Sweeping, majestic...yawn

Rating: 6/10 (13 September 2002)

To say that you don't like Speilberg is almost unamerican, certain to get you dismissed as an arty naysayer. How could you not love Jaws, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Schindler's List?
Indeed, how could you not. They are all honed and perfected in every possible way. Anything that you might not enjoy, that might not contribute to your complete and utter passive entertainment, has been sandpapered away, leaving a smooth, coated lozenge of American moviemaking. They are perfection personified.
And while that makes these films impossible to hate, it also makes them impossible to love, at least in the way that I love movies. I want my favorite films to push back, to argue with me, and with themselves. What has been lost in the process of perfection is personality, the willingness to fail, to be boring, or slow, or stupid, or half-baked. To write a line of bad dialogue, to cut a scene too short or too long. To risk an ugly shot in search of a mind blowing one, or to move the camera and risk a shaky scene. Godard, the anti Speilberg if there ever was one, did all of these things over and over. To watch a Godard film, even a truly awful one (and there were quite a few), is thrilling. To watch a bad Speilberg film (say, 1941) is numbing and unbearable, as the lack of personality simply shines through.
And then there is Schindler's List, Speilberg's 'art' film. Visually, it makes all manner of stylistic references to everyone from Kurosawa to Bergman (two decidely risk taking filmmakers), but spiritually it's closer in spirit to Lean's Lawrence of Arabia or Doctor Zhivago, 'quality' films where even the beauty is stifling. It seems designed, much like his action blockbusters, so that there is nothing bad you can say about it. Great photography abounds, but never in a way that makes you want to sit up and notice. It's like a series of postcards from the holocaust. It's emotionally wrenching, at times, but never in a way that demands that you become uncomfortable. And it builds up to a treacly ending that rings so false that it's almost embarrassing.
So there you go. I'm sure I've made some people hate me, but so be it.