NO SEX PLEASE, I’M A MOVIE LEGEND
Steven Spielberg: A Life In Films Molly Haskell Yale €24
Steven Spielberg turned 70 at Christmas. Let’s hope he lives as long as his nearest directorial counterparts: Alfred Hitchcock made it to 80, Howard Hawks 81, and Frank Capra a ripe old 94 (although he made his final film 30 years before that).
Spielberg shows no sign of slowing down. As critic Molly Haskell blithely puts it in the introduction to this sincere but inessential monograph: ‘In his eighth decade on Earth, he is still making movies as fast as we can see them.’ Most film-makers can still only dream of having as much success as one of Spielberg’s flops. (His sappy 1989 romance Always took in $74 m.)
Haskell, the author of serious-minded books about cinema, has been charged with whizzing through Spielberg’s canon in 200 pages and joining the thematic dots (divorced parents, Peter Pan-like mother who ‘refused to grow up’, suburban ennui).
With zero access to her subject and little extra research beyond historian Joseph McBride’s definitive biography, at one point the author is reduced to guessing how much Spielberg’s first wife Amy Irving might have made from their 1989 divorce. (She describes it, in less than sisterly terms, as a ‘windfall’.)
However, since McBride’s 2011 update, Spielberg has directed five films including Lincoln, Bridge Of Spies and The BFG (the latter pair starring his latest muse, Mark Rylance). The more highbrow The Kidnapping Of Edgardo Mortara (also starring Rylance) is due this year and filming has wrapped on sci-fi adventure Ready Player One (also with Rylance). I’m exhausted just thinking about having to watch them all.
If A Life In Films has a nominal angle, it’s in the name of Yale’s Jewish Lives – a series of books on notable Jewish people of which this is a part. Haskell is nevertheless quick to sideline Spielberg’s Judaism in favour of his ‘natural ecumenism, a generosity of spirit’. In precis, the religion of his family (his Orthodox Jewish grandparents came to America from Ukraine in the early 1900s and the family relocated to a ‘mostly Christian’ suburb of New Jersey in 1949) was ‘denied, then embraced’ by this neurotic child of the Fifties, who came to ‘cherish Christmas as an allembracing symbol of American togetherness’. From the July 4 celebrations jeopardised in his 1975 film Jaws, public holidays seem to follow Spielberg around. His output may have darkened since the pivotal Schindler’s List – with AI, Minority Report, and Munich – but his blockbusters somehow always still feel like suitable viewing for a family Christmas, as they rarely feature sex. Indeed, Haskell describes him as ‘anti-erotic’.
She highlights the significance of anthropomorphic 1986 animation An American Tail, which Spielberg’s company Amblin co-produced. In it, the Mousekewitz family emigrate to the US from Russia on the promise that there are no cats in this promised land for rodents. There is an underlying theme of persecution. ‘Often,’ Haskell writes, perceptively, ‘Spielberg expressed parts of himself in films he produced that might be too frightening or risqué for the mainstream audience he sought.’ Indeed, a book zipping through just his producer’s-hat films might have made for a more vital tome.
‘His blockbusters somehow always feel like suitable viewing for a family Christmas’