Steven Spielberg: A.I. Artificial Intelligence

Given that my return to A.I. is what prompted my decision to revisit all of Steven Spielberg's films in the first place, I was afraid I had nothing to add to my original review. However, I think I mostly avoided retreading and if I have no particularly new point to make about the ending, I do at least come at it from a different angle in response to Roger Ebert's recent addition of the film into his Great Movies canon, a move that makes me happy but does not preclude me from disagreeing with his interpretation. I stand by this being Spielberg's finest film, and also one that I think is better for his involvement, not some second-best option to a Kubrick direction (Kubrick likely would have agreed, since he urged Spielberg to take it well before he passed). Perhaps the most philosophical blockbuster ever made, and certainly one of the finest American films of the Aughts.

Check out my new review of the film at Cinelogue.

The Fisher King (Terry Gilliam, 1991)

Made in 1991, The Fisher King is both somewhat dated and remarkably ahead of its time, a rarity among the classical mythological/folk-tale fantasies of its maker, Terry Gilliam. That aspect of Gilliam's filmmaking is certainly on display, of course: the film gets its title from the Arthurian legend of the keeper of the Holy Grail. But its view of healing wounds and redemptive human arcs is far more deeply felt than anything else in the director's corpus, and it set the stage for a number of reductive movies that used some facet of its subtly sociopolitical construction without understanding the true humanity that powered it.

The film's first shot places a mouth in extreme close-up as it sleazily talks into a microphone in a smoky radio studio. Jack (Jeff Bridges), a shock jock who combines Rush Limbaugh's combativeness with Howard Stern's puerile humor. For the entire first scene, Gilliam never places Bridges' face in full view, alternating between overhead long shots of the jock mocking disembodied voices and more close-ups of an almost toad-like mouth smacking and oozing literal and metaphorical spittle at those poor saps foolish enough to call in and argue with the man. Even in person, Jack is a voice, a lecturing superego as vile as the most uninhibited id, spewing bile upon the populace he so completely loathes.

In only a few minutes, Bridges finds this character, then completely shifts gears in an instant: as he celebrates his sitcom being picked up in his large, lonely apartment, a news report notes that one of the callers he insulted took his misanthropic, anti-yuppie railings too seriously and shot up a fancy restaurant, killing several patrons. Suddenly, the arrogant look twisting Bridges' face into a condescending leer slacks, and his face goes numb with horrific self-realization. Not many actors could take a character they've only been building for five minutes and completely change him in 30 seconds, but not everyone is the greatest living American actor.

For the rest of the film, the smug Jack moves around in a stupor, destroyed by guilt. Gilliam deploys his patented fish-eye lenses to show the man's incessant intoxication, and though he moves rapidly to a scene of attempted suicide, the confidence of Bridges' performance makes the sudden transition to Jack getting loaded at a dingy, pre-Giuliani rental store and putting on concrete shoes to drown himself later that night. Some gangbangers spot him and plan to have some fun torturing the wino, only for a crazed homeless man calling himself Parry (Robin Williams) to intervene.

The greatest surprise of The Fisher King lies not within the film's style, which manages to recreate Gilliam's bombastic élan on a more intimate scale, nor the flawless gearshifts Bridges pulls off but in the simple, astonishing fact that Robin Williams manages to show everyone else up. Now, that sounds more unbelievable than it is, but Williams rarely clicks for me. He tends to veer between manic and maudlin with such abandon he makes Alan Alda's most unstable leaps on M*A*S*H seem cohesive. The Fisher King represents one of a handful of roles to adequately play on his dramatic capacity and his overwhelming comic energy in equal measure, and this performance stands well above his others.

A high school teacher driven insane by his wife's murder at the hands of the man Jack drove to despair, Parry believes himself to be the incarnation of Percival, the fool knight in search of the Holy Grail. (I suppose Gilliam just can't let the Grail go.) Williams gets to vent his high comic style in Parry's more deluded flights of whimsy, mixing his chivalric challenges with streetwise language to create fitful moments of lucidity in which he so completely wears down Jack that he ultimately emerges the sane one. In film, Williams often puts his body into his comedy and his soul into the drama, but here the line blurs.

Feeling responsible for Parry's misery, Jack tries to help him out, but his initial gestures reveal a thoughtless, facile attempt to put the man out of sight and out of mind. Yet Jack finds himself genuinely caring for Parry's well-being, and he soon comes to believe his path to redemption lies in introducing his strange (but only) friend to the woman he's fallen for: a timid, klutzy book editor named Lydia (Amanda Plummer). Holding Parry back is his devastating insecurity, manifested in the form of a red knight that patrols around offering symbolic reminders of the event that tore his life apart -- tattered red clothes resembling ripped flesh, belching fire the blast of a shotgun. He cannot bring himself to talk to the lonely woman, so it's up to Jack and his girlfriend, Anne (Mercedes Ruehl), to bring the two together.


The Red Knight, as well as the expressive setpieces of New York's post-crack, pre-Giuliani homeless jungle, offer familiar sights to Gilliam fans expecting his fantastical direction. The film even offers references to some of his other work, most explicitly Monty Python and the Holy Grail and Brazil -- a Brazil poster dots the wall of the Video Spot office, and high angle shots of Lydia's bureaucratic publishing job recall the stifling morass of office life in the director's masterpiece.

But what Gilliam does not receive nearly enough credit for is his way with actors. Responsible for several of the finer child performances of the last few decades, Gilliam also eked career-highlight performances from Bruce Willis, Brad Pitt, Jonathan Pryce and Johnny Depp, and he even managed to compensate for the beautiful fragments of Heath Ledger's incomplete work for The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus with actors all offering different but cohesive takes on the same character.

Here, he gets magnificent performances from all four of his leads. One might attribute the fact that the least noticeable of the main cast, Ruehl, is the one who got an Oscar for her work to typical Academy thick-headedness, but I see it as proof of how well everyone fit together and how even the softest touches of one actor enhanced the work of the rest. As Jack's long-suffering girlfriend, Ruehl is used to being the most malleable of the characters, forced to deal not only with Jack's mood swings but now Parry's brief flirtations with normalcy and, eventually, Plummer's bitchy nervosa. She holds the rest of the cast together and wonderfully plays off their foibles and joys and pains.

Plummer too carves out her own space against the titanic outpourings of emotions and self-loathing that Williams and Bridges offer. Withdrawn and wiry like a caged mouse, Plummer finds a way to be annoying and endearing, emotionally sheltered the point of frigidity but just lonely enough to keep following Jack ludicrous schemes to set her up with Parry. Anne later admits that the two are made for each other, and that's obvious even before they meet.

Gilliam places such faith in his actors that he takes himself out of the most crucial moment of the movie: the double date with the four characters. With a simple long shot of all four eating Chinese food, the director lets them riff, intruding only to cut the waffle with some hilariously Kurosawa-esque transition wipes and the occasional closer shot of Jack and Anne whispering comments on how Parry is doing with Lydia. The scene initially works as riotous comedy, Jack and Anne doing their best to keep a straight face as Parry and Lydia awkwardly handle the food, slurp, burp and never finish a tentative attempt at conversation. As the dinner wears on, though, the mood relaxes, and we see Parry start to charm Lydia, and soon the light feeling spreads even to Jack: Sheila O'Malley pointed out a lovely, underplayed moment of Jack gently pulling down Anne's loose bra strap and kissing her lightly on the shoulder as Parry sings a half-romantic, half-bawdy ode to his love.

Compare this plainer, more realistic view of romance and romanticism to the lofty, self-consuming varieties found in Brazil, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, even, to an extent, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Though that style creeps in with the vignettes involving the Red Knight, The Fisher King deals in lilting but painfully tangible visions of love. Parry's reverie in Grand Central Terminal turns the place into a giant dance hall, but beneath the gorgeous image of the expansive transit station bathed in angelic light is the harsh sight of the ragged Parry chasing a love that keeps getting farther away. When he finally gets to confess his feelings for Lydia, he must first overcome the uneasy suggestion that he's a stalker. There's a thin line between love at first sight and obsession, but Williams manages to find himself on the right side of the divide with a gorgeous speech that turns his microscopic detail of her life into a love letter. Insecure but harmless people like Parry cannot just ask someone out: they have to get to know the person and learn her quirks and likes and worries first. The innocence of his delivery threatens to bring me to tears as much as it does Lydia. And have the words "Shut up" ever been so gentle and warm?

That light approach floats the film through potential pitfalls, such as its wafer-thin view of homelessness in post-Reagan America. The two most prominent homeless people in the film, Parry and a cabaret queen played by Michael Jeter, both found themselves crazed and homeless not because of deep-rooted psychological issues or economic duress but because of major traumas that broke them. One could argue this is an attempt to prove that anyone can wind up on the streets given the right circumstances, but it also presents a narrow-minded view of the horrors of homelessness. Yet Gilliam does not trade on the idea that a bum can teach a yuppie to find himself, at least not without reciprocating that moral instruction in turn. The beauty of The Fisher King is that all its major characters help the others in some way instead of any one person unlocking a moral truth. For example: Anne nurses Jack during his dark years, agrees to help Parry and softens up the frosty Lydia to deal with people. In turn, she gets a moment to reflect upon the one-sided nature of her relationship with Jack from Parry.

The first cries of "Forgive me!" in the film are ironic, the drunken ramblings of a cocksure asshole chanting the catchphrase that will make him millions. Later, when that sitcom makes it to air, they're farcical. But the idea of forgiveness forms the core of the film: Jack needs forgiveness for the consequences of his shock jock confrontations, while Parry needs to forgive himself for living while his wife died and mourn her properly. Thus, the role of the Fool and King in the film's frequent allusions to the myth alter routinely: each sees the other for who he really is and hold the key to the other's redemption. The paths back to humanity are twisted and gnarled, and when both Parry and Jack suffer setbacks the haunted looks in their eyes can rip out heartstrings.

For all the film's mordant, Gilliam-esque comedy -- Jack gets back into show-biz late in the film, only to be pitched on a sitcom about the homeless that "won't be depressing" -- The Fisher King stands as the most touching movie the director ever made, an underrated actors' showcase that does not want for visual acuity. From the dawning horror on Bridges' face as his hand glides up from below frame in a vain attempt to cover his gaping mouth at the start to Williams' disturbing look of peace when thugs attack him, the actors always find ways to surprise us with this movie. It may be disjointed, but The Fisher King belongs on the list of unappreciated '90s movies along with another transcendent movie (also starring Bridges) about redemption and reconnecting the disconnected to humanity: Peter Weir's Fearless.

Steven Spielberg: Hook

The story of Hook's inspiration is, like the film itself, at once so brilliantly and frustratingly childlike that everything that works and fails can be gleaned from its conception. Nick Castle, originally slated to direct a Peter Pan movie after Spielberg gave up the idea, got the idea from his son. The boy did something that only a child ever has the gall to do: when presented with an absolute -- Peter Pan never grows up -- he questioned why. That twist made it perfect for Spielberg to take over the project; only a Disney-fed eternal child like him would think to continue pursuing that idea, and only Spielberg could use it as the last major expulsion of his pet themes before he entered the more serious phase of his career.

Originally slated to make a version of the original Peter Pan in the '80s, Spielberg shelved the project when he had his first child. Wisely, he also believed his thoughts on childhood and the perversion of either staying young in a harshly adult world or maturing too quickly were thoroughly expounded with Empire of the Sun. For Hook, he approaches the same topic from the opposite angle: now that he's a father, a father who might be gone months of the year on location shooting, Spielberg clearly fears he might become the same absentee father that he endured as a child. Thus, for all the light, occasionally distracting comedy of the tale, Hook has as much to say about the director's hangups as any of his other films.

Ingeniously, he recasts Peter Pan as Peter Banning, a Baby Boomer lawyer who, as Wendy (yes, that Wendy) rightly notes, has become a modern pirate. Opening with a Truffaut homage in the form of children's upturned faces as they watch their peers perform a school play of Peter Pan, Hook's gentle mood is broken ever so slightly the second it settles upon Peter (Robin Williams) as he watches his daughter on the stage playing Wendy. Then, it shatters when he cell phone rings. Ignoring his daughter, he then makes plans that conflict with his son Jack's baseball game in the morning.

Though the film tracks Peter, Spielberg roots it in a child's perspective, preparing for the eventual shift back to Neverland but also allowing everyone but Peter to see the effects of his behavior. It is a shame that Spielberg never gives us the point of view of Peter's adult self, the desire to work hard and provide comfortable lives for his family, but then that point of view has always reeked of self-justification anyway and the misery of his family hardly speaks to their well-being.

Only when the family heads to London with a still-fuming Jack does Peter's humanity show. There to help Granny Wendy (Maggie Smith, who in her younger days played Peter on the stage) with a hospital wing dedication in her honor, Peter is still distracted. At the actual dinner, however, he shines, beautifully paying tribute to the woman who took in him and other orphans without saying much at all. Contrasted with his previous coldness, and an ill-timed shift in the deal he thought was a lock causes him to explode at his children, we can see the good man in Peter, even if he cannot.

The lighting in this first segment is soft, tranquil but also ghostly. This is most visible at the charity ball where dozens of table lamps first illuminate the power and meaning of Wendy's efforts with orphans then turn cold and ominous as Hook's return sends waves of chilled atmosphere rolling across an already frigid London. Once Peter is lured back to Neverland -- by, who else, that zipping ball of light known as Tinker Bell (Julia Roberts) -- Spielberg alters the lighting scheme to something brighter, more optimistic, replacing artificial light with the natural sunlight the office-bound Peter likely had not noticed in years.

Spielberg has his fun with the character, making Peter Pan not only a grown man but one with an intense fear of heights and flying. After stumbling into Hook's pirate hangout and confronting the mad captain, Peter must suffer the humiliation of having to chase his trapped children up a mast under the ultimatum that, if he can simply fly like Pan and touch Jack and Maggie's hands, they can go free. All the poor man can do is tremble and fail when he attempts to climb out and grab them. Only Tinker Bell's quick-thinking saves the Bannings from death, and her successful plying of Hook's vanity gives Peter a shot at rediscovering his past self to add some punch to the fight.

Without question, Hook is a flawed film. Nowhere are the issues more apparent than in the Lost Boys' hideaway, a bizarre yet unimaginative mash-up of classical tree house structure with modern touches like a skate park(!). The use of oddly placed bright paint -- contained in suction-cup arrows, placed in a large pool used for rough landings in flying lessons -- captures less a sense of the childhood id gone mad than Spielberg grasping at straws for something that might amuse a kid. For a director all too often accused of being emotionally stunted, Spielberg suffers from the opposite problem here: like Peter, he's grown up, and returning to his innocence proves an unexpected challenge.

The most egregious indicator of the director's age showing is the dinner scene, where Peter looks on helplessly as the Lost Boys eat what appears to be nothing until he too plays along and finds a feast laid before him. As the dinner begins and the children exclaim over the foods they're eating, one boy exultantly shouts "banana squash!" What goddamn child in the history of human existence has ever lost his mind for banana squash? Adults don't even get excited for it. You're telling me that a child (a runaway child with no parental conditioning, no less), left to imagine his ultimate meal, would A) have anything that could even pass as a vegetable and B) wouldn't invent some magical meat made of ice cream? It's a small detail, I grant you, but it's indicative of the issues that mar the film.

Likewise, the Lost Boys themselves lack characterization beyond their appearance, from the jovial, roly-poly Thud Butt to a wee lad whose shortness reveals an impish cad. I've been watching this film since before I could even remember, and I've yet to decide whether Rufio works as a character or derails the entire picture. That a Lost Boy would assume authority of the troupe in Pan's absence is sensible, but there are several problems with Rufio. For one thing, even though Pan was always the biggest of the Lost Boys, he hovered around 12 and 13. Rudio looks like he drove into Neverland after stealing his stepdad's GTO and avoiding the prom because his high school suspended him. For another, he does not ever fit in with the other boys, and his attempts to engage in the goofy imagination that occupies the Lost Boys' time resemble a teen awkwardly breaking out old toys and messing with them like an Alzheimer's patient who has forgotten their function.

By the same token, he obviously looks like the clear leader in Peter's absence, and his half-punk styling fits within the genteel vision of Lord of the Flies that is the adolescent anarchy of the Lost Boys. He regards Peter with scorn because he's a grown-up, but the more Peter proves himself and reveals his inner Pan, the more Rufio prepares to hand power back without a fight. Dante Basco clearly had fun working on this large-scale production, an undeniable step up from his start as a child breakdancer and bit actor, and the twinkle in his eye as he gets to sneer at Robin Williams carries the character much further than anything he actually says.

What the film does well is explore Peter's half-regression, half-evolution to a man who remembers his responsibilities but also taps into his childish side. Williams finds one of his best mixes of his manic, often grating comic style and powerful but occasionally maudlin dramatic side, and he arguably wouldn't better the balance he found here until World's Greatest Dad last year. He plays Peter as the sort of man who would yell, "When are you going to stop acting like a child?" at his 10-year-old son, who has the only possible answer: "I am a child!" In Neverland, Williams has the unlikely role of straight man, the one who has to remain calm and incredulous instead of unleashing his series of impersonations and stream-of-consciousness rants. Fresh off two lauded dramatic performances in Dead Poets Society and Awakenings that showed off his Julliard-honed skills, Williams perhaps uses Peter's arc to get back in touch with his own roots.

Still, even when the old, playful Pan reemerges, the best comedy of the film by a mile belongs to the double act of Hook and Smee. Hoffman and Bob Hoskins could not be more game for their roles, and they play their relationship less as master and servant than mental patient and caretaker, Smee constantly trying to buck up Hook in his incessant and hysterical bouts with suicidal depression. Hoffman takes the same tics and obsessive mannerisms that made Rain Man so borderline offensive and turns them into comedy gold: his Hook is all slight nods and twitching lips, trying vainly to act respectable until he explodes in villainous glee. There's a reason the film is called Hook, because whenever he's on-screen, the film swells.

Symbols of emotional and physical baggage run through Spielberg's films, from suitcase a starved, half-mad Jamie drags out of the internment camp in Empire of the Sun to the image of the Devil's Tower Roy cannot get out of his mind until he leaves it, and Earth (and his family), behind him in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Several predominant symbols in Hook lock and unlock memories, their potency enhanced by Neverland's ability to make one forget himself. Before leaving for the charity function, Peter attempts to make amends with Jack by giving him his watch, a sign of adulthood and responsibility. Hook, naturally, hates clocks of all kinds owing to that damn crocodile that haunts him even after he killed it, uses that watch to break Jack. Playing on the boy's resentment of his father, Hook brainwashes Jack into loving him instead, and the clear break comes when the boy smashes Peter's watch.

Another symbol is a baseball, which Jack carries around with him. Hook organizes a baseball game to fully win Jack over, and when the boy hits the home run he never could in the real world, he finally gets his perfect childhood wish even as he sends the symbol of his innocence rocketing away from him. When it hits Peter on the head, it helps jog back his own priorities, but he must find his own repository of childhood to fully reawaken his own powers. This he finds in a teddy bear, a symbol Spielberg already used way back in his first theatrical feature, The Sugarland Express, thus tying Peter's childhood with his own.

These intelligent touches keep me coming back to Hook long after I should have grown out of it, but they remain frustrating when taken with the film's many missteps. There's a terrific moment of slapstick during the pirates' ballgame when a man tries to steal second and is shot, much to Hook's annoyance, but the funniness of the moment also begs the question why Jack just doesn't react at all to a man being murdered in front of him, in some ways because of him and his desire to play a game no one else in Neverland understands. The climactic fight should carry the weight of two old rivals engaging in their final duel, but the slapstick of the Lost Boys' involvement turns a bloodbath into Home Alone; I half-expected Commander Macaulay Culkin to lead a division of Lost Boys. And in one of the film's true serious moments, Peter's recollection of his mother and how he came to Neverland, Spielberg and his writers come up with a backstory that clashes with the director's visual accompaniment. Peter speaks of fleeing his family because he was afraid of mortality, yet the film shows his baby carriage simply sliding away (and his mother just not reacting in any way whatsoever). Even setting that aside on grounds of whimsy and fantasy, we're still left with a baby who was apparently engaged in philosophical rumination on the nature of death, and suddenly we're back in banana squash territory.

Yet I still do enjoy Hook, with its Hook/Smee dynamic (further proof that Spielberg can make comedy work when he adheres to a more classical structure instead of his more epically scaled missteps) and the form that only Spielberg can bring. He breaks from reality as soon as possible here, casting an intense but cold light reminiscent of the the passing UFOs in Close Encounters of the Third Kind outside the children's bedroom in Wendy's house. Shots bookend each other, whether in close proximity -- a long shot of Peter standing on the balcony after the children's abduction to Tinker Bell flying in and assuming a similar scale with the dollhouse inside. Spielberg had no reason to go to Neverland, not after saying everything he could have said there in an internment camp in Shanghai, but he does find new topics for discussion even if they might have been better served elsewhere. At its core, Hook is one of two expulsions of Spielberg's "old" style before he entered into the modern phase of his career. Unlike Empire of the Sun, both Hook and Jurassic Park would couch his themes in his more broadly entertaining élan. But if Hook is all about taking out all the childish things we put away, the director used it to stow his old self as he prepared for one of the most remarkable late-careers of any prominent filmmaker.