Spielberg is so phenomenally successful that he has, in a sense, become his own most fabulous creation. The press has been going gaga in his glow. The Lost World is just a movie, but it's being talked about as yet another gold brick in Spielberg's castle in the sky. Whether it's any good is considered almost beside the point. What really matters is that castle.
Spielberg is probably the greatest entertainer in the history of film. He has said that his success is because he thinks like his audience, but it would be closer to the truth to say that, at his best, he is able to be his own ideal audience and continually astonish himself.
It was, perhaps, easier for him to astonish himself in the beginning--before he became Midas Inc. The TV movie Duel and Sugarland Express and Jaws were kinetic jaunts directed by a prodigy almost deliriously high on his own prowess. It's as if Spielberg made these films by asking before each setup, "How can I direct this scene in the most exciting way possible?" When he later made his great science-fantasy movies, he was still trying to astonish himself--and us--but in a less kinetic frenzy. He was interested in wowing us more with the force of his wonder than with the play of his pyrotechnics. E.T. and Close Encounters were beautiful movies because his magic act was linked to something beyond technique--which came so easily that perhaps it no longer meant anything to him.
Later, when the wonderment started to look processed, in such films as Always and Hook, there was not even the phenomenal technique to fall back on. The films, which were not commercial hits, looked like they were made by a superannuated child-man. Suddenly, it became okay for his true believers to talk up Spielberg as a "personal" filmmaker, as if the working-out, however convoluted, of his themes of childhood regret and parental abandonment was valuable all by itself.
The recent biographies and the Time cover story still go in for this sort of thing: Spielberg is an auteur who makes elaborately personal movies disguised as big, juicy commercial fabrications. But is this true? It's obvious that, say, The Lost World and Schindler's List touch on Spielberg's memories of absent fathers, or anti-Semitism in junior high school, or whatever. But does this, by definition, make them "personal" films? Thematically, Hook, a reworking of Peter Pan, is probably the most "personal" of Spielberg's movies--yet he's so disengaged from it that it comes across as perhaps his least personal. With Spielberg, his films are at their most personal when, as a filmmaker, he's most charged up by what he's showing us. In this sense, Jaws is more personal than Hook.
The truth is that I don't really want to see Spielberg make personal movies, at least not the type his deep-dish critics respond to. And although I admired Schindler's List and look forward to Amistad, I don't really want to see him become the kind of socially conscious "artist" Hollywood admires. Spielberg has taken the rap for almost singlehandedly turning movies into theme parks, but some of his parks are a lot more spacious and dazzling than the carefully appointed cottages in Hollywood's prestige-picture circuit. To praise him for having arrived as an artist with Schindler's List is, I think, to misunderstand what kind of artist he is; it condescends to the playful glories of his best earlier work. I'm not crazy about The Lost World, but I'm glad Spielberg followed Schindler's List with it. It demonstrates, at least, that he isn't angling to be the first film director to win the Nobel Peace Prize. He has taken so long to break adolescence that he should be in no hurry to turn elder statesman.
The Lost World: Jurassic Park
Directed by Steven Spielberg; with Jeff Goldblum, Julianne Moore, Vanessa Lee Chester, Pete Postlethwaite, Vince Vaughn, Richard Attenborough, Arliss Howard and Peter Stormare.
Rated
