Spielberg: Hook

WHAT DOES THE PROTAGONIST WANT? Peter Banning is a lawyer who wants to be a good father but does not know how to do so. Hook is about the process Peter undergoes to become a good father.

The structure of Hook is, like Always, one of Spielberg’s few three-act dramas, and goes like this:

ACT I (0:00-51:00) This is the longest first act in Spielberg’s career, and takes Peter all the way from being a lawyer in Los Angeles to hosting a benefit for an orphan’s hospital in London to being captured by Tinkerbell and taken to Neverland to being challenged by Captain Hook. I’m tempted to break this act up into smaller pieces — at 24:00 Peter’s children are kidnapped, which marks a change of direction for him, at 30:00 he learns that he is Peter Pan, at 35:30 he is taken to Neverland. We could say that Part 1 is "Peter runs away from his children," climaxing in Peter’s children being kidnapped, Part 2 is "Peter pursues his children" which gets him, reluctantly, to Neverland and face-to-face with their kidnapper.

ACT II (51:00-1:31:00) Peter is given a challenge by Hook: become the real Peter Pan again in three days and then come back and fight me, or else I’ll kill your children. Peter is whisked away (by mermaids) to the Lost Boys’ island, where many colorful antics ensue. While Peter deals with his "training," Hook concentrates on brainwashing Peter’s son Jack, turning Jack into his own son instead of Peter’s. Peter starts to get the hang of being Peter Pan again when Hook stages a baseball game to win Jack over to his "side." Peter witnesses the ball game and sees that he’s lost Jack’s heart, which brings us to the "end of Act II low point."

ACT III (1:31:00-2:15:00) Peter learns his backstory (amnesia — where would movies be without it?) and regains his Pan powers. He leads an attack of the Lost Boys against Hook and his pirates, turns his son back to his side and defeats Hook and takes his children back to London.

NOTES: The Peter Pan stories are some of the deepest, most durable, most delightful, and saddest in the English language. The joy and tragedy inherent in the story of a boy who won’t grow up and his effect on other peoples’ lives seems like a natural for Spielberg. Yet Hook, in spite of being typically thematically dense (issues of time and aging, "work" and "play", parenthood and childhood suffuse every scene in the movie), takes the great resonance of Pan and makes it feel glib, facile, superficial. Spielberg’s uncanny ability to elicit emotion is everywhere, but often the tears feel unearned — they feel well and truly jerked.

The problem, I think, starts with the premise. In a classic "stand the idea on its head" move, the script has Peter Pan be a grownup. Which strikes me as "clever" instead of an actual good idea. Because once you make that decision, the movie isn’t really about Peter Pan any more, it’s a movie about a middle-aged man who must become Peter Pan, or rather, "act like" Peter Pan, in order to rescue his children.

Peter Banning is caught in the same bind many men are caught in — to be a good father he must provide for his family, but to provide for his family he must spend time away from them. Except for Peter, he’s fleeing them, using his work as an excuse. He’s lawyer in the middle of "the biggest deal of his life" (aren’t they all) and his family is a burden to his work. All well and good, dramatically. Where does the script go wrong?

Peter attends his daughter’s school play (Peter Pan) but takes a business call on his shoebox-sized cell phone during it. He schedules a meeting during his son Jack’s baseball game and promises to attend both. He makes the meeting but, of course, misses the ball game.

And the screenwriter says "baseball game?" Wait, he’s attending his daughter’s school play, which must necessarily take place during the school year, and he’s taking the family to London soon, where it is snowing, this must be Christmas break, yes? Who is playing baseball in late December? Peter mentions something about the game being part of the "Santa Series," which only makes the error dramaturgically worse — in order for Peter to miss his son’s baseball game, the script invents a late-December baseball series. Why does it have to be baseball? Why can’t he miss his son’s volleyball game, or his soccer game? Weren’t schoolboys playing soccer in 1991? The answer is: they want the beat to scan quickly. "Father doesn’t attend son’s baseball game" is a beat that requires no further explanation — because it is, of course, a cliche.

Much is made of the notion that Peter is "all grown up," but we see in his "office scene" that he has not lost all sense of play — he has a "cell phone duel" with a co-worker at the elevator bank. It seems that Peter is only "all business" when he’s around his family.

The script also cheats by making Peter’s "deal" something his wife disapproves of. I presume that the wife doesn’t disapprove of her jetting-to-London-for-Christmas lifestyle, so apparently the Banning family has plenty of money without Peter’s new "deal of his life." This is convenient, making Peter not just work too hard but work too hard at getting things he doesn’t actually need. We are meant to understand that "work is bad" and so again, the script stacks the deck dramatically.

(On the plane to London, it is noted that Peter is afraid to fly — but how many have noticed that the pilot making announcements over the PA is Captain Hook?)

Once in London, the aged Wendy notes that Peter, in his job as a corporate lawyer, has "become a pirate" — that is, one of the "bad guys" of the Pan narrative. This, again, is clever but does not resonate as it should, for reasons we shall see later.

(The other day I was looking for something to watch with my son Sam, and Sam asked if there were any Spielberg movies he hadn’t seen yet. I breezed past Schindler’s List and Munich — he is 7, after all — and took out Hook. I showed him the box: "It’s a comedy about Peter Pan — but he’s grown up!" Sam got a confused look on his face and asked if he could play Lego Star Wars on the computer instead.)

It is announced by the wife that Peter "needs to spend time with his kids," as they are growing up fast and soon won’t want him around. Time, time, time, ever encroaching. And I wonder, where is there a movie narrative about parents who need to spend less time with their kids?

As Peter and his wife attend a testimonial dinner on the behalf of Wendy (a scene that includes a shot of a building-shaped cake being pushed up an aisle — a bizarre, out-of-the-blue reference to, of all things, Kurosawa’s The Bad Sleep Well) Capt. Hook invades Wendy’s home and kidnaps Peter’s children.

Why? That is, why now? Why is Hook kidnapping Peter’s children now? How did he get to London? Can he travel back and forth between Neverland and our world at will? If so, why London? Why not kidnap Peter’s children in Los Angeles, where they live every day? And why this night? Did he know Peter would be out of the house? How? If he knows so much about Peter’s comings and goings, why is he so surprised to learn that he’s grown up? For that matter, how could Hook hatch a devious plan to kidnap Peter’s children and not understand that that means that Peter is grown up?

Anyway, the children are kidnapped and the police are notified. This, we understand, is a dead end, not because we know about Hook’s involvement, but because the chief inspector on the case is Phil Collins, who may be many things in this life, but "great detective" is probably not one of them.

Wendy takes Peter aside to inform him that he is, in fact, Peter Pan, the Peter Pan of legend. Peter doesn’t believe her, even though she’s played by Maggie Smith, who can make just about anything believable. Instead, Peter must be physically dragged to Neverland by Tinkerbell, who shows up later that night. And so we see that Peter may not believe his "mother" (that is, Wendy) but he can be convinced by Tinkerbell, who, as it turns out, has a life-long crush on Peter. And so a dynamic is set into motion regarding a boy’s psychological development — there comes a point where he won’t listen to his mother but will follow a girl anywhere. This notion eventually comes back full circle when we learn that Peter was lured from Neverland by the sight of Wendy’s daughter Moira, giving up eternal youth for the sake of earthly love (and never mind that Moira is, essentially, his sister — ick).

Peter arrives in Neverland, where he finds, in the town square, the giant crocodile who ate Hook’s hand dead, stuffed and turned into a broken clock. The croc/clock is a major part of the Pan ethos, representing death in the form of time — it was not an accident that the crocodile had swallowed a clock in Peter Pan. In Hook, Hook has killed the croc, and killed time as well — we will eventually learn that he has banished all timepieces from Neverland.

Which leads me to, I think, an important question. Hook, by the end of the movie, is shown to have aged dramatically since Peter last saw him. Why? Do the rules of Neverland not apply to him? Because he is already "grown up," does that mean that he will, in Neverland, grow old and die? Does it mean that his fellow pirates will also grow old and die? If so, why haven’t they?

I ask because, from the moment we meet Hook, it’s clear that he hasn’t "grown up." He’s still playing — at being a pirate. His ship never leaves the dock, his self-made pirate society goes on all around him, he’s long since gotten bored with raiding villages and killing Neverlanders — it’s obviously all just a game to him. He’s the "bad guy" in Neverland, that’s his role, and he’s grown bored with it. That’s why he wants his fight with Peter, and that’s why, when he sees that Peter has forgotten who he is, he agrees to Tinkerbell’s deal to get Peter back in fighting shape. For Hook this is all a game, a game he’s won a long time ago and gotten bored with.

So yes, Peter is brought to Hook, Hook has Peter’s children, Peter is unable to fly, Hook is disappointed, Tinkerbell makes a deal with Hook to get Peter back in shape.

Peter is taken to the island of the Lost Boys, where the production design, already a little too-too for my tastes, threatens to sink the entire movie, and the casting takes a disastrous turn. The Lost Boys of Hook all turn in standard-issue Hollywood "kid performances", mugging and gesturing, "helping out" the scene by indicating emotions rather than honestly expressing them. In the Lost Boy scenes, it’s hard to believe that this movie is directed by the same man who made E.T., who got an incredible performance from 3-year-old Cary Guffey in Close Encounters and who will get another one from Dakota Fanning in War of the Worlds.

Why do the Lost Boys of Hook have a skateboard park on their island? And a basketball hoop? And some kind of elaborate roller-coaster track? Who built such a thing? Not the boys, certainly — a construction project like that would take serious engineering skills. Yet there they all are, multi-colored and "wacky." Hook is the only instance I can find of Spielberg the director "talking down" to a young audience, cooking up kooky, overplayed, colorful antics to supposedly delight kids. Physical comedy of a Little Rascals variety ensues.

Hook, meanwhile, ponders what to do with the three days he has to kill. He vainly contemplates suicide, then instructs Peter’s children that their parents hate them. Maggie, the girl, is unreceptive to Hook’s brainwashing and is shunted offscreen — the better to concentrate on the father/son conflict. But then why have Maggie in the script at all?

Hook takes Jack to the "broken clock museum," where he allows Jack to work out his aggression against Peter by smashing timepieces with a mallet, compressing the symbols of grown-up Peter, clocks and death into one. Again, this is all clever on a scene-by-scene basis but the end result fails to resonate. Worse still, Hook stages a baseball game for Jack, to "seal the deal," make Jack his "son" — again, why? Hook wants to turn Jack from Peter why? He says the move is to improve his chances in the upcoming "war" against Peter, but the previous day Hook seemed unaware that Peter was a father — why would he have an understanding of the importance of fatherhood to Peter? Hook obviously isn’t a father and shows no interest in parenting — what is his endgame? Kill Peter and then Jack? And then what? He can’t kill Peter, not really — that would be the end of his game. And what does it mean, really, to be "killed" in Neverland, where no one ever grows old (except, apparently, Hook)? In the script’s quest for novelty, it upends the delicate balance of Peter Pan‘s exquisite symbology and makes it shallow and narcissistic.

(The Pan character is, of course, a first-rank narcissist, made explicit in Hook when Peter, having recovered his Pan-ness, gazes at his youthful reflection in a pond.)

(The Bad Sleep Well reference may not be the strangest in Hook. There is also a scene where the pirates are held spellbound by young Maggie singing a song of innocence on the dock — apparently a reference to, of all things, Paths of Glory.)

As Act II draws to a close, Peter understands that in order to save his child he must become a child — that fatherhood is, in part, a second childhood. This second childhood is harder than the first, because the father must be both innocent child and responsible adult. And again, it’s a clever notion but the script can’t seem to make up its mind — Peter recovers his memories of being Pan, but then immediately forgets why he had to do so, then just as quickly recovers that memory and charges off to save Jack. This back-and-forth seems to stem from the quasi-love-story between Peter and Tinkerbell, which, like the love story in Always, doesn’t quite land, is rushed and seems to slow the story down instead of creating additional tension. Tinkerbell, it seems, is supposed to represent the tragedy of lost innocence — when you no longer believe in fairies part of your soul is gone — but the emotions in the love-story scenes are forced, demanded instead of achieved.

Anyway, Peter regains his Pan powers (by conveniently tying his ability to fly with his desire to be a father) and leads an attack on Hook’s ship, and there are many colorful antics as the Lost Boys fight the pirates with weapons that are, essentially, toys. And Hook kills one of the Lost Boys, provoking Peter’s anger, but again, the beat doesn’t land because the rules of Neverlandare never properly outlined — does Hook really kill people? How does one die in a place where no one dies? Aren’t Hook’s activities really just play?

Peter gets Hook on the ropes and Hook indicates that he wishes to die. And perhaps that was his plan all along, to bring Pan back to Neverland so that he can have a glorious death, that, having played his game for too long, death is "the only adventure left." And this is, of course, the tragedy of a man who pretends he’s a child all his life — he misses out on maturity, on parenthood, on the life that Peter has back in Los Angeles.

In any event, Hook does not get his glorious death in battle, nor does he get his triumph over Pan. Instead, he is, somehow, devoured by the long-dead croc/clock and vanishes — the script has played too fast-and-loose with its own mythology and, finally, has no solution for Hook’s problem except to make him disappear, no longer a character but an empty symbol.

Peter, oddly, does not take the Lost Boys with him to back to London, even though they are, theoretically anyway, orphaned children in need of parenting. He leaves them in Neverland and passes along leadership to the oldest (or at least the biggest) of them, charging the boy with a kind of fatherhood, to "watch out for the little ones." As Peter takes off, the littlest Lost Boy says "That was a great game," indicating that, perhaps, tomorrow their "dead" comrade will play again and Hook will be back in his place and the whole cycle of play will begin again.