Spielberg's thriller. The T-Rex, gargantuan, deafening and capable of crushing a whole man in one bite, makes even the massive shark seem simple in comparison. The director announces it by the motif of a soft thud deep in the background and a quiver of water in a puddle or glass, the calm before the storm. Whenever that massive head juts into view, the panic overwhelms. The velocirpators work in an opposite fashion. There is no warning, no trick to contain them. The T-Rex gives itself enough time to let its victims froth in terror; the raptor just strikes. Small, fast and resourceful, the raptors come out to play whenever a human might find itself in an area where it need not fear the tyrannosaur, ensuring that no place in the park is truly safe.

The "baddie" dinosaurs, like the rest of the creatures, are the collective result of four effects masters working in tandem: Stan Winston with his animatronics, Phil Tippet's go-motion, supervisor Michael Lantieri and digital animator Dennis Muren. Though one can tell when a puppet is being used and when the computer animation is on-screen (typically the animatronics are used for close-ups and direct contact with characters while the CGI dinos appear in long shot), the effects work borders on the seamless. Jurassic Park, a film about the potential side effects of technological growth, ironically set off a technical revolution in the cinema, introducing a breakthrough in storytelling potential that almost immediately morphed into a way to make big, silly effects on the cheap. How many movies today survive solely on CGI that dazzles an audience instead of working fluidly in a story? Why, the same is true of Jurassic Park itself.

In fairness, the film does have some clever writing. In smoothing out Crichton's technical writing and heavy plot, David Koepp made the wise decision to alter the characterization of Hammond, who in the novel was a conniving old huckster who abandoned pharmaceutical research for genetic engineering because, despite the gouging policies of Big Pharm, he could not charged as he pleased for medicine. The novel's Hammond would agree with the lawyer here (weakened into a thin stereotype for the movie) that he could charge tens of thousands for a single ticket. Koepp helps drive the point about the dangers of genetic engineering by casting Hammond as a kindly old benefactor who wants, Walt Disney-style, to see smiles on the faces of all the world's children. However, like Disney, Hammond has a hard ambition that cannot be hidden, not even behind that avuncular face, and he allows himself to overlook tiny flaws until they escalate into massive problems.

Elsewhere, however, the characters thin, from the lawyer to Alan, who loved children in the book because of their love of dinosaurs but hates them here so he can fit into Spielberg's running theme of emotionally distant father figures and to set up the ostensibly emotional plot of Grant learning to care for Hammond's grandchildren out in the park. Perhaps if Neill committed, he could make the character work, but he appears to have recognized that the dinosaurs would be the main attraction and coasts through the movie with his Indiana Jones-knockoff hat (and profession, come to think of it) while Laura Dern makes for the world's unlikeliest scream queen as she shrieks and swears in terror for the whole of her time on the island. She has a scene late in the film with Hammond in which she must deliver one of the most eye-rolling "HERE IS THE MESSAGE" speeches ever, and she over-emotes so blatantly it's hard not to laugh when she unhelpfully adds, "People are dying out there!" Only Goldblum is remotely animated, but he spends so much time dancing around tossing out quips that he only manages to cover up for the fact that Malcolm has no actual character.

There's also the issue of some sloppy editing. When the guests get out to see the triceratops, it's barely cloudy outside. After about an hour, a hurricane has blown in and lightning arcs the sky. Not 20 minutes later, it's pitch-black and raining in monsoon quantities, just so Nedry's escape can be all the more confusing and doomed. Alan shoots at raptors with a shotgun, but the glass he shoots shows bullet holes, not shot damage. The clearest example is, of course, the tyrannosaur paddock, which is ground level at the start and suddenly a 30-ft. gulf when the T-Rex busts out and shoves a car into its pen. Everything exists for maximum entertainment, but the lack of even basic continuity at times shows an amateurism that Spielberg never previously allowed in his immaculate work.

I will forgive a film thin characters and predictable plotting if it is told well visually -- it is a visual medium, after all. But Spielberg seems to have dialed back his style to make the computer animation easier for his staff as they felt their way around their own innovation, and Jurassic Park suffers most not from its characters but from Spielberg letting off the gas. Jaws worked so well as a thriller because the director was in control of everything. Here, he must rely on others to put stuff into his frame after he shoots, and he appears out of his element. Of course, he was charting new territory and the degree to which he incorporated CGI meant he had to be the one to brave these unknown waters, but there is an unease with digital animation in this film that Spielberg would only later overcome.

And yet, the film does achieve that maximum entertainment. Jurassic Park may sacrifice character, coherence, even style to grab the audience, but I cannot deny I still thrill at that brachiosaur, still sit on edge when Dern goes into that raptor-ridden bunker and still feel uplifted by John Williams' main theme, one of his finest compositions. Even so, like Hook, Jurassic Park can no longer make me ignore glaring issues for the sake of nostalgia. Its conservatism is particularly tedious: the film emphasizes the need for a nuclear family through Grant's storyline with the kids (who, frankly, are so annoying I wouldn't mind if they made toothpicks for the T-Rex), and it makes a justifiable yet overbearing critique of the unchecked progress of science. Hell, it even has a minor go at electric cars for being silly and reliant upon outside factors that limit our freedom.

Looking back, it seems the perfect blockbuster for the Clinton era, an attempt to add heart back to the blockbuster after the soulless '80s (even Spielberg used the decade to make the largely self-serving Indiana Jones films), but that do-good liberalism ties to old-school conservative values. In that sense, one must credit Universal president Sid Sheinberg insisted Spielberg make this film before Schindler's List: Spielberg, the ultimate Hollywood liberal, had to cleanse his palette with this film before moving totally into the humanism of his next feature. Taken with Schindler's List, Jurassic Park cements the director's domination of all aspects of mainstream American cinema, and for all the film's flaws, it still shows a man capable of pleasing hundreds of millions with the ease of flicking a light switch. Nostalgia be damned: when the film clicks, it transcends its weaknesses, even if but for one blessed instant. Sometimes, that's all it takes.