Spielberg’s “lost” treasures
Though it’s tempting to dwell upon Steven Spielberg’s superior visual aesthetics—his mellifluous and unstudied reimagining of the Ford and Lean “scene” in War Horse, the extra-dimensional lighting and thrillingly untethered camera of Tintin—it’s the storytelling project that distinguishes both films.
A mark of what jazz musician Kenny Werner calls effortless mastery, Spielberg’s facility renders the impression of a relaxed spontaneity, an immediacy that completely belies the artistic maturation, thoughtfulness and the natural aptitude underlying it. As he did in 1993 (Jurassic Park and Schindler’s List), then again in 1997 (Lost World, Amistad), 2002 (Catch Me If You Can, Minority Report) and 2005 (War of the Worlds, Munich), Spielberg has achieved one of those double-down years not seen since the days of the studio masters (see Preston Sturges or John Ford’s ’40s). He traversed hours of daunting movie terrain without seeming to waste a single shot while preserving a rollicking Raiders of the Lost Ark pace in Tintin and the deceptive simplicity and story-space intimacy of War Horse.
The news that the once redoubtable American Society of Cinematographers ignored both Spielberg films in favor of trendy, unremarkable and insider nominees (a sure sign that the Academy will follow) is, as expected, execrable. That’s no longer a matter of mere prejudice or professional envy: It’s entirely possible that Spielberg doesn’t impress his colleagues because they’re no longer his fellow artists—or, rather, they’re not really in his class.
Spielberg now makes movies for the blind. Remember how Ford dared black-and-white and tableaux vivants in 1941 for How Green Was My Valley—a masterpiece War Horse hearkens and recollects—yet Arthur C. Miller was not forgotten by awards season, as, apparently, virtual camera operator Spielberg and the great Janusz Kaminski will be. While other filmmakers gloat over box office numbers and seem content to impact the business (something Spielberg accomplished as early as Jaws, the first summer release in history to become the year’s biggest blockbuster), Spielberg settles for nothing less than influencing the art.
In The Adventures of Tintin, Spielberg deinfantilizes adolescent adventure by remembering and reimagining Hergé’s pre-war comic book rather than revising it for modern delectation. Contrary to the way his work is always mischaracterized, Spielberg understands the youthful yearning for participation in the adventure of adulthood.
He elevates the yarn’s levels of visual and narrative sophistication. Cub reporter Tintin pulls a pistol to greet dastardly interlopers with the familiar ease that Indiana Jones tossed a revolver into his luggage. He embraces real-world comic references to rum, tobacco, whiskey breath and the French Foreign Legion (a Frank Sinatra song every modern should rediscover), rescuing the story from the perils of moralistic American P.C. when the genre is on the precipice of being lost forever. It’s a sonorous echo of the American serial genre, filtered through the Old World and coming back in mesmerizing modern style.
Spielberg’s triumph in War Horse is literal, figurative and moral clarity of vision. In his sensitive handling of Great War realism and the exquisite depiction of Albert’s youthful earnestness, unworldliness and decency, Spielberg corrects an adult genre gone fatuous, cynical and fashionably nihilistic. He teaches the lesson on how to corral a galloping metaphor of innocence lost without ever seeming precious by returning to the deceptively simple style of the masters: Ford and Lean and even the underappreciated Clarence Brown, none of whom (heretical spoiler to follow) could command an action sequence the likes of the one in War Horse as Joey, terrified by tank and trench, is lost in No Man’s Land. In contrast, Spielberg depicts the battle death of gentleman Captain Nicholls by showing galloping Joey’s empty saddle. He selects notes like a jazz master soloing.
Spielberg’s stripping the movies of Hollywood’s overwrought style and anti-war agitprop—his humanistic judiciousness—has the contrary effect of strengthening the repellent horror and making the story’s points about the many faces of courage. Just as he deployed contrasting iconographic resonance of the tireless American Indiana Jones attacking a Panzer headlong on horseback—the cowboy in the fedora against Nazis in helmets—Spielberg showing a team of horses forced to literally break their hearts to pull gargantuan field artillery up a hill ranks among the most persuasive and tragic images in anti-war movie memory. The fact that Joey’s life depends on either that or pulling ambulances underscores the futility of battle without the easy irony.
Now, Spielberg turns Tintin sequels over to lesser directors, having exhausted the comic’s meaning yet leaving an indelible watermark that other directors would be foolish to blemish (particularly Peter Jackson, whose sequel should, for starters, be shaken out of his nauseating King Kong computer-game camera swooping).
If Spielberg pipes up at all about his movies’ maltreatment, it will be on behalf of the artists who deserve more than dismissal-by-proxy for working with him. America’s greatest film artist is its most humble. As War Horse’s writers would have it, “Think how brave he is, refusing to be proud.”
