Fascinating Disaster

Rating: Null/10 (8 March 2001)

Spoilers herein.
Comedy is hard. When someone can't do it, it indicates that they are not really masters of their craft. Some of the bastions of Hollywood are embarrassed by this. Harrison Ford for instance, and here the widely worshiped Spielberg. Most of the failures at comedy are simple failures -- uninteresting. (Or they just work with an adolescent audience.) But this one is interesting.
Spielberg is famous for his notion that films are not like books. They are not supposed to be intelligent and complex, but simple. He promotes the much studied theory of `high concept.' The idea is that any film should be comprehensibly described in 25 words. Further, in his own version of HC, the film is not only storyboarded, but is EXPLICABLE by the storyboards. In other words, the film exists first as a comic book, so MUST be without depth.
The good news is that he can focus, focus, focus, and the product is heavily cinematic. You can understand his successes in these terms: `Jaws,' `Close Encounters,' `Raiders,' `Jurassic,' even his so-called `serious' films: `Schindler,' `Amistad,' the first 20 minutes of `Ryan.' I appreciate the fact that he can create a single vision and sustain it through the work in terms of an image vocabulary. So many directors seem to lack this skill. But his effect is always cheap, and its success in implanting itself in our minds and culture cheapens us.
It is harder to see this flaw with films that we like, for instance the Indiana films. That's why failures like this and `Hook' are so important. It helps to remind us why we like stupid stuff when we think we are being serious. But most of us -- if the thing is at root supposed to be funny -- it has to be smart underneath.
And it is why Spielberg isn't important to the history of film, except in adding some visual slang. Zemekis, the collector of the gags which comprise this film, is a lesser Spielberg. This same mentality is the core of `Gump.'
John Williams does another of his shameless ripoffs of Bernstein, specifically `The Great Escape.'