THE NEW film by Steven Spielberg, The Terminal, which stars Tom Hanks as a stranded airport traveller, simply flicks up the name of the studio and the film on a departures board before beginning. The reason for such brevity, says Spielberg, is that lengthy titles spoil the fun. “Audiences are telling us: ‘Just get started’.”
To judge by the sub-par performance of The Terminal in America this summer, audiences also seem to be saying: “Just finish.” British moviegoers can judge for themselves when the film opens here on September 3.
Something has happened to Spielberg en route to his glorious twilight, and it’s not the complaint that dogged him in the 1990s — that he had lost his sense of mischief and become a dogmatic melodramatist. No, it concerns his ability to wrap up a story concisely and with generic decorum.
To start with, the length. All his films run long now, even his rompish comedies. One has to go back 15 years to Always to find a Spielberg film that is not more than two hours long. But the problem is not self-importance or waning energy. Minority Report and Catch Me if You Can both felt like films from someone 20 years younger; the latter also had a striking, animated, full opening title sequence. No, the problem is the padding to be found in the third act, or more accurately the clutter of codas that pack the audience in cotton-wool to make sure nobody leaves feeling anything other than comfortable.
Cinema’s greatest crowd-pleaser has turned into its greatest people pleaser. The clinical term for the condition is emotophobia, defined as an excessive or irrational fear of negative feelings, but “feel-gooditis” serves just as well.
Advertisement
The original ending for The Terminal was so preposterously feel-good that it was actually reshot and toned down after test screenings. But it still lays on the Capra corn with a trowel. Cheering airport workers appear out of nowhere, tough guys providentially turn kind.
Spielberg used to believe in crisp endings. E.T. ends with a torrentially sad farewell, Empire of the Sun with a muted, ambiguous reunion. His first feature, The Sugarland Express, is his only out-and-out comic tragedy, but he was not averse to the ambiguous coda. The hysterical victory dance of truck-menaced Dennis Weaver at the end of Duel dissolves to a sunset which finds him sitting dazed on a clifftop. Later, the antics of Raiders of the Lost Ark end, in a nod to Citizen Kane, with the all-powerful ark being consigned to a government warehouse by indifferent bureaucrats.
Since then Spielberg’s endings have become increasingly enslaved to upbeat endings, even when the genre doesn’t require it. His futuristic thriller Minority Report must be the only noir to end with an image of rustic bliss. (The first thing Ridley Scott removed for his director’s cut of Blade Runner was the studio-inserted final shot of green trees.)
The more ill-suited a feel-good ending, the longer it takes to contort the narrative to justify it.
Spielberg’s science-fiction fable AI: Artificial Intelligence could have ended perfectly after two hours with its robot-child expiring on the ocean floor by the statue of the Blue Fairy, a figure he is convinced can make him real. It is a poignant and ironic end for a machine who yearns to be loved, for in failing he becomes even more human. The film’s narrator even spells it out, saying it is “part of the great human flaw to wish for things that don ‘t exist”.
Advertisement
But Spielberg added another 25 minutes to the story, going 2,000 years into the future to find a race of super-robots who can finally give the robot-boy what he wants — a creepy reunion with his long-dead mother. It kills the film because it is so craven and so unnecessary, the worst kind of unearned wish-fulfilment.
The quiddity of Spielberg’s popcorn genius may well be the scene in E.T. where the bicycles take to the air. It is the magic carpet ride brought to suburbia for those who believe that dreams come true.
But the second half of his career has seen a more mature, morally complex filmmaker in between the dinosaur carnivals. Even more so, it seemed, when he found a story could be intimate without being static, so doing drama didn’t mean having to sacrifice his bravura style of kinetic wide-angles. (This might be why The Terminal feels so fundamentally not a Spielberg story, because it is all about being stuck in one place.)
Not surprisingly, the complaisant finale is there like a safety net in his first serious film, The Color Purple. But the story peaks when Whoopi Goldberg finds the courage to leave her tyrannical husband. What follows is a 25-minute series of feel-good resolutions, including a lucky inheritance and a gospel choir set-piece out of The Blues Brothers. They remove all the sting. The big mother-and-child reunion scene, complete with slow-motion running through a field, is not a healing balm on pain and loss, but syrup on syrup.
Spielberg’s own human flaw is very similar to his robot-child hero — he has a sentimental streak to crack the Moon. It it hard to know where to look, for example, during the coda scene of Saving Private Ryan, when the misty-eyed veteran turns to his wife and blubs: “Tell me I’ve led a good life. Tell me I’m a good man.”
Advertisement
It is not the line so much as the gushing staging of the scene that feels so false.
Even Schindler’s List, an otherwise impeccably restrained film, trips up with the climactic scene of Schindler’s departure. “I could have done more,” he sobs in front of the entire camp. “I threw away so much money, you have no idea.”
Again, it is not the sentiment that rings false, but the staging. The lines sound like a quiet confession Schindler might make to his wife later, but they are inflated into a soaring, sobbing set piece complete with group hug.
Schindler’s List used to seem to be the signpost to a more experimental future, but now it looks increasingly like a detour. Spielberg’s next project is an update of The War of the Worlds with Tom Cruise, confirming he is a director who craves mega-hits above all else.
He is an artist with the soul of a tycoon, and an insecure soul at that. A film-maker who keeps trying to win an audience he has already won.
Advertisement
THE ONES THAT GOT AWAY
White Lightning (1973) Car chase flick with Burt Reynolds. Spielberg passed on it as he thought it was too close to his man v truck movie Duel.
The Taking of Pelham 123 (1974) He was in the frame for this subway heist movie until United Artists thought it “director proof” so gave it to journeyman Joseph Sargent.
Advertisement
California Split (1974) While still in TV, he worked with the writer Joseph Walsh on a gambling script which stalled after Walsh clashed with MGM. The writer later made it with Robert Altman.
Lucky Lady (1975) Too busy with Jaws to direct this 1930s romp about rum-runners with Burt Reynolds and Liza Minnelli. It bombed as a Stanley Donen film.
Magic (1978) Richard Attenborough directed Anthony Hopkins as the ventriloquist controlled by his dummy. It might have been Spielberg and Robert De Niro.
Big (1988) Tale of a kid in an adult’s body was scripted by Spielberg’s sister Anne and developed for Harrison Ford. Brother Steven withdrew, apparently not to overshadow her achievement.
Rain Man (1998) Worked for a year with Dustin Hoffman, Tom Cruise and writer Ron Bass but left to honour his commitment to the Indiana Jones franchise.
Cape Fear (1991) Planned a remake of the 1950s thriller, then handed it over to Martin Scorsese. De Niro as menacing Max Cady was Spielberg’s suggestion.
The Bridges of Madison County (1995) Originally announced as a Spielberg project but Clint Eastwood eventually directed and starred with Meryl Streep.
Memoirs of a Geisha (2004) Spent years developing Arthur Golden’s novel. Now being directed by Rob (Chicago) Marshall.