Part 5 of 8
Last week, I discussed how the WWII drama Empire of the Sun marked a transitional moment in the career of Steven Spielberg. It was his first (semi) successful attempt at filmmaking of a darker, more mature sort. Before that film, his best work was in the genre of the mainstream Hollywood blockbuster. After that, the subject matter of his films entered slightly more disturbing territory. A recurring subject in these later works would be how certain groups of people can be seen as something less than human beings; as objects that can readily be tossed into the trash. Schindler’s List is the most obvious example—it would have fit well into this week’s post, but I placed it in last week’s group simply because of its World War II setting—but this is not the only time he explored such themes. However, it likely is the best film he’s made of this ilk. The films I’m discussing this week—The Color Purple, Amistad and Munich—are imperfect, but they all are about what happens when a person lives their life only as a servant, a product or a target.
Spielberg as a filmmaker is exceptionally good at two things: 1) orchestrating stirring moments of uplift, and 2) showing us the depths we as a species can sink to. However, the films are best when they give us these moments independently. When Spielberg attempts to create a film that is at once horrifying and ultimately moving, the results are frequently less successful. Take, for instance, War of the Worlds. Most of the film is incredibly bleak—and wonderfully so—yet the ultimate happy ending comes so far out of left field that it feels simultaneously jarring and cheap. You can’t tell us everything is going to be okay when you’ve spent a whole two hours telling us it isn’t. The Color Purple and Amistad are two films that ultimately suffer simply because they want to have it both ways. Munich deserves credit for sticking to its pessimistic guns, but even this film inserts a scene toward the end that keeps the film from reaching all-time great status.
The Color Purple arrived at an awkward time in Spielberg’s career. At this moment, one could tell he desperately wanted to be working with more adult material. Yet his style had not matured along with his ambition quite yet. This, as mentioned before, would come with Empire of the Sun. With The Color Purple, Spielberg chooses to tell his story in precisely the incorrect way. If you were to watch a great deal of this film without sound, you might believe it’s a slapstick comedy about a group of wacky African Americans in the early 20th century. Here is a film where a character casually discusses the importance of beating his wife while he tosses hay into the face of another for comedic effect. Perhaps this is meant to illustrate just how commonplace domestic violence was at this time, but this method just does not work in practice.
Think about the filmmaker that Spielberg would become. In several films, like Schindler’s List and Munich, his main goal would be to show the audience the true horror of the historical time in question. Audience entertainment—while important—was secondary. Spielberg is far too intent on making The Color Purple watchable, while the subject matter calls for something completely different. The look and feel of the film can best be described as a live action cartoon, and the audience will never be confused as to whether or not they’re watching a fictional film. Absent is the verisimilitude and documentary-like grittiness that would come with Schindler’s List eight years later.
This was the first time I had seen The Color Purple, and I was surprised at how thoroughly I disliked it. It’s not that the story is less than compelling—quite the contrary, this would seem to be a natural fit with the rest of Spielberg’s oeuvre—but I found myself constantly unhappy with everything Spielberg chose to do. Even in his weaker films, the direction almost always elevates the material. The exact opposite is the case here, and I found that rather surprising. This is a greater shame because all of the performances are frequently powerful. In particular, Whoopi Goldberg—as the protagonist Celie—provides the film a heart that it otherwise lacks. We root for most of the characters, and we sympathize with them, but it’s hard to become invested with the film we’re watching. The moments of comedy may have worked if the film tried to earn them, but it doesn’t. This is a movie about sexism, racism and violence, but it doesn’t really have anything new to say about anything. The book is allegedly much more frank about its story, but Spielberg’s film tones it down to the point where it lacks any and all impact.
By the time Amistad came around 12 years later, Spielberg had just about figured everything out. He had already made Schindler’s List—which both won him an Oscar and made a ton of money—so his career seemed as if it would take off forever in this more adult direction. Sure enough, the best scenes of Amistad are reminiscent of the most horrifying in Schindler’s List, as hundreds of slaves are transported across the ocean in a manner akin to animals. There are precisely two great sequences in this film—not good, great—but the rest of the film often feels overly-simplified and rather uninteresting. The story of the ship La Amistad is a thrilling one, yet the film chooses to focus mostly on the American trial that came after. As a result, the courtroom drama portions of the film feel like they were secondary in Spielberg’s mind. He made Amistad to show what happened before the trial, but he’s stuck making a film which spends most of its time in the courtroom.
The first great sequence in the film is actually the first sequence in the film, period. As Amistad begins, the audience witnesses the mutiny of the eponymous ship by a group of Africans who escape from below deck. This is a striking and violent sequence that puts the film in gray territory at the outset: yes, these Africans were wrongly thrust into the slave trade, but are they all that civilized a people? They had no intention of taking the ship peacefully, and instead of sympathizing with the slaves at the outset the audience instead is somewhat fearful. The opening scenes of Amistad seem to be setting up a truly great film.
Unfortunately, Amistad begins to stall once the Africans arrive on American soil. Instead of focusing on the problematic mutineers, we instead meet the red-white-and-blue likes of Roger Sherman Baldwin (a quite good Matthew McConaughey), ex-President John Quincy Adams (Anthony Hopkins) and freed slave Theodore Joadson (Morgan Freeman). It is here things become far too black and white, as Spielberg takes the usual—and correct, obviously—“slavery bad, freedom good” approach, with any and all dissent toward that point of view coming from the film’s villains. Roger is the most immediately relatable of these characters, and his scenes with the mutineer Cinqué (Djimon Hounsou) are often intriguing. He’s a guy who just wants to do what he believes is the right thing, even if that occasionally backfires.
Then comes the film’s most striking sequence: a flashback which depicts in graphic detail the horrors that these Africans had to go through before the mutiny. In many ways, this provides context for the sequence at the film’s outset. It gives us a reason to sympathize with these rather uncivilized people, as mutiny was likely the only chance they’d have at survival. The prisoners are stripped nude, stored together below deck, beaten, and at one point thrown off the ship to drown so that there were fewer mouths to feed. Spielberg’s films often have the greatest impact when he is most unsparing, and he censors nothing here. This is the lowest place that human beings can ever be pushed to, and he wants to make sure you see all of it. If you still think Spielberg is a “safe” filmmaker, allow me to direct you to this sequence.
Once we see these hardships, the journey of the mutineers through the American court system seems far less compelling. While what the trial symbolizes is important, it doesn’t have the impact that Spielberg normally thrives on. When you have a bunch of white men simply standing around debating the fates of men who don’t speak any English, it’s hardly right up his alley. Perhaps this is why the ultimate climax falls flat. Amistad builds up the final trial in the Supreme Court as a near-insurmountable obstacle, yet all it takes is a short John Quincy Adams speech and suddenly we’re all sending the Africans back to their home. And, roll credits. Amistad ultimately feels like a rather dull epilogue to what would have been one of the greatest films of the Spielberg filmography. It isn’t bad, but it’s disappointing considering what could have—and should have—been.
Of all the films Spielberg has ever made, none has been as unrelentingly bleak as 2005’s Munich. Where some of his movies may put the audience through some punishing scenes of violence then ultimately end on a note of uplift, Munich is a complete condemnation of the vengeance-first mentality of modern world affairs. It is, in many ways, an unsatisfying film. But that’s more or less the point. This film begins with an act of horrific violence, and that leads to more and more until our “heroes” are trapped in a cycle that is doomed to never end. A team of assassins—led by Avner Kaufman (Eric Bana)—is sent on a mission to kill several men behind the massacre at the 1972 Munich Olympics. At first it seems like they’ll simply be checking faceless names off a list, but as the film goes on they find themselves further and further down the rabbit hole.
Given his history—and, yaknow, Judaism—many expected that Spielberg would ultimately turn Munich into a piece of pro-Israel propaganda. Instead, he made something far more challenging. When Avner and his cohorts go to kill the alleged planners of the Munich massacre, we do not see their targets doing typically evil deeds. In most movies, when the protagonists kill someone it’s because they were shooting right back. From the audience’s point of view, these Mossad agents are (mostly) killing family men who are visibly doing little wrong. In some cases, they’re not even sure their victims were involved in Munich at all. Yet their orders are to ignore who these people are as human beings, and instead kill them without mercy. However, their acts of revenge inspire revenge right back, and you can guess where the cycle goes from there. After a few killings, the assassins no longer feel any real sense of purpose.
There’s a moment about midway through Munich where Avner’s role as assassin is put in jeopardy. As he stands on the balcony of his hotel room, the man he is supposed to kill—in the neighboring hotel room—comes out on his balcony and strikes up a conversation. For a second, a human face is put to the targeted name. Now he must go inside and signal his men so that the bomb explodes, killing their target. At this point the whole business stops being routine and becomes something more brutal.
Watching it a second time, I found myself more accepting of the film’s flaws. Specifically, the lovemaking/massacre flashback scene at the film’s climax wasn’t quite as silly as I recall. Perhaps this is because I was expecting it, but I could more readily dismiss it as a brief flaw rather than a film-killer. It still keeps Munich from becoming one of the best films Spielberg ever made, but I am now more comfortable calling it a great film. The two-and-a-half hours that come before is far too perfect to let one brief moment of ridiculousness derail the whole film. This is not a political thriller simply about a small group of people; it’s actually about how the revenge-centric policies of several nations have led to the current instability in world politics, more specifically the Middle East. Munich makes the argument that responding to violence with violence won’t stop the war. If anything, it will protract it.
Spielberg has always looked down on oppression and violence, even if making a film about it was occasionally at odds with his usual strengths. The Color Purple, Amistad and Munich are three incredibly ambitious films—most Spielberg movies are—yet it’s their imperfections that often make them fascinating. They are about the consequences of reducing other people to objects completely devoid of individuality, and—in the case of the first two in particular—how the oppressed can fight back and regain their own freedom. Where The Color Purple and Amistad suffer because of Spielberg’s need to wrap things up perfectly, Munich shows us what he’s capable of when he fully explores the darkness of human nature. In most cases, real life doesn’t have a happy ending.
Next Week: A trip through Spielberg's less well-known films, and few outright failures.
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