For my latest Re-Make/Re-Model piece for Spectrum Culture, I compare the blisteringly funny, darkly funny Ealing Studios classic The Ladykillers with the Coens' 2004 remake. The latter is my least favorite of the brothers' work, so I had hoped to see something of value on a second watch. Sadly, watching the two films back to back only made its failings that much more apparent, and all the (very Coenesque) charm of the original is lost on weak irony, puerile scatology and offensive caricatures. It is everything Coen haters accuse the brothers of being but otherwise never are, and I shall continue to put it out of sight and mind when evaluating their incredible body of work.
My full piece is up now at Spectrum Culture.
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Showing posts with label Tom Hanks. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tom Hanks. Show all posts
Tuesday, December 11
Capsule Reviews: The Deep Blue Sea, Cloud Atlas, Rust and Bone
The Deep Blue Sea (Terence Davies, 2012)
Lit in a stuffy haze by Florian Hoffmeister, Terence Davies’ adaptation of Terence Rattigan’s play The Deep Blue Sea continues the director’s penchant for visualizing the confining boundaries of conservative British upbringing. Ambiguities poke through, though, as they did for his masterpiece Distant Voices, Still Lives. Here, the cukolding love triangle of Rachel Weisz, lover Tim Hiddleston and elder husband Simon Russell Beale certainly exhibit melodramatic flourishes—“To the Impressionists!” is a boisterously funny outburst begging to join the ranks of a cinephile’s referential quotes. Yet the material also resembles a British take on Anna Karenina, where the cheated husband responds not with blustering, annihilating anger but a measured, conflicted tone of hurt and resignation. Weisz and Hiddleston face the negative consequences of passion, but it is Beale who grounds the film and threatens to steal the film as the person truly suffering in all this. His flicker of a smile and the pant of excitement in his voice when he notes Weisz still wears her wedding ring is so delicate the film threatens to blow away with the extra breath in his exhale, and his subsequent offer to help her transition away from him in any way he can is more poignant and heartbreaking than the subsequent travails Weisz faces with her impetuous new beau. Grade: B+
Cloud Atlas (Larry Wachowski, Lana Wachowski, and Tom Tykwer, 2012)
The Wachowskis and Tom Tykwer adapt David Mitchell’s novel by breaking up its Matryoshka doll structure into a cross-cut epic spanning time and space, yet the end result feels curiously unambitious. As with Mitchell’s book, each of the six stories is told in its own generic style, be it a corporate espionage thriller in the 1970s, a period melodrama of the early 20th century, a dystopic sci-fi social commentary in the not-too-distant future, and so on. But where Mitchell handles these transitions not simply with narrative adjustments but overhauls in prose, the direction across these separate stories is curiously homogenous despite some visibly different input between the chunk of segments primarily shot by the Wachowskis and those of Tkywer. Perhaps this was intended to keep the film stable, as it does not follow the novel’s structure but constantly leaps between each story. Nevertheless, this undermines each of the sub-films within the larger framework, for they lack direction unique to them, while the overarching themes of suffering and kindness echoed across each avatar lack the passion I expected. The remarked-upon race- and gender-bending of the cast members across the different stories brings to mind, of course, Lana Wachowski’s own violation of social binaries (a.k.a. that vile “natural order” bandied about by the villains who recur in different power positions throughout). Strange, then, and unfortunate, that the final film should feel so removed from its own earnest call for upending that system in favor of making a better, gentler world. The altered conclusion takes that quest literally, but that only makes the setting as removed as the tone, and indeed the hollow but sincere warmth the filmmakers find in the material can also feel like a capitulation to the order. Grade: D+
Rust and Bone (Jacques Audiard, 2012)
Two scenes in Rust and Bone bring Jacques Audiard’s direction in alignment with the complex, multitudinous emotions conjured by his actors. The first is Stéphanie’s (Marion Cotillard) return to water after an accident during her orca show at a sea park left her without legs. Cotillard’s face registers fear, nervousness, eagerness and, eventually, rhapsody as kickboxer Ali (Matthias Schoenaerts) carries her into the ocean and she finds herself “home” again even as she struggles to adjust. The second, when the pair have sex for the first time, brings those same emotions back as Audiard playfully moves with Stéphanie’s preparations, holding on the removal of stockings and darting to trace her quick concealment of her prosthetic legs. The rest, tragically, betrays the subtleties the leads bring to the movie, with intrusive close-ups and ill-advised fade-outs to the soundtrack force emotions where Cotillard and Schoenaerts so deftly left matters without easy conclusions and invited the audience to truly engage with their characters. Grade: C
Lit in a stuffy haze by Florian Hoffmeister, Terence Davies’ adaptation of Terence Rattigan’s play The Deep Blue Sea continues the director’s penchant for visualizing the confining boundaries of conservative British upbringing. Ambiguities poke through, though, as they did for his masterpiece Distant Voices, Still Lives. Here, the cukolding love triangle of Rachel Weisz, lover Tim Hiddleston and elder husband Simon Russell Beale certainly exhibit melodramatic flourishes—“To the Impressionists!” is a boisterously funny outburst begging to join the ranks of a cinephile’s referential quotes. Yet the material also resembles a British take on Anna Karenina, where the cheated husband responds not with blustering, annihilating anger but a measured, conflicted tone of hurt and resignation. Weisz and Hiddleston face the negative consequences of passion, but it is Beale who grounds the film and threatens to steal the film as the person truly suffering in all this. His flicker of a smile and the pant of excitement in his voice when he notes Weisz still wears her wedding ring is so delicate the film threatens to blow away with the extra breath in his exhale, and his subsequent offer to help her transition away from him in any way he can is more poignant and heartbreaking than the subsequent travails Weisz faces with her impetuous new beau. Grade: B+
Cloud Atlas (Larry Wachowski, Lana Wachowski, and Tom Tykwer, 2012)
The Wachowskis and Tom Tykwer adapt David Mitchell’s novel by breaking up its Matryoshka doll structure into a cross-cut epic spanning time and space, yet the end result feels curiously unambitious. As with Mitchell’s book, each of the six stories is told in its own generic style, be it a corporate espionage thriller in the 1970s, a period melodrama of the early 20th century, a dystopic sci-fi social commentary in the not-too-distant future, and so on. But where Mitchell handles these transitions not simply with narrative adjustments but overhauls in prose, the direction across these separate stories is curiously homogenous despite some visibly different input between the chunk of segments primarily shot by the Wachowskis and those of Tkywer. Perhaps this was intended to keep the film stable, as it does not follow the novel’s structure but constantly leaps between each story. Nevertheless, this undermines each of the sub-films within the larger framework, for they lack direction unique to them, while the overarching themes of suffering and kindness echoed across each avatar lack the passion I expected. The remarked-upon race- and gender-bending of the cast members across the different stories brings to mind, of course, Lana Wachowski’s own violation of social binaries (a.k.a. that vile “natural order” bandied about by the villains who recur in different power positions throughout). Strange, then, and unfortunate, that the final film should feel so removed from its own earnest call for upending that system in favor of making a better, gentler world. The altered conclusion takes that quest literally, but that only makes the setting as removed as the tone, and indeed the hollow but sincere warmth the filmmakers find in the material can also feel like a capitulation to the order. Grade: D+
Rust and Bone (Jacques Audiard, 2012)
Two scenes in Rust and Bone bring Jacques Audiard’s direction in alignment with the complex, multitudinous emotions conjured by his actors. The first is Stéphanie’s (Marion Cotillard) return to water after an accident during her orca show at a sea park left her without legs. Cotillard’s face registers fear, nervousness, eagerness and, eventually, rhapsody as kickboxer Ali (Matthias Schoenaerts) carries her into the ocean and she finds herself “home” again even as she struggles to adjust. The second, when the pair have sex for the first time, brings those same emotions back as Audiard playfully moves with Stéphanie’s preparations, holding on the removal of stockings and darting to trace her quick concealment of her prosthetic legs. The rest, tragically, betrays the subtleties the leads bring to the movie, with intrusive close-ups and ill-advised fade-outs to the soundtrack force emotions where Cotillard and Schoenaerts so deftly left matters without easy conclusions and invited the audience to truly engage with their characters. Grade: C
Thursday, June 7
Blu-Ray Review: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
[Note: I received this disc from Warner Bros. as part of their Blu-Ray Elite program.]
Film
Any movie that opens with an artistic abstraction of a body falling to signify someone jumping from one of the Twin Towers can't hope for greatness, but the shamelessness of Stephen Daldry's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is breathtaking in its outrage. In fairness, it was always going to be this way. An adaptation of the hideous book by Jonathan Safran Foer, the worst, most self-satisfied writer in America today, EL&IC does not so much process the horror of September 11 and its bewildering aftermath through the eyes of a possibly autistic 9-year-old as use this blank protagonist to skirt any sincere approach to the tragedy.
Oskar (Thomas Horn, discovered being robotic and eerily smart on Jeopardy's Kids Week) roams around New York seeking some sense of closure for his father's (Tom Hanks) death in the terrorist attack, especially concerned with finding what his father's mysterious key unlocks. The lad, afraid of subways, runs around the city with a tambourine so that we have something to irritate us when the soundtrack isn't dominated by Horn's monotoned complaints about things that make him nervous. Unable to process emotion, he intrudes upon the turbulent lives of adults dealing with their own issues and presses them to answer his questions. For a movie supposedly about coping with 9/11, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close depicts a disgusting inability to deal with the realities of life and the manner in which banal sorrows do not cease with the occurrence of large-scale travesties.
Slow-motion shots of a vase symbolically shattering and the shallow focus of Oskar's Asperger-vision mark Daldry's only major artistic contributions to Foer's godawful prose. No, scratch that, there's also the matter of the frenetically edited, swirling montages set to Oskar's speech when he grows frantic in his word diarrhea. All of this is set to perhaps the worst, least subtle score the great Alexandre Desplat has ever composed, a treacly mess of shameless strings and woodwinds that trade Desplat's gift for atmosphere for an Oscar-baiting, unsubtle mess.
An all-star cast is utterly wasted, with the sole exception of Max von Sydow as the mute renter living in Oskar's grandmother's apartment. Von Sydow's magnificent face, stony yet expressive, is at once more contemplative and more youthful than the perpetual look of mild irritation on Horn's mug. The reason for his self-imposed silence is telegraphed from miles away, but von Sydow breathes some life into this picture, and his every gesture is to be treasured. But even he is weighed down by the oppressive, naïve sentiment of it all. This is one of the worst movies ever made, a patronizing statement that it's alright to move on delivered to audiences who long since have. Like most movies about unfathomable tragedies as seen through a child's perspective, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is a moral cop-out, a simplistic means of tearjerking that engages its touchy subject on no level other than exploitation. I steered clear from this movie upon its original release over some of the furor that greeted it, but even distanced from the anti-hype, I still loathed this movie.
A/V
This being a contemporary film, the technical specs are naturally robust. It's a shame they're in service to such drivel: to say that the sight of the burning Towers has never looked more crisp than in the 1080p transfer is not exactly a ringing endorsement. Nevertheless, the flat, depressed color schemes of Chris Menges' cinematography are reproduced clearly and cleanly. The 5.1 lossless mix evenly distributes Desplat's score and foregrounds the dialogue with clarity. In the moments where Oskar's speech grows frantic, the surround-sound mix truly comes out, overwhelming speakers with his insufferable, cut-up ramblings.
Extras
A smattering of features detail the making of the film from its general production to the discovery and instruction of Thomas Horn. Best of all, however, is Max von Sydow: Dialogues with "Renter." It's easily the best extra, if for no other reason that it gives an even longer view of one of the cinema's great actors, who is engaging even when standing still in the wardrobe department. Consisting solely of set footage, this feature gives an insight not only into Sydow's work as an actor but serves as a better making-of featurette than the actual making-of also included on the disc. Hell, it's better and more human than the film to which it is attached, which is admittedly saying nothing at all.
Bottom Line
The A/V quality and features do the film a service it does not deserve. Other than the chance to see von Sydow in his element and wholly at ease after six decades of doing this, there's nothing, including and especially the actual movie, to recommend this. For von Sydow fans, I'd say Rent It but don't bother with film. For everyone else, Avoid at All Costs.
Film
Oskar (Thomas Horn, discovered being robotic and eerily smart on Jeopardy's Kids Week) roams around New York seeking some sense of closure for his father's (Tom Hanks) death in the terrorist attack, especially concerned with finding what his father's mysterious key unlocks. The lad, afraid of subways, runs around the city with a tambourine so that we have something to irritate us when the soundtrack isn't dominated by Horn's monotoned complaints about things that make him nervous. Unable to process emotion, he intrudes upon the turbulent lives of adults dealing with their own issues and presses them to answer his questions. For a movie supposedly about coping with 9/11, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close depicts a disgusting inability to deal with the realities of life and the manner in which banal sorrows do not cease with the occurrence of large-scale travesties.
Slow-motion shots of a vase symbolically shattering and the shallow focus of Oskar's Asperger-vision mark Daldry's only major artistic contributions to Foer's godawful prose. No, scratch that, there's also the matter of the frenetically edited, swirling montages set to Oskar's speech when he grows frantic in his word diarrhea. All of this is set to perhaps the worst, least subtle score the great Alexandre Desplat has ever composed, a treacly mess of shameless strings and woodwinds that trade Desplat's gift for atmosphere for an Oscar-baiting, unsubtle mess.
An all-star cast is utterly wasted, with the sole exception of Max von Sydow as the mute renter living in Oskar's grandmother's apartment. Von Sydow's magnificent face, stony yet expressive, is at once more contemplative and more youthful than the perpetual look of mild irritation on Horn's mug. The reason for his self-imposed silence is telegraphed from miles away, but von Sydow breathes some life into this picture, and his every gesture is to be treasured. But even he is weighed down by the oppressive, naïve sentiment of it all. This is one of the worst movies ever made, a patronizing statement that it's alright to move on delivered to audiences who long since have. Like most movies about unfathomable tragedies as seen through a child's perspective, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is a moral cop-out, a simplistic means of tearjerking that engages its touchy subject on no level other than exploitation. I steered clear from this movie upon its original release over some of the furor that greeted it, but even distanced from the anti-hype, I still loathed this movie.
A/V
This being a contemporary film, the technical specs are naturally robust. It's a shame they're in service to such drivel: to say that the sight of the burning Towers has never looked more crisp than in the 1080p transfer is not exactly a ringing endorsement. Nevertheless, the flat, depressed color schemes of Chris Menges' cinematography are reproduced clearly and cleanly. The 5.1 lossless mix evenly distributes Desplat's score and foregrounds the dialogue with clarity. In the moments where Oskar's speech grows frantic, the surround-sound mix truly comes out, overwhelming speakers with his insufferable, cut-up ramblings.
Extras
A smattering of features detail the making of the film from its general production to the discovery and instruction of Thomas Horn. Best of all, however, is Max von Sydow: Dialogues with "Renter." It's easily the best extra, if for no other reason that it gives an even longer view of one of the cinema's great actors, who is engaging even when standing still in the wardrobe department. Consisting solely of set footage, this feature gives an insight not only into Sydow's work as an actor but serves as a better making-of featurette than the actual making-of also included on the disc. Hell, it's better and more human than the film to which it is attached, which is admittedly saying nothing at all.
Bottom Line
The A/V quality and features do the film a service it does not deserve. Other than the chance to see von Sydow in his element and wholly at ease after six decades of doing this, there's nothing, including and especially the actual movie, to recommend this. For von Sydow fans, I'd say Rent It but don't bother with film. For everyone else, Avoid at All Costs.
Thursday, March 8
Steven Spielberg: The Terminal
The first shots roll over Customs & Border Patrol setting up for the day at JFK International, cordons being set up to direct incoming travelers as dogs make a quick scan of the place. Soon, the people pour in, travelers of all different nationalities cramming into lines and handing over passports and declaration forms as they are screened by officials in booths. Then the camera pulls back to reveal that these measures are but the first step of heightened security. Above it all, more officials watch on surveillance cameras for any anomalies, the airport now looking more like a casino than a transportation hub. In a few minutes, Spielberg deftly casts a world of total monitoring, where excuses and intentions don't matter. If someone catches an error, arrest and deportation follows swiftly. In this new world, the prospect of travel seems more frightening than exciting.
The basis of the film is the story of Mehran Karimi Nasseri, an Iranian refugee who spent nearly 20 years stuck in limbo at Charles de Gaulle airport, unable to enter France itself or to return home. Spielberg and the writers swap an Iranian in France for a fictional Eastern European in America: Viktor Navorski (Tom Hanks) arrives from the former Soviet republic of Krakozhia just as a coup overthrows and delegitimizes his government. Everyone in the airport is evaluated by their printed identities, and on paper, Viktor Navorski effectively no longer exists.
Yet this change of nationalities has the effect of innately undermining the film's relevance. Though Nasseri's plight precedes the release of this film by 18 years, his situation fits neatly into the modern landscape of Middle East tensions. Navorksi, on the other hand, is a relic of the Cold War, a means of divorcing the film from a specific time period in what feels like a safety precaution. It also allows the leading man to be a comically bumbling white man instead of a politically contentious Muslim.
And from the second Hanks appears on-screen, it's obvious that the film's toe-dip into any political commentary will take a back seat to awkward slapstick and translation humor. Hanks lets his face slack with a combination of awe and confusion, Viktor's language barrier and enthusiasm for visiting New York preventing him from remotely understanding why he must stay in the terminal. He slips on wet floors, walks into glass doors, and repeats his pre-set list of English phrases until the plot finally calls for him to learn some English to prevent the loss of audience goodwill. It's fun to see Hanks slip back into his early, comedic tone, but he cannot square the zaniness of Viktor with the shock on the man's face as he watches his country fall on television, or when he must become serious later to help those he meeting in his stasis.
It's a two-dimensional performance that requires an equally thin villain, which Viktor receives in the form of Acting Field Commissioner Frank Dixon (Stanley Tucci), some meaningless bureaucrat who behaves as if he's the head of Homeland Security. Having spent his life sucking up to his superiors and getting ahead of his peers at any cost, Dixon does not understand the concept of basic humanity. He's spent so long looking at people's documents that he cannot process the actual person, save to look for inconsistencies in their story. He can catch out a group of Chinese "tourists" to Disney by noting their lack of cameras, or see through a drug smuggler's cover of buying brazil nuts for his mother-in-law by noticing the lack of a wedding ring. But when a confused man begs to bring in medicine for his father without the proper forms, Dixon feels nothing.
Admittedly, he's the closest the film comes to suggesting a connection with the times. One of the head customs officials, Dixon speaks no language but English and has no translators on-hand to deal with those who cannot understand his fast-talking bureaucratese. He "explains" the Krakozhia coup to Viktor in terms that would baffle a native English speaker, then gets annoyed at the man's incomprehension. But these realistic caricatures give way to a full-on antagonist, Dixon raging at Viktor's presence without reason, so terrified that Viktor will ruin his ascent that he does everything he can to entrap Viktor into getting arrested and deported, or at least detained somewhere else. His wrath is never given clarification nor purpose, and the rest of the film is too optimistic for his baseless fury to be any kind of commentary on the xenophobic practices of Homeland Security.
Dixon's lack of solid character foundation is but one part of the larger absence of meaning that hobbles the film. Charles Taylor of Salon called this Spielberg's worst-directed film, and I'm inclined to agree with him. The set, though impressively detailed and filled with extras, feels lifeless and clearly artificial thanks to Spielberg's awkward direction. His camera, normally so jubilant and free, moves with clumsy stiffness, maladroitly careening into close-ups rather than evoking that euphoric quality of the "Spielberg Face."
And frankly, the dimensions and layout of the terminal make no sense. Repeated shots of certain locations establish the repetition of Viktor's caged life, but the lack of connectivity between these areas creates a potentially limitless space. Where, for instance, is that dilapidated airplane gate where Viktor sleeps? With its ratty disrepair and inactivity, this part of the set looks like some weird post-apocalyptic vision of the terminal, as if the original shooting script included some nightmarish vision of another terrorist attack and its aftermath before that plot point was dropped halfway into production. It's not like Spielberg can't handle confined spaces: watch his direction in the opening of Amistad or on the boat in Jaws. Held in by the dimensions of the respective ships, Spielberg swaps his dollies and cranes for tilts, pans, and judiciously cut static shots. In both cases, Spielberg generates suspense and momentum while also clearly defining the limitations of the setting. The terminal here is technically limited, but Spielberg's made it so big as to trap the movie between being too small and too large, sapping the movie of its tension.
The airless feeling created by The Terminal's flaccid direction rends apart the already threadbare plot mechanics driving the film. Tucci's villain is consistently made simultaneously more cartoonishly vile and more impotently meaningless to the overall story, ensuring an easily hated antagonist who ultimately cannot truly be cruel. Furthermore, the other people Viktor meet simply pad time, be it the catering car driver (Diego Luna) who pines for a CBP officer (Zoë Saldana) or the Indian janitor (Kumar Pallana) who's fled prosecution back home for three decades. Then, of course, there's the romance between Viktor and flight attendant Amelia (Catherine Zeta-Jones), a subplot so tacked-on it makes the stuff between Leonardo DiCaprio and Cameron Diaz in Gangs of New York look as natural and integral to the film as the love story of Before Sunrise. Everything feels like a distraction from the things Spielberg wanted to say but was too afraid. For his first explicitly post-9/11 film, the director chose a contentious subject, but he goes so far out of his way to be inoffensive that nothing in the movie sticks.
As previously stated, the giant set of The Terminal pays homage to Jacques Tati and his masterpiece (and one of the greatest of all films), Playtime. By setting his film in an international transit terminal, Spielberg subtly gets to show the world coming to America, a sly commentary on our sudden and belated realization of the planet around us. In a way, it's the flip side of Tati's film, which comes from a European sensibility to posit a future where utilitarian American modernism has stripped the world of its multiculturalism. The giant scale of Playtime is a deliberate counterpoint to the modest level of postwar European film, the bombastic 70mm canvas its own joke at the expense of needlessly gargantuan excess. But Spielberg's set, huge and controlled as it is, is practically a step down for the director in terms of siz. Playtime was larger than this, but it still felt like a prison. Spielberg allows his terminal to feel too livable to make his points.
Tati's film, set in a vague future and from a European sensibility, more explicitly crafts a globalized world, where modern architecture obliterates culture and makes for a world with uniform buildings and behavior, where landmarks are but a distant memory. But Playtime is also human, its escalation of absurdity and dismantled mise-en-scène coinciding with a liberation of the caged human spirit. Spielberg is approaching his subject from inoffensive angles to maximize commercial viability, but beneath all his slapstick are darker implications of modern America that he cannot yet bring himself to explore.
The Terminal is a film that attempts to make farce of American policy but also doesn't want to truly demonize it. It therefore frames the changing landscape of America's public face around a freak occurrence of bureaucratic anomaly. In so doing, The Terminal ends up saying nothing about the fears of our rude awakening to the world's evil and our less-than-stellar response to this fact. Sandwiched between the fluid comedy-drama of Catch Me if You Can — which handles the shifts between broad comedy and heartfelt drama far better than this — and Spielberg's 2005 films —which treat 9/11 with far more maturity and filmmaking prowess — The Terminal has already been all but forgotten. This may not be a bad thing.
Monday, February 20
Steven Spielberg: Catch Me if You Can
The brilliant opening credits of Catch Me if You Can encapsulate the spirit and tenor of the film to follow with magnificent conciseness. Animated with the use of rubber stamps (an ingenious technique that only further ties the credits to the content of the actual movie), Olivier Kuntzel's and Florence Deygas' title design renders Spielberg's most delicate film into a brief summary of plot and direction. The credits have a tremendous flow and momentum to them, the words forming in elegant typography, lines always continuing until they form the next credit. The animation has the same unceasing inertia, with the frame shifting horizontally and vertically as the stamped silhouette of Frank William Abagnale, Jr. (Leonardo DiCaprio) evades FBI Agent Carl Hanratty (Tom Hanks). Buoyed by John Williams' own '60s throwback, a light but still dramatic score, these first minutes are so memorable that I recalled them instantly after not seeing the film in years, while so much of the actual story had faded.
Watching Catch Me if You Can again, however, made me wonder how I'd let it sink in my estimation. It's an undeniably light work, perhaps Spielberg's lightest since The Sugarland Express, his first theatrical film. But it's also the first of his movies since then to truly work as a comedy, to still operate on the formal, large scale of his typical work but also generate character-driven, intimate humor woefully absent in, say, 1941. So delicate is Spielberg's craft here, so unlike his typical populist stylist of overwhelming spectacle, that it can be easy to miss that the film, like The Sugarland Express, is actually a drama. In fact, it may be the most elegant summary of some of Spielberg's pet themes of childhood innocence and distanced parenthood. That it is so funny only reveals frustratingly unexplored depths to Spielberg's storytelling capacity.
We meet Frank Abagnale Jr. as a guest on a game show in the '70s. Caught, even reformed, he is on television acknowledged for what he truly is: one of the greatest con-men of the 20th century. Spielberg then briefly flashes back to his capture in France, where Hanratty finally confronts his biggest target and betrays a clear fondness for the young man beneath his taunting. By starting with these two scenes before reverting back to a mostly linear tour through Abagnale's life, Spielberg gives away his hand. The question of the cat-and-mouse game between FBI agent and confidence man is answered before anyone has even begun to ask it. This flashback betrays the director's motives: as charming and clever as so many of the reversals Abagnale routinely performs on Hanratty are, they are not the point of the expertly plotted caper.
This is only made clearer when Spielberg reverts to Abagnale's youth. Leonardo DiCaprio, though using roles like this to establish a serious and adult persona, has never looked more fresh-faced than the boy Frank. Abagnale has the perfect postwar adolescence: his respected father, Frank Sr. (Christopher Walken) sends him to private school and continues to romance his wife (Nathalie Baye), whom he met while serving in France. DiCaprio wears a boyish smile that takes years off his already cherubic face, and he regards his father's induction into the local Rotary Club's lifetime membership as something approaching beatification. To see this kid, so naïve and joyous, juxtaposed so closely with the rotting but still cunning knave trying to escape from a French prison creates a cognitive difference.
With considerable speed, however, Spielberg begins to bridge the two beings into the same conflicted son. Frank Sr. exhibits some erratic, even dishonest behavior with bankers, and his mutterings about the I.R.S. knocking on his door coincide with shots of the Abagnales' fortunes reversing. To keep the feds at bay, the family must sell their home and move into a smaller place, as well as getting rid of the car. The parents must also send their son to public school, where he goes the first day in his old uniform, tacitly attempting to keep some form of familiarity in the upheaval (his behavior here mirrors that of Max Fischer in Rushmore after his expulsion from the titular academy).
But it is this act that helps bring out the start of Abagnale's gift for tricking people. Shoved by a bully, he walks into class with that kid and, when some mistake him for the substitute teacher, he plays along so that he might get his revenge. As the start of an epic criminal career, it's so innocuous as to be no less bewildering than the sinless child previously seen. But the childish quality of Abagnale's trick reveals a crucial aspect of his crimes that are hammered home by his subsequent discovery of his mother's infidelity and his parents' divorce.
Faced with having to choose between his separating parents, Abagnale somehow seems to grow even younger and more innocent as cross-cut frames of a sympathetic but impatient lawyer urging the boy to sign meet shots of the young man desperately fleeing the situation, running so hard that the formal elegance of the film to that point is instantly upturned in favor of handheld, momentum-filled shots that carry all the frantic energy of Spielberg's handheld footage in Saving Private Ryan. Abagnale's subsequent career of confidence tricks, of check fraud slowly blossoming into full-on impersonations of pilots, doctors and attorneys, comes back to this single moment, a despairing child fleeing reality for the safety of his own illusions.
In that sense, the Spielberg film with which Catch Me if You Can shares the most is Hook. They even share something of a common shot: the honoring of the beloved and respected parental figure in a ceremony that is both modest and overwhelming for what it means to the principal characters in attendance. There's more humor in Frank Sr.'s speech about the two mice than the resonant beauty of orphans standing for Granny Wendy, but that early shot acts a clue to this film's fairy tale origins. But Catch Me if You Can succeeds where Hook so often falls flat as a story of reality and fantasy colliding. Spielberg's Pan is a realist being sucked back into his fantasy world against his will, creating an awkward struggle in which regression is bizarrely proffered as a positive goal. Abagnale's story progresses the proper way, in which a fantasist resists the constant tug of the world around him as he must continuously up the ante of his imagination to outpace the truth.
To further emphasize this, Spielberg took the biggest creative license with Abagnale's life to stage two invented reunions between father and son. These scenes beautifully capture the son's futile attempts to remold everything back into the life he remembers. Having amassed a pile of money through check fraud gotten over by the respect given to him as a Pan-Am "pilot," Abagnale treats Frank Sr. to lavish lunches and extravagant gifts that the father, still hounded by the I.R.S., must turn down. But the son persists, and he speaks to his dad about going to pick up mom as if nothing happened, as if she didn't already remarry and Frank Sr. wasn't hollowed out from the blows of his career and family imploding at the same time. Abagnale is so caught up in his lies, and still so childish, that he cannot see the problem of giving his audited father mountains of cash he himself obtained illegally. With his father, he really is a pilot, just trying to give back to his parents who are going through a rough spot but will come through it all right.
Walken shines in these scenes. Every time he returns to the screen, Frank Sr. is more bitter, more heartbroken, but his self-pity never stops him from seeing right through his boy. In their first reunion, Walken has a smirk on his face that betrays all he knows from the moment he sets eyes on Junior. Walken puts an edge into his last few lines with DiCaprio, and when Frank Sr. parts with a cryptically whispered, "The rest of us really are suckers," the depth of his son's cluelessness is made plain by his confusion. His dad just shattered the illusion and Abagnale doesn't even know it. But when the two later meet, after Frank Sr. is reduced to working for the government he so virulently hates, the father's knowledge of his son's true activities comes out in the open when the man actually encourages his kid to continue his antics, so thrilled that his boy is giving the government a hard time. Ironically, it is Abagnale's true identity as a criminal that makes his father the happiest, but Abagnale still cannot break out of his fantasy. Frank Sr. is by this point completely broken, and all he has left in life is the brief thrill of vicarious revenge. But his son cannot see that, for he cannot even see himself.
But reality breaks through Abagnale's barriers despite his best efforts, and Spielberg further clarifies his placement of the opening flashbacks by presenting an alternate bond between Abagnale and Hanratty. The latter works in the bank fraud division he helped create, and he attaches himself to Abagnale's extensive paper trail with solemn zeal. Hanks plays Hanratty almost totally without mirth, albeit with a touch of self-awareness. (I'd give anything to have been in an audience when he replies to his partners' complaints of his humorlessness with a vulgar knock-knock joke that could bring the house down.) Hanratty gets so caught up in Abagnale's case that he himself risks folly by disappearing solely into his work. He's chasing the man beneath all those aliases, and when the two meet for the first time, Abagnale manages to fool Hanratty into letting him go. Later, the boy recounts to the agent what his dad told him about why the Yankees win, that everyone else is "looking at the pinstripes." For a time, Hanratty is as much a part of the fantasy world Frank Jr. constructs as the various occupations.
Yet Hanratty offers clarity to Abagnale, clarity both unwanted and desired. He represents hard truth in the form of the law, unable to nab the con man but nevertheless capable of ruffling his feathers. At one point in the film, Abagnale has fallen so far into his own construct that he attempts to marry a girl (Amy Adams) who thinks him one of his aliases. This essentially traps him, but he doesn't realize it until Hanratty's team tracks him down, demolishing Abagnale's house of cards and gradually setting the boy on a path to collapse. Incidentally, it's a collapse that, in a mirror of Peter Pan in the flashback of Hook, occurs when he sees his mom happy with another child. But where the young Pan fully divorced from reality to retreat to Neverland, Abagnale must finally come to terms with that reality.
On the flip side, Hanratty also stands for the normalcy Abagnale genuinely wants from all his high-flying escapades. Like Abagnale's father, Hanratty is divorced, only it was dedication to his job, not an illegal undermining of it, that splintered his family. Hanratty is also the one to see the real Abagnale, again in a foil of the boy's father: Frank Sr. sees vengeance for his torment at the hands of feds, while Carl sees the child just wanting to be loved. When Hanratty receives the first of his Christmas calls from Abagnale, he rightly deduces that the boy is calling because he has no one else to talk to, but his victorious laughing soon gives way to a clear empathy for the kid. Abagnale's genuine regret for the hassle he causes Hanratty feels like that of a disobedient but faithful child apologizing for letting down his father. All the bravado in DiCaprio's voice dies in those phone calls, his guarded but somber tone suggests that he's growing tired of all the games too.
As with last year's War Horse, Catch Me if You Can represents a deliciously old-school Spielberg in the midst of his literally bleached-out late career. Janusz Kaminski's cinematography is rich in color, with classically arranged shots offering sumptuous detail as Spielberg moves swiftly through Abagnale's fast-paced life, a speed that apparently matched that of production. Though it lacks the gravitas of so many of Spielberg's late work, the film nevertheless features perhaps the best of his exuberant energy, which might explain how he could average three shooting locations a production day and still wind up with such an immaculately framed picture. To return to The Sugarland Express, Spielberg's light but poignant 2002 feature forms something of a bookend with his first theatrical release. They are both fleet-footed exercises in style that reveal their maker's deep preoccupations, but where The Sugarland Express ends with confusion and sadness, Catch Me if You Can shows its characters moving on, coping with their failures and even finding contentment.
Though filmed and released after Minority Report, Catch Me if You Can feels as if it should come before it, forming a tighter bond with A.I.'s mature, insightful thoughts on childhood and humanity and leaving Spielberg's morally probing tech thriller to the post-9/11 films to follow. But regardless of its release date, Catch Me if You Can may be the final word on Spielberg's obsession with innocence, childhood and family. That's not to say he hasn't broached the subject since, but certainly nothing he's done since has even neared the intensity and depth with which it has reckoned with the director's most personal themes.
Watching Catch Me if You Can again, however, made me wonder how I'd let it sink in my estimation. It's an undeniably light work, perhaps Spielberg's lightest since The Sugarland Express, his first theatrical film. But it's also the first of his movies since then to truly work as a comedy, to still operate on the formal, large scale of his typical work but also generate character-driven, intimate humor woefully absent in, say, 1941. So delicate is Spielberg's craft here, so unlike his typical populist stylist of overwhelming spectacle, that it can be easy to miss that the film, like The Sugarland Express, is actually a drama. In fact, it may be the most elegant summary of some of Spielberg's pet themes of childhood innocence and distanced parenthood. That it is so funny only reveals frustratingly unexplored depths to Spielberg's storytelling capacity.
We meet Frank Abagnale Jr. as a guest on a game show in the '70s. Caught, even reformed, he is on television acknowledged for what he truly is: one of the greatest con-men of the 20th century. Spielberg then briefly flashes back to his capture in France, where Hanratty finally confronts his biggest target and betrays a clear fondness for the young man beneath his taunting. By starting with these two scenes before reverting back to a mostly linear tour through Abagnale's life, Spielberg gives away his hand. The question of the cat-and-mouse game between FBI agent and confidence man is answered before anyone has even begun to ask it. This flashback betrays the director's motives: as charming and clever as so many of the reversals Abagnale routinely performs on Hanratty are, they are not the point of the expertly plotted caper.
This is only made clearer when Spielberg reverts to Abagnale's youth. Leonardo DiCaprio, though using roles like this to establish a serious and adult persona, has never looked more fresh-faced than the boy Frank. Abagnale has the perfect postwar adolescence: his respected father, Frank Sr. (Christopher Walken) sends him to private school and continues to romance his wife (Nathalie Baye), whom he met while serving in France. DiCaprio wears a boyish smile that takes years off his already cherubic face, and he regards his father's induction into the local Rotary Club's lifetime membership as something approaching beatification. To see this kid, so naïve and joyous, juxtaposed so closely with the rotting but still cunning knave trying to escape from a French prison creates a cognitive difference.
With considerable speed, however, Spielberg begins to bridge the two beings into the same conflicted son. Frank Sr. exhibits some erratic, even dishonest behavior with bankers, and his mutterings about the I.R.S. knocking on his door coincide with shots of the Abagnales' fortunes reversing. To keep the feds at bay, the family must sell their home and move into a smaller place, as well as getting rid of the car. The parents must also send their son to public school, where he goes the first day in his old uniform, tacitly attempting to keep some form of familiarity in the upheaval (his behavior here mirrors that of Max Fischer in Rushmore after his expulsion from the titular academy).
But it is this act that helps bring out the start of Abagnale's gift for tricking people. Shoved by a bully, he walks into class with that kid and, when some mistake him for the substitute teacher, he plays along so that he might get his revenge. As the start of an epic criminal career, it's so innocuous as to be no less bewildering than the sinless child previously seen. But the childish quality of Abagnale's trick reveals a crucial aspect of his crimes that are hammered home by his subsequent discovery of his mother's infidelity and his parents' divorce.
Faced with having to choose between his separating parents, Abagnale somehow seems to grow even younger and more innocent as cross-cut frames of a sympathetic but impatient lawyer urging the boy to sign meet shots of the young man desperately fleeing the situation, running so hard that the formal elegance of the film to that point is instantly upturned in favor of handheld, momentum-filled shots that carry all the frantic energy of Spielberg's handheld footage in Saving Private Ryan. Abagnale's subsequent career of confidence tricks, of check fraud slowly blossoming into full-on impersonations of pilots, doctors and attorneys, comes back to this single moment, a despairing child fleeing reality for the safety of his own illusions.
In that sense, the Spielberg film with which Catch Me if You Can shares the most is Hook. They even share something of a common shot: the honoring of the beloved and respected parental figure in a ceremony that is both modest and overwhelming for what it means to the principal characters in attendance. There's more humor in Frank Sr.'s speech about the two mice than the resonant beauty of orphans standing for Granny Wendy, but that early shot acts a clue to this film's fairy tale origins. But Catch Me if You Can succeeds where Hook so often falls flat as a story of reality and fantasy colliding. Spielberg's Pan is a realist being sucked back into his fantasy world against his will, creating an awkward struggle in which regression is bizarrely proffered as a positive goal. Abagnale's story progresses the proper way, in which a fantasist resists the constant tug of the world around him as he must continuously up the ante of his imagination to outpace the truth.
To further emphasize this, Spielberg took the biggest creative license with Abagnale's life to stage two invented reunions between father and son. These scenes beautifully capture the son's futile attempts to remold everything back into the life he remembers. Having amassed a pile of money through check fraud gotten over by the respect given to him as a Pan-Am "pilot," Abagnale treats Frank Sr. to lavish lunches and extravagant gifts that the father, still hounded by the I.R.S., must turn down. But the son persists, and he speaks to his dad about going to pick up mom as if nothing happened, as if she didn't already remarry and Frank Sr. wasn't hollowed out from the blows of his career and family imploding at the same time. Abagnale is so caught up in his lies, and still so childish, that he cannot see the problem of giving his audited father mountains of cash he himself obtained illegally. With his father, he really is a pilot, just trying to give back to his parents who are going through a rough spot but will come through it all right.
Walken shines in these scenes. Every time he returns to the screen, Frank Sr. is more bitter, more heartbroken, but his self-pity never stops him from seeing right through his boy. In their first reunion, Walken has a smirk on his face that betrays all he knows from the moment he sets eyes on Junior. Walken puts an edge into his last few lines with DiCaprio, and when Frank Sr. parts with a cryptically whispered, "The rest of us really are suckers," the depth of his son's cluelessness is made plain by his confusion. His dad just shattered the illusion and Abagnale doesn't even know it. But when the two later meet, after Frank Sr. is reduced to working for the government he so virulently hates, the father's knowledge of his son's true activities comes out in the open when the man actually encourages his kid to continue his antics, so thrilled that his boy is giving the government a hard time. Ironically, it is Abagnale's true identity as a criminal that makes his father the happiest, but Abagnale still cannot break out of his fantasy. Frank Sr. is by this point completely broken, and all he has left in life is the brief thrill of vicarious revenge. But his son cannot see that, for he cannot even see himself.
But reality breaks through Abagnale's barriers despite his best efforts, and Spielberg further clarifies his placement of the opening flashbacks by presenting an alternate bond between Abagnale and Hanratty. The latter works in the bank fraud division he helped create, and he attaches himself to Abagnale's extensive paper trail with solemn zeal. Hanks plays Hanratty almost totally without mirth, albeit with a touch of self-awareness. (I'd give anything to have been in an audience when he replies to his partners' complaints of his humorlessness with a vulgar knock-knock joke that could bring the house down.) Hanratty gets so caught up in Abagnale's case that he himself risks folly by disappearing solely into his work. He's chasing the man beneath all those aliases, and when the two meet for the first time, Abagnale manages to fool Hanratty into letting him go. Later, the boy recounts to the agent what his dad told him about why the Yankees win, that everyone else is "looking at the pinstripes." For a time, Hanratty is as much a part of the fantasy world Frank Jr. constructs as the various occupations.
Yet Hanratty offers clarity to Abagnale, clarity both unwanted and desired. He represents hard truth in the form of the law, unable to nab the con man but nevertheless capable of ruffling his feathers. At one point in the film, Abagnale has fallen so far into his own construct that he attempts to marry a girl (Amy Adams) who thinks him one of his aliases. This essentially traps him, but he doesn't realize it until Hanratty's team tracks him down, demolishing Abagnale's house of cards and gradually setting the boy on a path to collapse. Incidentally, it's a collapse that, in a mirror of Peter Pan in the flashback of Hook, occurs when he sees his mom happy with another child. But where the young Pan fully divorced from reality to retreat to Neverland, Abagnale must finally come to terms with that reality.
On the flip side, Hanratty also stands for the normalcy Abagnale genuinely wants from all his high-flying escapades. Like Abagnale's father, Hanratty is divorced, only it was dedication to his job, not an illegal undermining of it, that splintered his family. Hanratty is also the one to see the real Abagnale, again in a foil of the boy's father: Frank Sr. sees vengeance for his torment at the hands of feds, while Carl sees the child just wanting to be loved. When Hanratty receives the first of his Christmas calls from Abagnale, he rightly deduces that the boy is calling because he has no one else to talk to, but his victorious laughing soon gives way to a clear empathy for the kid. Abagnale's genuine regret for the hassle he causes Hanratty feels like that of a disobedient but faithful child apologizing for letting down his father. All the bravado in DiCaprio's voice dies in those phone calls, his guarded but somber tone suggests that he's growing tired of all the games too.
As with last year's War Horse, Catch Me if You Can represents a deliciously old-school Spielberg in the midst of his literally bleached-out late career. Janusz Kaminski's cinematography is rich in color, with classically arranged shots offering sumptuous detail as Spielberg moves swiftly through Abagnale's fast-paced life, a speed that apparently matched that of production. Though it lacks the gravitas of so many of Spielberg's late work, the film nevertheless features perhaps the best of his exuberant energy, which might explain how he could average three shooting locations a production day and still wind up with such an immaculately framed picture. To return to The Sugarland Express, Spielberg's light but poignant 2002 feature forms something of a bookend with his first theatrical release. They are both fleet-footed exercises in style that reveal their maker's deep preoccupations, but where The Sugarland Express ends with confusion and sadness, Catch Me if You Can shows its characters moving on, coping with their failures and even finding contentment.
Though filmed and released after Minority Report, Catch Me if You Can feels as if it should come before it, forming a tighter bond with A.I.'s mature, insightful thoughts on childhood and humanity and leaving Spielberg's morally probing tech thriller to the post-9/11 films to follow. But regardless of its release date, Catch Me if You Can may be the final word on Spielberg's obsession with innocence, childhood and family. That's not to say he hasn't broached the subject since, but certainly nothing he's done since has even neared the intensity and depth with which it has reckoned with the director's most personal themes.
Tuesday, June 14
Steven Spielberg: Saving Private Ryan
Saving Private Ryan is the most troublesome film in Steven Spielberg's filmography. It, far more than the contested Schindler's List, Amistad or even the tonally inconsistent The Color Purple, is the best evidence for Spielberg's supposed unsuitability for drama. Those films counterbalance Spielberg's worrisome moments of misplaced sentimentality with glimpses of an actual understanding of the gravity of the situation. The understated tilt up from the infamous shower scene in Schindler's List to show the consequences of actual gas chambers works as a response to both accusations that the director was exploiting a world travesty and his supposed lack of subtlety. Saving Private Ryan lacks such a moment. No, that's not right; it does contain such moments, but they feel artificial and forced, feeling like the work of a man who threw them in desperately at the last minute instead of finding organic depth.In essence, Saving Private Ryan is the Holy Bible of war movies, in the sense that it contains so many contradictory, half-baked themes and morals that it can be used to justify practically any outlook. As such, I cannot say that it is a bad movie, per se; in fact, some moments display an almost overwhelming sense of form. But it is a schizophrenic movie, filled with competing influences of other war films. That indeed is the problem: for a supposedly realistic document, this is a film founded on other films instead of history.
And it starts off so well, too. The D-Day sequence is among the most justly famous in modern film, a strategically planned setpiece that ports over the most important lesson from the similarly masterful Battle of Shrewsbury in Orson Welles' Chimes at Midnight: war is chaos, no matter how well-trained soldiers are. Spielberg's tracking shots and steady, deliberate progression are offset by a careening, bewildering sandstorm of whump-ing bullets and enough blood to turn an ocean red. As clear as the movement through the sequence is, and despite the sequence's gargantuan length, Spielberg did not storyboard it, getting spontaneous moments The horror takes on a surreal flavor: from a soldier shuffling around with dead-eyed determination until we see he's been looking for his own severed arm to the shot of a flamethrower erupting out of a bunker like some belching dragon. Of those who make it to the top of the beach, few feel any real sense of victory, only shuddering relief at being alive.
Yet the sequence also brings out some of the major issues of the film: Spielberg, for all his earnestness, has always had a fair grasp of irony, but many of the dark twists scattered across the D-Day scene and the film at large seem cheap and mean-spirited. Men clamor to safety or survive a glancing bullet, only to be cut down a second later. The issue of perspective arises: as we later learn, the entire fabrication of the framing device is already suspect if not outright abysmal, and the further jumps into the POV of Germans mowing down American GIs essentially shatter the notion of this being a passed-along remembrance.
Furthermore, by opening with an epic battle, Spielberg elides over the need to build character from the outset (there is a time and place for character motivation, and it ain't Omaha Beach). But that absence of fleshed-out character carries through the entire film. Instead, we get stereotypes: you've got your brash Brooklyn Jew (Adam Goldberg) looking to get back at every Nazi for crimes against his people, another Brooklynite (Edward Burns, a roaring vacuum of charisma who doesn't even have Noo Yawk charm to get him by), an Italian (Vin Diesel)—enough with Brooklyn, already—a Bible-quoting, redneck sharpshooter (Barry Pepper), and other clichés. Capt. Miller (Tom Hanks) leads them, and his withholding of personal information is almost laughable. The reveal that he was a schoolteacher back home is so unsurprising even Miller notes that people back home say, "Well, that figures" when he tells them his occupation.
Sent to retrieve James Ryan, a paratrooper whose brothers all died in the D-Day invasion, Miller and his men find themselves at the heart of a treatise on the nature of war, though what that treatise seeks to argue is a mystery. The men are human enough to resent the absurdity of their mission, being sent deep behind enemy lines, but eventually they fall into line, and some of them even come to embrace the task in a facile way. Spielberg does not even attempt to defend the premise that sacrificing many for one is noble, and at times he even seems to attack it before ultimately relying on sentiment over any lucid argument to sell his point. Thus, the men become not soldiers but icons, symbols of the valiant struggle of our last great conflict. But also, war is hell. But it can also be good. But not really.
The constant oscillation between lament for the horror of war and Greatest Generation paean makes every quiet scene a toss-up: will it give the characters dialogue about the pointless waste of war, or will it exalt the valiant struggle of the American soldier (and only American, as the film omits the perspective of the Germans and the presence altogether of other Allies)? If Saving Private Ryan has any true merit as an overview of war, it is in giving visualization to the liberal inner turmoil of supporting the troops but hating the war. Spielberg, whose father served in the war, who made war movies with his Super 8 camera, does not want to fully condemn the act of war, especially not this one. Truthfully, some wars are necessary, and they don't get much more so than World War II. But Spielberg cannot find a way to note the waste and destruction of war, not without sentimentalizing it as glorious. That leaves the film trapped between elegy and irony, creating a muddled tone that dirties his romanticized view and pretties up his disgust.
What Spielberg is trying to figure out is not easy, and I might be inclined to sympathize with his attempts to grapple with conflicting feelings if he treated a deep, multifaceted moral conflict with anything approaching a complex thought process. Instead, he uses a narrative transparently plotted around action sequences and speechifying, all featuring characters without dimension, motivation or, frankly, anything to distinguish a number of them besides geographical background and corresponding regional behavior.
The most troublesome of these characters, and a repository for the film's annihilating collision of opposed ideas, is Cpl. Upham (Jeremy Davies). A translator without combat experience forced to join Miller's excursion because of the deaths of his unit's own translators, Upham is first portrayed not simply as farcically incompetent in a battlefield but, frankly, as a human being. He awkwardly slaps men on the shoulders and asks fatuous questions like an alien sent to monitor this curious phenomenon known as warfare. It's amusing that the film gets thrown into competition with The Thin Red Line, as Upham feels like a paper-thin version of the drifting souls of Malick's film. Upham quotes Emerson, looks innocent and would generally prefer to sit this one out, fellas, thanks.
The general line on Upham, from supporters and detractors of the film alike, is that he is a coward, a charge supported by his collapse in the climax. But I will give Spielberg some credit and say he really is trying with this character—the character, it is worth noting, he openly said he identifies with most in the film. When the medic, Wade, dies in an attack on a machine gun placement, the men corner the one surviving German, dubbed "Steamboat Willie," and mean to execute him. Upham intervenes and ultimately sways Miller into letting the German go, the jeers he receives from the other soldiers and, most likely, a number of audience members, do not disguise the fact that he is right to object to an execution. But Spielberg brings Willie back at the end and even makes him the German to shoot Miller, prompting Upham to execute him, an act that occurs shortly after he is reduced to a simpering pile incapable of saving Mellish.
Adam Zanzie, who has posted the only support of the film that has ever tempted me to change my opinion of this movie, defends this:
"I think the reason why Steamboat Willie ends up becoming the man who shoots Miller is so that Upham’s senses of right and wrong, in regards to killing, can be put to a test: the previous times in which Upham has failed to kill were times in which he should have. Now that he has to live with the shame of those previous failures, can he still manage to avoid killing at a time when it would be wrong for him to do so?"This is an interesting take, and the best one for trying to figure out what Spielberg at least wanted to accomplish with this character. Upham is a coward throughout, ducking any engagement in battle and falling into such a state outside the room where Mellish is slowly stabbed to death that the emerging German does not even waste time killing him. But the belated execution is the ultimate show of cowardice, ironically inverting the cliché of the weakling achieving wartime manhood in killing. Looking at it on paper, the execution is one of the strongest points of the film.
But there's the matter of the tone hanging over Upham's actions: by making Willie Miller's killer, Spielberg openly puts out the suggestion that Upham bears responsibility for the captain's death for not letting the execution occur when it was first attempted. It is difficult capturing a film's tone, especially in a film with such an inconsistent one, but Upham's killing of Willie feels vindicating rather than expressing the dark complexity of Upham's moral failing. Even the look of self-loathing on Davies' haunted face seems as applicable to his anguish at not acting sooner as his realization of a mistake. I don't think the film condemns Upham for not killing, mind you; I think the film is too confused to say anything about him.
This back-and-forth is why I hate even thinking about this film, much less talking about it. This is not a film demanding serious unpacking of complex themes; it is a simplistic movie that is nevertheless trying so hard to be smart that it elicits apologia even from those of us who do not care for it. This is one of the most visible entries in the type of film I call a "Yeah, but" movie. Regardless of what position you take on it, arriving at it necessitates wading through a sea of contradiction until you're as likely to believe the opposition, whatever side that might be, when you reach the other side.
One aspect of the film that can and should be definitively addressed is the ridiculous notion of the film's realism, something that wouldn't be an issue so much if the film itself broadcasts itself as a depiction of war as it really is. Not even the D-Day sequence, with its skewed feeling of the passage of time, is realistic, and the film only spirals further out of control from there. The entire sequence at Neuville is a wash, featuring the ridiculous sight of Caparzo grabbing a French girl given by her parents to find safety, something he does despite the presence of Germans still within the village. And after several exchanges of gunfire, a nearby wall collapses to reveal Germans standing around idly, leading to a standoff without tension (either the Germans would surrender or they'd just open fire; they're too outnumbered to just stand there making threats). It's all a means to empty, calculated tension, lacking the spontaneity of the D-Day setpiece and feeling like manipulation at every turn.
The entire climax at the bridge assumes gross incompetence on behalf of the 2nd SS Panzer Division Das Reich, an elite, battle-hardened unit seen here behaving like fools—besides, they wouldn't even have made it to Normandy at that time, delayed as they were by French Resistance efforts, but then this film doesn't give a damn about anyone but us so perhaps we can assume the resistance flatly does not exist in the film. They arrive at a strategic point that is wholly silent and proceed without caution. They drive open-top vehicles through streets lined with tall buildings with endless vantage points. As for the Americans, the gunners task Upham with toting around belts of ammo when surely they'd each drape some over them before the ambush, knowing full well of how much displacing they'd be doing. Upham carries the ammo solely to set up Mellish's death, which could have been prevented if he'd fixed his bayonet like anyone anticipating close-quarters combat would do. Not a damn thing in the climax, up to and especially the deus ex machina of intervening air support, feels real.
These problems stem from basing the film on other depictions of war instead of war itself. Spielberg incorporates a flood of references, none clearer than Sam Fuller. As far as looking to filmmakers for insights into reality goes, at least Spielberg went with the one who actually served. But he misses the point of Fuller's films: Fuller hated subtlety but pursued a clearly defined point with such confrontational verve that his bluntness was ultimately subversive. Nothing here save the gore, which loses its shock rapidly, is truly confrontational. The Fuller influence does at least give us Sgt. Horvath (Tom Sizemore), a gruff, stocky sarge who looks and sounds like he really did fall out of one of Fuller's films. He's the sort of man who can collect some dirt from each place he's fought in tins, one of which is unhelpfully labeled "Africa." But Spielberg ultimately tears even him down by foisting a schmaltzy monologue upon the sergeant in which he goes against character to muse "saving Private Ryan might be the one decent thing we were able to pull out of this whole godawful mess."
Horvath's sudden turn to prosaic sub-poetry is but one of several clanging moments of lofty dialogue in a film that's supposed to be a realistic trek through the Western Front. Gen. George Marshall, by all accounts a remarkable, singular man with a genuine care for his troops, is nevertheless pushing it here by A) needlessly being informed of the deaths of the Ryan brothers and B) quoting a letter written by Lincoln as some kind of justification for ordering the extraction and ticket home for the surviving Ryan. And when Miller and co. finally find fresh-faced poster boy Ryan (Matt Damon), he spits in the face of their own sacrifice with the chest-thumping message, "You can tell [my mother] that when you found me, I was with the only brothers I had left," a moment so thick and nauseating it goes down like Castor oil.
And that framing device. Dear God. For one thing, it's a manipulative cheat, clearly leading the audience to believe that the old man is Miller, something communicated by the matching zoom-ins on the elder man's face before the gravestone and Miller's at the conclusion of the taking of Omaha Beach.
And when Spielberg fades Damon's face into Harrison Young's at the end, the sheer awkward hilarity of it is the only thing that can offset the rage of the ruse. Adam says the book-ending shots of a washed-out American flag are ironic, and maybe that's true, but nothing about the framing device suggests any sober rumination on what was given up for James Ryan to have a family of prop blondes. Ryan's simpering question, "Am I a good man?" is a shallow means of sidestepping the total lack of thematic resolution—I mean, honestly, what the hell is his wife going to say? "Actually, James, you were a drinker and emotionally distant and I never got to live my dreams." But I shouldn't take it out on poor James; who wouldn't be psychologically scarred by a dying Miller yanking him close and whispering, "Earn this" into his ear. That might be the single most offensive moment in the film, a disgusting moral imperative extended to the audience watching, sternly reminding us that we owe something to the Greatest Generation. Spielberg seems to think he's fulfilling his own obligation here, which is wishful thinking at best and insulting at worst.
There are aspects of this film I quite like, to be fair. Apart from the D-Day sequence, I enjoy the scene in the church in the aftermath of the disastrous Neuville section. It's the one place in the film anyone acts like a person, Miller quietly voicing his disdain for the mission to Horvath as the rest of the men deal with Caparzo's death and rest up for the next move. And compared to the cheap comedy of the aforementioned sneering deaths in the opening battle, the gallows humor of the men going through paratroopers' dog tags as if playing a game as surviving troopers walk by too tired and scarred to even register disgust, is an unsettling but darkly amusing moment.
But these are flashes of inspiration in a film that doesn't know what it wants to say and goes about looking for answers in the clumsiest manner possible. The film tries to set up its moral core with Upham, but the true spirit of the film might lie with Steamboat Willie, the German with a by-the-nails grasp on English who spits out fractured, stereotypically American references with desperation to win over a cynical, bloodthirsty crowd. Spielberg tackled the subject of World War II with great subtlety and grace with Empire of the Sun, a film that allowed him to use and subvert his sentimentality in brilliant fashion. In seeking to find the deromanticized truth of a necessary, horrid conflict, Spielberg only serves to weaken every interpretation of World War II.
As I said, this is not a bad film, per se—I still watch it from time to time without needing to be coerced into it—but it is a directionless one, and certainly his biggest dramatic misfire. Were it not so self-assured about itself, though, I might be inclined to forgive its excesses. But where Schindler's List and Amistad were prestige pictures, this is the first time you can actually catch Spielberg putting one eye on the viewfinder and another on Oscar gold. The best thing I can say about it is that Spielberg and Hanks went on to produce Band of Brothers, a miniseries large enough to contain the multitudes that are overstuffed and underdeveloped here. So, the single best aspect of Saving Private Ryan is that someone eventually made a smart version of it. Bully.
