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In The Lost World we have a variation on this errant-father theme -- a Spielberg perennial -- involving Ian and his daughter Kelly, who stows away on Isla Sorna and wins her dad's boggle-eyed appreciation by saving him from a tyrannosaur with a high-flying acrobatic kick. Kelly, whose mother dumped her and moved to Paris, opens the film complaining to Ian that he's a bad dad. It takes the dinosaurs to bring them together. (Kelly, incidentally, is black, which either signals a welcome bit of color-blindness on the part of the filmmakers or else a blatant attempt to woo African-Americans to a movie otherwise almost entirely devoid of them.)
Goldblum and Moore are fun to watch together, but they should have been a great team. He's spindly and dark and a little ostrichy, and she's smudged-elegant and carrot-topped. As bickering on-and-off lovebirds, they're set up to be Tracy and Hepburn in the wilds. It's not often an actress as extraordinary as Moore gets entangled in one of these special-effects extravaganzas, but after a promising start acting headstrong and petting dinos, her character turns drab and heartfelt. She's on Isla Sorna to prove that tyrannosaurs are really nurturers or some such. It's as if Calamity Jane turned into Dian Fossey.
It may seem monumentally ungracious to expect more from a film such as The Lost World than just a thrill ride. Especially when it delivers the thrills -- a rarity in these Anaconda days. Certainly if you're looking for state-of-the-art dinosaurs, this is the place to be. But state-of-the-art isn't necessarily the highest station for a filmmaker. The shark in Jaws wasn't exactly state-of-the-art. Many of the special-effects monster movies we remember most fondly from childhood were far from seamless -- from King Kong on up. It didn't matter, because they had something else going for them besides technology: a sense a wonder very close to a child's. Spielberg, when he's really flying high, can give it all -- the satisfactions of a great and wicked thrill ride plus the eye-popping wonderment of a child's fantasia. In The Lost World he's flying at mid-altitude.
Spielberg recently graced the cover of Time magazine -- "At 50, he's the most successful movie-maker ever. An exclusive look at the man behind the mogul" -- and is the subject of two new biographies, one by John Baxter, the other by Joseph McBride. He's so phenomenally successful that he has, in a sense, become his own most fabulous creation. The press has been going gaga in his glow. The Lost World is just a movie, but it's being talked about as yet another gold brick in Spielberg's castle in the sky. Whether it's any good is considered almost beside the point. What really matters is that castle.
And yet the castle, with some of its turrets prefabricated and its windows rose-tinted, remains a true dream-work. Spielberg got where he is by creating not only the boffo escapades I didn't particularly care for -- such as the Indiana Jones movies and Jurassic Park -- but also such films as E.T and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which will give deep pleasure forever. Spielberg is probably the greatest entertainer in the history of film. He has said that his success is due to the fact that he thinks like his audience, but it would be closer to the truth to say that at his best he is able to be his own ideal audience and continually astonish himself.
It was perhaps easier for him to astonish himself in the beginning -- before he became Midas Inc. The TV movie Duel and Sugarland Express and Jaws were kinetic jaunts directed by a prodigy almost deliriously high on his own prowess. It's as though Spielberg made these films by asking before each setup, "How can I direct this scene in the most exciting way possible?" When he later made his great science-fantasy movies, he was still trying to astonish himself -- and us -- but in a less kinetic frenzy. He was interested in wowing us more with the force of his wonder than with the play of his pyrotechnics. E.T. and Close Encounters were beautiful movies because his magic act was linked to something beyond technique -- which came so easily that perhaps it no longer meant anything to him.
Later, when the wonderment started to look processed, in such films as Always and Hook, there was not even the phenomenal technique to fall back on. The films, which were not commercial hits, looked like they were made by a superannuated child-man. Suddenly it became OK for his true believers to talk up Spielberg as a "personal" filmmaker, as if the working out, however convoluted, of his themes of childhood regret and parental abandonment was valuable all by itself.
The recent biographies and the Time cover story still go in for this sort of thing: Spielberg is an auteur who makes elaborately personal movies disguised as big juicy commercial fabrications. But is this true? It's obvious that, say, The Lost World and Schindler's List touch on Spielberg's memories of absent fathers, or anti-Semitism in junior high school, or whatever. But does this, by definition, make them "personal" films? Thematically, Hook, a reworking of Peter Pan, is probably the most "personal" of Spielberg's movies -- yet he's so disengaged from it that it comes across as perhaps his least personal. With Spielberg, his films are at their most personal when, as a filmmaker, he's most charged up by what he's showing us. In this sense, Jaws is more personal than Hook.
The truth is that I don't really want to see Spielberg make personal movies, at least not the type his deep-dish critics respond to. And although I admired Schindler's List and look forward to Amistad, I don't really want to see him become the kind of socially conscious "artist" Hollywood admires. Spielberg has taken the rap for almost singlehandedly turning movies into theme parks, but some of his parks are a lot more spacious and dazzling than the carefully appointed cottages in Hollywood's prestige-picture circuit. To praise him for having arrived as an artist with Schindler's List is, I think, to misunderstand what kind of artist he is; it condescends to the playful glories of his best earlier work. I'm not crazy about The Lost World, but I'm glad Spielberg followed Schindler's List with it. It demonstrates at least that he isn't angling to be the first film director to win the Nobel Peace Prize. He has taken so long to break adolescence that he should be in no hurry to turn elder statesman.
