Spielberg's spatial experiment, yet another failure

Rating: Null/10 (7 October 2007)

Having made enough money off his escapist films, Spielberg set out in the early 80s to be thought of as a serious film-maker. One who innovates or invents some new form of narrative progression.
The irony, of course, is that whenever Spielberg sets out to "seriously" and self-consciously experiment with cinematic form, he makes total crap, whilst whenever he sets out to make a simple escapist film, he often revolutionises film in some way. (if you consider sustained sadism, CGI and blockbuster mechanics beneficial, let alone truly revolutionary.)
"The Terminal", despite its simple premise, is a very experimental film. Here Spielberg is playing with the notion of cinematic space. Film as an environment and environment as central character.
All "serious" film-makers have at least one purely architectural film. Welles has "The Trial", Kubrick has "The Shining", Polanski has "The Tenant", Lumet has "12 Angry Men", Hitchcock has "Rear Window", Fincher has "Panic Room" (failure), Altman has "Gosford Park" (amongst many others), Cameron has "Titanic", Scorsese has "Gangs of New York", Curtiz has "Casablanca", De Palma has "Snake Eyes" etc etc.
Now Spielberg and Scorsese have been evolving along the same lines since the 80s, and so when Scorsese's "Gangs of New York" hit the screens, Spielberg thought it high time to make a spatial movie of his own.
But what type of spatial movie? Should he go the Hitchcock route? Should he go the Welles route? Should he go the Altman route? No, he goes the Kubrick route (probably because he's a big fan of "The Shining") and decides to invest allegorical meaning into his environmental space. And so instead of "Hotel as model of America" (The Shining) we have "Airport as model of the world" (The Terminal).
Thus, Spielberg inserts little symbolic episodes, the notion of getting real and false images (photographs, signatures and passports), symbolic quests for love and identity, and tries to weave various fable like strands into the whole thing. But it doesn't work at all because these things are all above Spielberg's head. He has no gift for filming dialogue, let alone complex allegories.
Spielberg is a serious student of cinema and he's aware of these various cinematic notions because he's seen countless masters do them. His problem is that he's trying to repeat past experiments instead of conducting those of his own.
Look, for example, at the difference between "ET" and "Empire of the Sun". "ET" is about an alien separated from his parents and "Empire" is about a boy separated from his parents. One is an artistically honest film (despite being about aliens!), the other is a self-conscious and failed attempt at semiotics. "Empire" is about an unreliable narrator (Bale) and the merging of false memories and fantasies, "ET" is about an artist (Spielberg) putting his true fantasies and feelings on screen. One is Lynch territory, the other Truffaut.
"Honest Spielberg" has a natural gift for "ET", whilst "serious Spielberg" has only a basic, distant understanding of "Empire". These polarised Spielberg identities are present in "The Terminal". On one hand it wants to be a serious allegory, on the other, it's just a cutesy feel-good comedy, a big budget rip off of "Moscow on the Hudson", Herzog's "Stroszek" and a couple works by Tati.
The main reason for these problems is that Spielberg works too fast. You can't imbue something with meaning and thought if you don't honestly put thought into it. The result will always be lightweight.
But ignoring allegory, "The Terminal" fails on a literal level as well. Its comedy is juvenile and at times cringe-worthy, and the romance between Tom Hanks and Zeta Jones is handled ineptly. But again, that's nothing new. Spielberg has always handled sexuality with a very strong sense of awkwardness. For example, the laughable sex scenes in "Munich", Matt Damon's "boob recollection" at the end of "Saving Private Ryan", the lesbians in "Color Purple", the romance in "Always" or the "sex scene" in the aircraft's cockpit in "1941". The romantic scenes and "F-bomb jokes" in "Catch Me If You Can" are likewise particularly awkward.
But most of all, "The Terminal" is a giant waste of money. Constructing such a beautiful set and then failing to use it properly is very offensive. But then, has Spielberg ever conveyed a tangible sense of true 3d space? Think of "AI" with its obvious sound-stages, or "Minority Report", where strong rays of white light are used to block off the sets. Do that film's "car factory" and "jet pack" action sequences take place in Spielberg's future city or do they feel like self contained sets, with no bridges or linkages between them? Oddly, despite being a master of camera movement, these is never the sense of any spatial world in Spielberg's films. Instead his locations are all cut off, a series of disconnected set pieces rather than tangible environmental spaces. His films rely on the power of the edit, of the cut, to force his imagery.
And yet with "The Terminal" Spielberg has a vast set at his disposal and nevertheless fails to charter space with any sense of intelligence. Can you imagine what Altman, De Palma or Welles would do with a set like this?
6/10 - Too long, not funny and lacks allegorical meat. There are a few good jokes at the beginning, all involving Tom Hanks' lack of understanding the English language, but ultimately Spielberg has just infantilized Hanks and treated him as yet another Spielbergian lost boy. Why not just re-watch "Moscow on the Hudson", Herzog's "Stroszek" or anything by Jacques Tati? Why is Spielberg continually trying to convince us he's the new Capra, the new Tati, when in reality he's more of a gleeful sadist along the lines of Peckinpah?