Fantastic Tales of The Boy Wonder Who Grew Up

SPIELBERG (2017)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

In the 1970's, Steven Spielberg was the new boy wonder of filmmakers - an assured, enthusiastic, talented and young Hollywood film director who brought the house down with 1975's "Jaws" and 1977's "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," the former being a genre movie that redefined suspense and thriller mechanics of B movies and the latter with a certain wondrous, exhilarating take on aliens visiting Earth without zapping to us to death. In the early to mid-1980's, however, he reached stratospheric heights as the King of Popcorn movies, blockbusters that in retrospect prove he knew not just how to entertain the audience, he had reached the populist movement that was once reached by Frank Capra. Whether it was Indiana Jones' swashbuckling adventures that redefined the summer escapist movie model or another alien tale of a lonely extra-terrestrial on Earth who wants to phone home, Spielberg wowed us with eye-popping spectacles and sentiment and genuine emotion. But his filmography started to include more serious work even in the 80's with his superb and controversial adaptation of Alice Walker's "The Color Purple" or his epic "Empire of the Sun." The tone changed extensively in the 1990's with "Schindler's List," a profoundly moving Holocaust story of a Nazi businessman who decided to save 1100 Jewish lives. Ever since then, Spielberg occasionally dabbled in escapism but his pop movies also had remnants of real-life terror using the prism of 9/11 with respect to aliens and privacy invasion namely the deliriously entertaining "Minority Report" and the frantic and effectively downbeat "War of the Worlds."

"Spielberg," which is written and directed by Susan Lacy, traces Steven Spielberg's career from his early days in suburbia making home movies, to his parents' divorce (reasons which were revealed only recently), to his days of making TV movies like "Duel," to hanging with the Movie Brats club (which included Brian De Palma, Martin Scorsese, George Lucas, to name a few), to making films that either were thrillingly escapist or serious-minded or both. Spielberg admits to not being the right director for "The Color Purple" (he was shy of showing some sex scenes, which he later depicted in films like "Schindler's List" and "Munich") though he doesn't share his thoughts on one of a couple of colossal disasters in his career, the dull and frenetic "Hook." He is shocked that nobody caught on with "1941," a bizarre comedy of Pearl Harborian proportions (one that John Wayne turned down due to its un-American attitude).

What is most fascinating aside from his films is Spielberg's upbringing as a Jewish kid who faced more than the occasional anti-Semitic remark. Therefore, as a result, Spielberg rejected his Judaism only until he made "Schindler's List" in 1993. Even more startling is that his parents divorced due to his mother having an affair with his uncle! This fact was unbeknownst to Spielberg and his sisters until very recently - their father claimed he was divorcing her but nobody knew Mama Spielberg was the real culprit. Considering Spielberg's films have touched on personal themes of divorce and father-son estrangement, this may have all played out very differently had the truth come out early in his childhood instead of when he reached his 60's.

 As for select film choices, the behind-the-scenes panic of trying to make the fake shark work in "Jaws" is the stuff of legend where Spielberg had to prove himself as a director by physically shooting in the water as opposed to a soundstage. His defense of the moral ambiguity of "Munich" is compelling, more so than the rather uneven though well-made depiction of that terrorist tragedy in 1972. It is fun to see a restored print of Spielberg's first major short film, "Amblin," and to hear Lucas describing this new boy wonder as a little too Hollywood-ish. I also love never-before seen photos of Kate Capshaw, current wife of Spielberg's, standing by the Bearded One's side while making "Schindler's List." Also of note is the personal connection he had to making "Close Encounters," especially the young kid in it who screams "Crybaby!" at his father (Richard Dreyfuss). This was the same word Spielberg used at his teared-up father when divorce was announced.

At the end of day, director Susan Lacy (who interviewed many people in his life, including Spielberg himself) shares Spielberg's own words as the filmmaker who is a "patriot," a man who is concerned with "separation and reconciliation." I always think of Spielberg as the artist who evokes the working class Everyman from suburbia as the hero, a hero from a time when America was Exceptional but also where the hero always wanted to go home. Spielberg applied it to fantastic thrillers and adventure stories, wondrous tales of aliens (both peaceful and antagonistic), and then eventually migrated to real-life historical tales of missing boys during WWII, American soldiers fighting the Great War or U.S. Presidents trying to work within the confines of a democracy for the greater good. Sure, Spielberg did it with sentiment, style and audience manipulation at its very core but those are tools of American and sometimes European cinema. He is not just an artist of populist cinema, he also makes the best mainstream movies. He is our Frank Capra and our Cecil B. DeMille.