Spielberg: Artificial Intelligence: A.I. part 2
Act I of A.I. ends with the news of Monica’s son Martin awakening from his sleep. Act II (30:00 – 52:00) then deals with the consequences of that development. It also represents a first for a Spielberg movie — the narrative switches protagonists at the act break. Up to this point, it’s looked like Monica is the protagonist of A.I., but in the fade that occurs at 30:00 the point of view shifts decidedly to David, and will remain there for the rest of the movie (although it could be argued that it shifts again at the beginning of Act V).
Spielberg: Artificial Intelligence: A.I. part 1
WHAT DOES THE PROTAGONIST WANT? David is a little-boy robot who has been programmed to love a woman he believes to be his mother. When she rejects him he vows to do whatever it takes to gain her love. This, to his little-boy-robot mind, involves tracking down "the Blue Fairy," a character from Pinocchio, so that he, like Pinocchio, can become a "real boy." The result is Spielberg’s strangest curveball, a movie that combines the solid, earned, heartfelt sentiment of Spielberg with the cold, wicked, despairing cynicism of Kubrick (who developed the movie for years before turning it over to Spielberg). Parts of it are almost unbearably sad, other parts are almost as unbearably creepy. Like many "important" Spielberg movies, it has five acts.
Spielberg: Saving Private Ryan part 5
Act V of Saving Private Ryan goes from 2:07:00 to 2:42:27. Its structure is a little more complex than the previous three acts and in many ways it is a mirror of Act I. Each of the acts of Ryan has three "chapters" to it, but both Act I and Act V are weighted with extended battle sequences. Act I’s is 25 minutes long and is followed by two shorter chapters, Act V’s is slightly shorter, 21 minutes, and has only a 4-minute suspense sequence as a prelude, followed by a brief 4-minute epilogue. Both Act I and Act V are bookended, of course, by the "present-day" scenes in the Normandy cemetery. Spielberg being Spielberg, he "stands Act I on its head," making the Act V small where Act I’s was big, Act V about hand-to-hand struggle while Act I is about massive numbers of men overwhelming the odds. To take it further, Act V’s battle is about outmatched Americans defending a losing battle against a larger, more well-supplied force rather than Americans attacking a German defense position. It’s almost as though Spielberg, in Act V, puts us in the positions of the Germans in Act I — the shoe is on the other foot now, as it were, the heartless bastards of the pillbox have become the terrified GIs of the bridge at Ramelle.
Spielberg: Saving Private Ryan part 4
Act IV of Saving Private Ryan is its shortest and most quiet. It contains only one brief battle scene and a large chunk of "meet the cast." It goes from 1:44:00 to 2:07:00 and, like the previous two acts, has three sections, which I will call Meeting Ryan, Preparing for Battle and Edith Piaf.
Spielberg: Saving Private Ryan part 3
Act III of Saving Private Ryan lasts from 1:13:30 and goes until 1:40:00. Like Act II, it’s divided into three sections, which I will call The Plane(*), The Radar Station and Steamboat Willie.
Spielberg: Saving Private Ryan part 2
In all the excitement of Act I of Saving Private Ryan, I forgot to ask the all-important question: What does the protagonist want?
In Act I, of course, Capt Miller "wants" nothing more than "to take out that pillbox." To do this, he must risk his own life and the lives of dozens of his men, his metaphorical brothers and sons. It’s a first act not unlike the first acts of the Indiana Jones movies, a brilliantly-staged succession of purely physical actions — how does one retrieve a golden idol from a booby-trapped temple, how does one get from a Shanghai nightclub to an Indian village overnight, how does one take out a heavily-fortified pillbox from an inferior position.
This may be why some people dislike the opening of Ryan — narratively, all the 25-minute battle sequence does is show how Capt Miller took that pillbox. It could have been disposed of in a five-minute title sequence. Miller could then get his marching orders regarding Ryan by minute 10, the movie could have been an act, and a good half-hour, shorter. If it is not advancing the story of the saving of Private Ryan, what is that superlative opening sequence doing there?
Spielberg: Saving Private Ryan part 1
The more I look at it, the more I feel Saving Private Ryan is Steven Spielberg’s best movie. It’s not fun like Raiders, not fun like Jaws for that matter, and perhaps a tad less startlingly original than Close Encounters. It’s more emotionally devastating than Schindler or E.T., and less manipulative than both — it earns its sucker-punches several dozen times over. It’s a little earnest and occasionally leaden in its use of irony, but the execution — oh my lord, the execution. Conceptually, as a work of cinema there is little new, but Spielberg pushes his work as a director into ever-more sophisticated and surprising areas. The movie’s philosophy is simple — deceptively so — and presents a vision of wartime sacrifice and patriotism of unusual depth and complexity. Hold on, this is going to be really long.
Spielberg: Amistad part 2
Amistad has five acts with a free/captive theme running through. In Act I, Cinque frees his fellows and is then taken captive, in Act II, a number of people conspire to free Cinque, only to have the judge deciding the case replaced by the president. In Act III it is proven, through much diligence and hard work, that Cinque was captured and held illegally, but in Act IV the president acts once again, throwing out the court’s decision and forcing the case to the Supreme Court, where Cinque’s case finally triumphs. In 1997, the idea of a president gaming the court system, obstructing due process in order to achieve the verdict he desires in the face of a clear-cut injustice, was one an audience could cheerfully smirk at — oh, that wacky Martin Van Buren, what a jerk, what a loser. Ahem.
What does Spielberg do instead? He gives us a man in a situation. No, wait, he makes it even simpler. He gives us a nail, some fingers, and some eyes. The fingers and eyes belong to Cinque, we will learn, and we come upon him in his decisive moment. We discover Cinque as he is engaged in the easily-described physical task of removing the nail that attaches his chains to the deck of the ship. But wait, no, for the first few minutes we don’t even know Cinque is on a ship, there’s just him and the nail — his eyes, his fingers, his chains and the nail. This is great cinema, people. The lighting tells us it’s night, in a thunderstorm, and the sound eventually tells us it’s a ship, but all we get at first is the eyes, the fingers, the chains and the nail. The scene states Cinque’s problem in the simplest, most immediately physical terms possible: he is in chains and he’s nailed to the deck of a ship. Who would watch a movie about a man nailed to the deck of a ship and not want the man to free himself?
Once Cinque gets that long, long nail out, he undoes his chains, frees his fellow captives and leads a mutiny on board the Amistad (how ironic that amistad is almost amity, the island from Jaws? Both words mean “friendship”). The mutiny is fiercely ugly and violent — Spielberg does not hold back on Cinque’s rage — and the nail of the previous scene is replaced with a sword in the second. Spielberg seems to be saying that the simple action of removing a nail can develop, in the blink of an eye, into armed insurrection against an unjust state.
Spielberg makes an interesting choice in this opening sequence: the mutiny is carried out in a barrage of foreign languages, Mende (which is what Cinque speaks) vs Spanish (which is what the ship’s crew speaks). Spielberg makes the decision to subtitle the Spanish lines but leaves the Mende untranslated. So suddenly, the protagonist we so dearly identified with is made harsh and unknowable, while we’re allowed in on the thoughts of the Spanish-speaking crew. I’m guessing Spielberg’s goal is not to distance us from Cinque but to keep the scene historically accurate (the sequence is, in large part, about the miscommunication between the crew and the captives), to give us a sense of the times, where there might be Africans and Spanish and English and Americans all in the same waters, or even all on the same ship. But the result is distancing — we’re outside of the protagonist.
Still, the opening 17 minutes are stunning, and completely without any meaningful dialogue. The opening is what Spielberg does best, pure action describing a straightforward process: how does one kill a shark from a sinking boat, how does one welcome a fleet of flying saucers, how does one clear a city of its Jews, how does one go from being a bound captive to being the captain of a hijacked vessel? And then what does one do, once that vessel in in one’s control, but one has no sailing experience? This sequence, and the one in Act III describing Cinque’s kidnapping and transport, his journey through the slave trade, form the heart of Amistad and are its most successful passages.
Later on, when Cinque and his fellows are behind bars, we are treated to subtitles for their lines, as they give comic interpretations of white New England culture. Now Spielberg wants us on Cinque’s side again, wants us to see dour, prissy New Haven as Cinque sees it. This helps us identify with Cinque again, but it also presents the cliche of the “noble savage,” the innocent who knows more than the civilized. This problem comes up several times in Amistad, as Spielberg grants us and witholds from us subtitles for Cinque’s lines as he sees fit. In one scene we’ll be in his head, but in the next scene he’s opaque and unknowable, a genuine savage.
The other cliche that runs through Amistad is the “noble white liberal” performing the task of freeing the oppressed black man. Just as Cry Freedom tells the story of Steven Biko through the eyes of a white journalist and Mississippi Burning tells the story of the civil rights movement through the eyes of a pair of white FBI agents, Amistad spends a lot of its time worrying about the travails of the well-meaning white people who want Cinque to go free. Cinque gets demoted from “protagonist” to “inspiration,” and narrowly escapes becoming a “symbol.” Spielberg tries to get around this cliche by tempering it with complication — the lawyer isn’t an idealist, he’s just a property-rights lawyer doing his job, the ex-president is a cranky old man, the crusading Christian is more concerned with his political agenda than with the life of his client — but it makes the narrative work harder than it needs to and, again, distances us from the protagonist.
Amistad‘s genre is the courtroom drama, a form given to long speeches and dialogue-heavy confrontations, things that aren’t a natural fit for Spielberg, even more so when his protagonist cannot speak. After the pure action of the slave-trade scenes, the next most effective sequences are the ones dealing directly with Baldwin’s attempts to communicate with Cinque. In order to win Cinque’s case, Baldwin needs to know him, and as Cinque comes into focus, a fully dimensional human being appears, neither noble savage nor innocent victim, but a specific individual, different from his fellows but worlds away from his captors, placed into a ridiculous, unwinnable situation. As Cinque comes into focus to us, Cinque’s situation comes into focus for him. By Act V he reveals himself, through his interpreter, to be savvy, highly intelligent and articulate. He shows that he understands the legal process, the nature of the trial and the use of metaphor — but he still has to sit out the climax of his own movie while an old white man makes a flowery speech on his behalf.
Spielberg: Amistad part 1
WHAT DOES THE PROTAGONIST WANT? Cinque, the protagonist of Amistad, has a desire as basic as it gets: he’s been kidnapped and sold into slavery, and he would prefer that not be the case. Because this is a Spielberg movie, Cinque’s desire is expressed as a single-minded desire to get back to Africa and see his family again.
Because of a number of narrative choices Spielberg has made, some of them stemming from the nature of the story itself, Cinque is rendered into passivity, even paralysis — he’s held prisoner throughout most of the narrative, in chains most of the time he’s imprisoned. He cannot speak for himself due to a severe language barrier. Spielberg knows that a passive protagonist makes for a weak narrative, so he assigns a kind of tag-team of minor protagonists who undertake the job of fighting on Cinque’s behalf. A number of these minor protagonists are assigned significant screentime, and some of them are interesting, but their stories are all in support of the story of the primary, paralyzed protagonist. This is a bold, risky choice to make, and a brand-new strategy for Spielberg. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work. When Amistad connects, it is always with scenes involving primary protagonist Cinque and his personal struggle for freedom. When it bogs down and gets diffuse, it’s when it’s focusing on its minor protagonists.
The structure of Amistad goes like this:
ACT II (28:00-1:00:00) Tappan and Theodore Joadson, a freed slave who works with him, go to Washington to see ex-president John Quincy Adams, who is in his declining years. Tappan and Joadson ask Adams to take up Cinque’s cause and he refuses. Tappan and Joadson, out of options, go back to Baldwin, who suggests that the case cannot be one as a moral crusade, but has a strong basis as a straight property dispute. Baldwin tries to find out where exactly Cinque and his fellows are from and gets nowhere fast. After a little detective work, Baldwin and Joadson find that while the Amistad is a ship from Cuba, Cinque and the others are from Africa, transferred after a sale from a illegal slave-trade ship. It seems like the case is all wrapped up when president Martin Van Buren, under pressure from southern forces, replaces the court’s judge with his own hand-picked choice.
ACT III (1:00:00-1:34:00) Joadson goes to ask Adams for help again, and Adams again refuses, but gives him some advice anyway — to find out Cinque’s story and present that to the court. Baldwin and Joadson locate a black sailor who speaks Cinque’s language and learns his story. We learn that Cinque was the village hero, who killed a lion single-handedly. The centerpiece of the movie is a fifteen-minute setpiece illustrating Cinque’s journey from contented village hero in Africa to wild-eyed mutineer in New Haven. This story is recounted to the court with its new judge, at the end of which Cinque stands up and says, in halting English, “Give us free!”
ACT IV (1:34:00-2:00:00) With their judge seemingly disposed against them, Cinque and his fellows start to give up hope. His best friend becomes a Christian, and Tappan admits that Cinque might be better for the cause of Abolition if he’s killed. Then, surprisingly, the new judge finds for Cinque and there is much rejoicing. Ordinarily, this would be an act break all in itself, but there is more story to be told: Van Buren is, again, pressured by the South to get the desired result, and Van Buren has the court’s verdict appealed to the Supreme Court. Cinque is enraged, wants to know what kind of place America is, where ideals are espoused but not practiced. Baldwin appeals to Adams again, and this time he takes the case.
ACT V: Cinque and Adams prepare their case for the Supreme Court. Adams, who has lived all his life in his father’s famous shadow, sees the case as a chance to make his own mark on American history. Adams delivers a long speech to the Supreme Court, the court, against long odss, agrees with him, and Cinque and his fellows go free and venture back to Africa. In case the movie had not been heavy enough, subtitles inform us that Cinque returned to his village to find that, in his absence, his family had been sold into slavery.
There is a lot of excellent filmmaking in Amistad, and yet there’s also something oddly stodgy and club-footed about it, and I keep coming back to this central problem of its paralyzed protagonist and its tag-team structure. Every time Cinque is allowed to speak for himself the movie comes alive, but when the movie stops to examine the central issue from other points of view it gets subdued and sancitmonious. It almost seems as though Spielberg, who triumphed so brilliantly with his Holocaust movie, felt a need to treat his Slavery movie with kid gloves. Wartime Poland in Schindler is a lively, complicated place with good people in all camps and a lot of moral ambiguity. The bad guys in Amistad are bad, bad, bad, sneering racists and glowering autocrats, childish leaders and gimlet-eyed power seekers. Joadson is an interesting character, but he’s also a passive protagonist, he’s either tagging along with Tappan, or tagging along with Baldwin or getting told off by Adams. Baldwin is an interesting character and the most Spielbergian of the bunch, a real “stand-it-on-its-head” kind of character, a pragmatist in a story of ideals, but his story conks out at the end of the end of Act IV. Adams is an interesting character but he’s used as some kind of secret weapon: “If only we could get John Quincy Adams to try this case, by god, we couldn’t lose!” From the moment he takes the case we know the outcome is in the bag, and the climax of the movie drags as a result.
And yet, I can see the rationale for the decisions made. Spielberg figured out that the way to make a Holocaust movie is to make it not about the Suffering Jews but about a guy who wants to open an enamelware factory. In Amistad he makes his protagonist a Suffering Slave and then he’s got nowhere to go; it’s endemic to the character’s situation that he’s unable to act. It’s as though he’d made Schindler’s List from Good Jew Stern’s point of view.
That’s enough for now, tomorrow I’ll go through the narrative in detail and sort out some of these issues.
Sam Alcott and the Theological Struggle of Doom
INT. SCREENING ROOM — NIGHT
SAM (7) and DAD watch Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom for the fourth or fifth time together. In the movie, late in Act I, Indy and Bald Village Priest converse. BVP tells Indy that Shiva has sent him to recover the village’s magic rock. Indy corrects him, saying that nobody “sent” him, his plane crashed.
Sam, alarmed, sits up.
Sam grabs the remote and reverses the movie for a minute. He plays the scene back, then freezes the playback.
SAM. Who’s “Shiva?”
DAD. Shiva? Shiva is the Indian guy’s god.
SAM. He said Shiva “sent” him.
DAD. Yeah?
SAM. Why did he say that?
DAD. Well that’s what he thinks.
SAM. Why does he think that?
DAD. Well, he’s a priest, Shiva’s his god, he was praying to Shiva to send help and Indy fell out of the sky. So the Indian guy thinks —
SAM. But did he?
DAD. Did who what?
SAM. Did Shiva send him?
DAD. Did Shiva send Indy? To find the Sankara Stone?
SAM. Did Shiva send him?
DAD. Well, that’s what the Indian guy —
SAM. But did he?
DAD. Well, what do you think?
SAM. I’m asking you. Did Shiva send Indy?
DAD. Well, that’s a good question, and that’s kind of what the movie’s about. Indy goes to Pankot to get the rock, right? But he doesn’t really believe the legends, he just thinks it’s superstition. He doesn’t think Shiva is real or anything, he’s in it for the “fortune and glory.” And he goes through the whole movie that way. But then, remember, at the end, when he’s hanging from the bridge with Mola Ram, it looks like he’s going to lose and then he says “You betrayed Shiva!” And he says the magic words and the rocks catch on fire and fall out of the backpack. So you could say that it isn’t until Indy believes that Shiva is real and the rocks are really magic that he’s able to beat Mola Ram.
SAM. So Shiva did send him.
DAD. Well, sure, if you want to look at it —
SAM. Did he? It soundslike he did.
DAD. Well, maybe he did.
SAM. So, did Shiva make those guys jump out of the plane, and make the plane crash, and the whole thing in Shanghai, with the gangsters and the nightclub and the dance number and the car chase? Did Shiva make all that happen?
DAD. Well, you know what they say dude, gods work in mysterious ways.