Out There: DISCLOSURE DAY

Disclosure Day barely functions as legible paperback thriller plotting, but it is a feast for Steven Spielberg auteurists. It’s a layered work of visual thinking and thematic exploration that’s a buffet of recurring ideas and preoccupations from throughout his oeuvre. And all that plays out as a backdrop for a pretty flimsy central narrative. It makes the movie a totally fascinating experience, and a sometimes distancing one, an open-hearted intellectual and intuitive exercise keeping a chintzy chase picture afloat. Put simply: it’s a MacGuffin chase for stolen government secrets. (There’s also a magic stick, the properties of which shift for the needs of the plot.) The hidden truths within are as follows: aliens exist and the government is covering it up. That’s a little underwhelming after his Close Encounters' transcendent finale of music and science, and E.T.’s fleeting intergalactic friendship, and War of the Worlds’ harrowing invasion and biological protection. Spielberg’s been here before. In Disclosure Day, the characters are ideas. We have Josh O’Connor as a man with a backpack full of USBs containing leaked footage. He’s Technology: research, math, the hard facts. We have Emily Blunt as a TV weatherperson, usually reading the forecasts but now fearful as she finds herself becoming a conduit for brain-scrambling languages and interpersonal connection. She’s The Media: communication, empathy, the messenger. Together they make both halves of the whole message from outer space. They have to avoid the shadowy suit (Colin Firth) who doesn’t want the secrets out. He’s the System. To short-circuit his private army, our heroes need help along the way from another whistleblower (Colman Domingo) who’s orchestrating the big reveal. He’s building a simulacrum from which to trigger their latent memories. He’s Art. The chase also involves a lapsed nun (Eve Hewson). She’s Philosophy, Theology. “You haven’t lost your faith in God,” she’s told by a wise elder nun (Elizabeth Marvel). “You’ve lost your faith in people.” 

So it is that the movie’s about alienation in all senses of the word. It’s set in our modern world where we suspect that there’s more to the official story about most everything, but many aren’t convinced the truth will make a difference. It’s Spielberg spinning a metaphorical web so quickly and masterfully, with such a vivid mess of intentions and references, that it can’t help but skate over some yawning plot holes in the process. His fluid camera teases and traverses spaces, separates and joins perspectives, locked into who sees or knows what and when, easily slipping between perceived realities. It’s a movie that’ll be far too open-hearted for the incorrigible pedantic quibblers in the audience. Spielberg is using the raw materials of his most crowd-pleasing popcorn pictures to make something deep and strange. But it’s an honest movie, and one that risks silliness at most every turn. And, sure enough, the characters are flatly representational and all the running around doesn’t add up to much for which it’s worth investing. But in the high-gloss B-movie mess of it all, Spielberg’s really making a movie about the power of movies to show us what’s really important—a fiction that takes us to deeper truths. This one opens in media res with a smeary digital image—an elbow to the ribs from our master filmmaker—that’s immediately contextualized as diagetic camerawork at a cheap phony wrestling match. It’s a parodical muscle man in red and another in blue playacting conflict for a cheering, jeering, invested crowd. The real conflict happens in the shadow behind them—a confrontation between the leaker and the forces who wish to stomp out his message. 

The movie’s wandering chase sequences and flat exposition then build up to a finale that’s all about listening. It has some of his crisp cross-cutting and Movie Star awestruck gazes and some screens-within-screens of CG effects. But the emotionality rests entirely on a TV reporter played by Courtney Grace, a relatively unknown actress who pulls it off with astonishing work as she narrates for her audience through an array of heightened confusion, wonder, bewilderment, and context collapse. It’s a moving moment of processing the unimaginable in real time. It’s not so much about what she, and we, see in those moments. (What’s actually there teeters on the edge of silly cliche.) It’s about the human connection in that moment, bound together by something real, for once. Spielberg wants us to really listen, to understand each other. To hear a truth is the start of enlightenment. He believes it to the point of transcendence—math and art, mind and heart, The Fabelmans of his own making. It’s that reconciliation that breaks down our all-too-human isolation, between nations, between individuals, and within our own heads. He thinks we need to believe—in a higher power, in the potential to move beyond our selfish fears, in the transformative possibilities of witnessing together. He believes in cinema. He believes in UFOs. He wants to believe. He’s our greatest living filmmaker. His movies are usually airtight and precisely calibrated to function at a high level, on multiple levels, while pleasing crowds. This one dares to fall apart in personal, idiosyncratic moments that resolve in ways only Spielberg’s instincts could pull off. The real disclosure here is his own. 

Visions of Light: THE FABELMANS

In the opening scene of Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans, it’s a snowy night in 1952 and a little boy is a little nervous about going to see his first movie. The prospect of giant people filling a wall in the downtown movie palace makes him leery. So his parents cheerfully try to calm his nerves. His father (Paul Dano), a meek, bespectacled engineer, launches into a technical explanation. Movies are just an illusion, he says: still photographs passed quickly before a light projecting the impression of moving pictures. His mother (Michelle Williams), who we’ll learn is a frustrated musician who battles depression, takes a more metaphorical approach. Movies are dreams, she says: dreams you never forget. Right there, in the opening dialectic between mother and father, science and art, reality and dreams, is the whole picture. It’s also a whole life, and a whole career. Anyone with an understanding of Spielberg the man and Spielberg the filmmaker will recognize that that boy, though he’s Sammy Fabelman here, is little Spielberg himself. Those are his parents’ occupations and personalities. And there he is, at his first movie, ready to discover The Greatest Show on Earth.

The movie that follows finds the boy’s growing interest in moviemaking, and dawning awareness that his parents’ marriage isn’t happy. These two aspects of his personal education are seen through a broader dawning of awareness of the world around him, and we see how a variety of influences inform who this young person starts to become—as an artist, and a man. Co-writing with Tony Kushner (in their fourth productive collaboration), scenes spanning his youth and teenage years are rich with character details that build out the world of this family, and their small circle of friends and relatives, as well as the reactions and habits that suggest their inner lives. We get amusing dinner-table chatter and passive-aggressive sniping and warm expressions of sympathy and acceptance. We also get those cross-currents of competition and concern that can push and pull on the decorum of a family. And further still, we get lots of happy moments, where the boy and his sisters and buddies make elaborate home movies and eccentric relatives float through and long car trips give a child new landscapes to feed his sharpening eye for noticing. (Great classic movies are doing that for him, too.) The scenes are framed in such a way that an adult eye can pick up on the unspoken details a child might not, but the perspective does so with such subtlety that there’s a fine-tuned generosity, and a lack of judgement. This isn’t a movie about a boy sometimes angry with his parents that is actually angry with the parents. There’s a lot of love here, foregrounded in the story, and some regret in the telling.

Spielberg approaches this semi-autobiographical sketch with the sensitivity to portray the dynamics honestly, the empathy to extend understanding to all involved, and the distance to deepen and resonate its ideas. This isn’t a retelling for self-aggrandizement or self-pity. Instead, it draws on a rich understanding of the relationships involved, and a lack of judgement on their actions. The boy finds much to be angry or sad about, and solace in honing his craft, but the movie itself is too compassionate to give in. This is a mature, even-handed look at specific moments in one particular family’s life. He keeps up the motif of the mechanical and the metaphorical, the technical and the emotional, light’s illusion and reality, throughout. The contrast between father’s machines—something to be taken apart, retooled, repaired—and mother’s music—piano practice filling the house with melancholy classical works—stand in for their ability to be complementary influences in a relationship. But it also stands in for their incompatibility. They’re trying, and there’s genuine affection there, but it just can’t connect consistently for the long term. It’s the figure of the boy, whose love for the movies becomes a love for the process—in long, loving montages behind-the-scenes of ingenious amateur filmmaking tricks and the procedural montages of previewing and cutting and adjusting 8mm reels—becomes the join between the head and the heart, the machine that makes ideas.

For that’s what the movies are: a technical feat that hits the heart. That’s what makes it a craft and an art. (So, too, says the movie, a calling.) By looking with such thrill of discovery at the makings of beginners’ films—and a beginning filmmaker—The Fabelmans reminds us that the movies are illusions that show us the world. They are collective dreams that hold us captive and can reveal something beyond the real and tangible—the deeper truths any great art form can access. Families are like that too, sometimes, built on shared dreams and memories, fueled by careful editing and elisions, motifs of light and shadow, rules and intuition. It’s about the framing, in what you see and know, and when, and how. It’s about whose perspective we share, what conclusions can be drawn, or faked, or ignored. Spielberg makes this movie with a clear-eyed love for family and film. It’s perhaps his most restrained work, with great blocking and image-making, but little of the obvious virtuosic camera moves or soaring scores for which he’s known. But it’s still, as so many of his movies are, about people seeing, or realizing, something amazing, and puzzling over its implications.

Moviemaking may be artifice, but the resulting art is, at its best, beautiful, and true, and real. And personal. Scenes of Sammy showing his movies to crowds are electric with pleasures and tensions. Seeing the audience react to one of his filmic tricks, you can see satisfaction sharing space with the wheels turning about how to grow and evolve as a technician and artist. Late in the film, Sammy, having shown one of his movies, is startled to discover he’s accidentally reframed reality for a character—and the gap between the screen and their daily existence opens up a crisis about how they’ll never live up to that image. This is a mirror of a scene in the middle where a few characters see an uncomfortable truth in some raw footage, a family secret hidden in plain sight. The movies can hide as easily as they reveal. And in the alchemy that takes them from an idea, to a camera, to a process, to art—there it is, real and unreal and all its consequences.

This is a movie about the thrilling act of creation, and the feedback loop between artist and audience. And it’s about how transporting and fulfilling it can be to see that screen light up with images you never knew you needed. Few movies about movies get this as right, perhaps because it’s not simply an ode to the form, but about the feelings and talents that come out of life lived full of complicated situations and shifting relationships. In the end, the movie’s final shot reminds us that all of this is framed with intentionality, considered for its implications, and shifted to clearly communicate its ideas. Here’s a movie from a master filmmaker, making the argument that everything one experiences goes into one’s art, and the results, with enough hard work, talent, and luck, can be transcendent. He’s right.

Got a Feeling There's a Miracle Due: WEST SIDE STORY

Now this is a movie. I’d almost forgotten they could still be like this: thoughtful and heartfelt, big and bold, theatrical and emotional, expertly, sturdily made at every level of craft and soul. In re-adapting the Broadway classic West Side Story, Steven Spielberg has made a widescreen spectacle full to bursting with intelligence, energy, and ideas. Watching it, I couldn’t help but think that Spielberg is one of the very few left working on this level in Hollywood. He knows what to do with the camera at every moment—to express, to surprise, to reveal, to move. Take the opening shot, for instance. Unlike the bird’s-eye view of a skyline that greets audiences in 1961’s Robert Wise take on the material—a classic in its own right, if more proficient than exceptional—Spielberg’s starts on debris. A building has been torn down. It’s 1957, the same year the musical debuted. What was once a tenement building has been leveled for a new complex. Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, a sign announces. Immediately we’ve been given a richer context for this Romeo and Juliet amid the gang clashes on city streets between new immigrant Puerto Ricans and the slightly older immigrant ethnic Whites. The cauldron of racial intolerance has been set to boiling by the encroaching economic and real estate displacement. And how poignant, too, that what will take over this neighborhood will be the same places that would perform projects of the kind we’re watching now.

I found this adaptation almost indescribably moving, even on simply the craft level. How sadly rare to be at a major studio release and find it overflowing with ideas and emotions communicated visually in every moment, to hear a soaring musical score robustly arranged and conducted to swell and underline and develop. Spielberg’s a master craftsman, no doubt. He has his usual crew—cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, editor Michael Kahn, and so on—up to their usual best. So of course it’s an untrammeled success on the technical level. Ah, but then there’s the justice they do to the material. What could be stale or overfamiliar is instead enlivened anew. As it unfolds I suddenly saw it for the first time in all the fullness of style and sentiment that audiences must’ve felt when it first appeared on stage. More than the original adaptation’s robust technical skill, Spielberg draws out the deep wells of emotion, the crisp cleverness of the late, great lyricist Steven Sondheim’s precociously poetic rat-a-tat puns and rhymes standing at pleasing angles from the sumptuous Leonard Bernstein jazz-and-Latin rhythmic symphonic score. Spielberg, with screenwriter Tony Kushner (the Angels in America writer who wrote Munich and Lincoln for him), also does justice to the Shakespearean dimensions, and knows the musical’s book by Arthur Laurents is best played like other pieces of mid-century modern melodramas a la Arthur Miller or Tennessee Williams. The result is a movie that’s in constant fluid motion and boisterous feeling, an effortlessly complex crowd-pleaser that never feels the need to stoop or slow for simplicity’s sake.

It helps, I’m sure, that the story is so strong and clear, and Kushner’s writing is perceptively and sharply adapted. He doesn’t push overmuch on the original, and instead surfaces and shines light anew on ideas and tensions already present in this classic work, as well as restoring some of the grit to the language. With vivid period details in all their glorious colors and textures, the movie has the social conditions of the times through the benefit of hindsight, with a great sense of historical context and cultural space. There’s that opening with the gentrification in progress. It introduces the gangs—the Sharks and the Jets—tussling over signs and paintings and flags—signifiers of shifting demographics amid the construction sites on blocks where fresh Spanish-language signage is side-by-side with rusting, fading Irish clovers. It’s a place where people are feeling muscled out by some Other or another. They’re all dwarfed by and forged in class resentments, but have turned to racial recriminations to feel a sense of futile control. The white gang is a simmering rage machine, puffed up with false superiority and dripping in presumptuous racist and misogynistic impulses. The Puerto Ricans have pride of their place and people, and feel justified outrage at the pushback they’re getting from some of their neighbors. The movie gives them greater voice—lots of colloquial Spanish and Spanglish in the dialogue is left unsubtitled and perfectly legible through powerful performances—and understands without excusing the gang’s sometimes-violent territorialism. The two gangs are on a clear collision course. That opening shot pushes past a wrecking ball on its way to revealing its characters in the midst of the muck. We know something’s coming.

Into this is introduced romance that structures the swooning early sequences and the weeping tragedy of the finale. After all, Tony, a white boy leaving the gang and hoping to make good (Ansel Elgort), is the Romeo to the Juliet who is Maria (Rachel Zegler), a Puerto Rican teenager looking for more in her life. They meet at a community dance, and their desire to dance becomes a flashpoint between the hot-headed Jets (led by Mike Faist) and the Sharks, whose leader (David Alvarez) is Maria’s boxer brother. The performers are universally wonderful, with Alvarez matched well with Ariana DeBose as his strong-willed long-time girlfriend playing fine counterpoint to the main couple. They get the centerpiece number “America,” with its bristling satiric syncopation, a classic back and forth that Spielberg films first through courtyard clotheslines that become clever shifting curtains, then spills out into the street with vibrant colors and sensations.

Tony and Maria’s love is softer, simpler, filmed in longing duets and yearning ballads—from “Maria” and “Tonight” to “One Hand, One Heart”—each given a full flowering of adolescent intensity. Zegler, in her first professional role, has a wide-eyed freshness, a dreamy gentility and innocence behind which sits a backbone of steel. Elgort, for his part, takes the baby-faced pathos that made him sympathetic in The Fault in Our Stars and Baby Driver and gives it the slightest Brando-adjacent edge of softened danger. Their love-at-first-sight is believable, and their desire drives and heightens everything that follows. Their balcony scene uses the bars of a fire escape to keep them separated—so close and yet so far—while other moments find streetlights turn a puddle into a gleaming spotlight of stars from overhead, or a stained-glass window lending a wooing an impromptu sense of something holy and right in the face of so much potential strife. Their friends and families are fighting because of them, and as the stakes grow deadlier, the drama around their potential future tips near bittersweet, and then on toward doomed.

Spielberg knows how to balance and build in interest and mood, with songs and sequences light and dark, characters raw and real in heightened drama bursting forth in snappy and soaring song. The film has a complexity in style and tone that’s so easy and entertainment so pure that it looks effortless. His filmmaking in every single moment—every note, every frame, every shot—communicates and imposes without showing off. He’s in total control, a virtuoso maestro of his collaborators behind and in front of the camera. His style is always like this at his best (and he so often is at his best), a strong hand with a light touch, what Pauline Kael compared to “a boy soprano singing with joy.” At 75, his movies have all the visual wit, sumptuous long takes, briskly blocked movement within the frame, clever cutting, and exuberant energy of a young cinephile enthused by the very prospect of making a movie and playing an audience. And yet he has the grandfatherly storyteller’s beneficence to engage deeply in the feelings and perspectives with subtly and nuance. It can make for one beautiful cohesive piece, so expertly accomplished and modulated. Played loud, there’s music playing. Played softly, it’s almost like praying.

It sings the most tenderly in quiet intimate moments and gruff arguments alike, and it comes alive in the kind of big, bustling group numbers that put any musical since MGM’s Freed Unit to shame. They impress with their energy, velocity, and shape, building in momentum with muscular screen choreography designed in homage to Jerome Robbins’ athletic approach. Showstoppers all, they’re refreshingly photographed to appreciate every step and gesture, to emphasize the skill and expressiveness, to highlight the unencumbered precision and joy. (He’s such a great director of action, from Indiana Jones to Jurassic Park, it’s no surprise.) Spielberg has this studio classicism in his bones—building these sequences with a pulse and an eye, every image somehow both snappy and propulsive and long, loving looks at physicality and movement. They’re so exceptionally involving and delightfully transporting, I almost felt swept up into the dancing myself despite sitting still. As the dancers join together in musical pleasure or collide in eventual despair even the drama—right down to its striking, tearful, symbolic conclusion—gathers the same sense of perfectly timed motion and expression.

Spielberg builds up the dynamics and conflicts and desires as if it was the first time anyone had played it—and somehow makes old new again. By highlighting these characters with even greater specificity in their time and place, and setting them against a backdrop of social upheaval, immigration, and construction equipment, he’s made a movie about America as a work in progress, with a definition up for grabs. A key figure is a reimagined shopkeeper role made into an even stronger conscience of the piece through the presence of Rita Moreno, star of the first film. Here she’s a wise elderly woman, a Puerto Rican who married a white man and  together ran a corner store for decades. She loves her entire neighborhood, and feels deep pain at their divisions. She wishes she could help bridge that divide. And Spielberg’s bridging a divide, too, having made an old school Hollywood musical epic, elegantly shot on film, brimming with talent and passion in emotion and skill in every second. I found myself brought to the edge of ecstatic tears by the sheer aesthetic pleasure—overwhelmed by the attention and care to the original musical brilliance, and to the undeniable vision of one of our last great moviemakers proving, even for just a few hours, that there’s still a place for this.

Game the System: READY PLAYER ONE

Leave it to Steven Spielberg, once the wunderkind of exceptional blockbusters, now the grand master of elegant Hollywood craft (two sides of the same coin, naturally), to make a gleaming, watchable, propulsive, largely entertaining movie out of a screenplay that’s charitably a pile of schlock. Plus, he’s too good a storyteller to avoid uncovering some small complexity where a lesser filmmaker would find none. This is Ready Player One, loosely adapted from Ernest Cline’s junk sci-fi novel by Cline himself and Zak Penn, a movie set in a future overcrowded with people and problems. In mostly off-hand and off-screen ways, it imagines we stopped caring about everything wrong with our society – the climate, the class struggles, the over-commercialized corporate surveillance state, the shallowness – and just wallowed in a late-capitalist decay. That’s frightening enough, but it also sees the entire populace plugged into and swallowed up by a Virtual Reality world called The OASIS. Bouncing between a heightened reality and this over-the-top imaginarium, Spielberg finds his typically expressive mise en scene, energetically filmic camera, and crisp editing patter letting the screen overflow with digital mayhem while almost entirely avoiding the senseless repetitiveness of his knockoff sub-Marvel competition. Only he would think to stage a second act set piece inside a recreation of a famous 1980 horror movie (a fine extra-textual tip-of-the-hat to a fellow auteur) and not only get the set perfectly realized, but to get the grain right, too.

The OASIS is an entire digital hellscape traveled via vision-enveloping goggles, omni-directional treadmills with bungee straps, and gloves and suits for sensory input. The thing is a combination social media and video game. There are casinos, branded game worlds, VR vacations, battles royale, sports, arcades, zero-G dance clubs, libraries, chat bots, and avatars representing several dozen Brand Name Intellectual Properties meant to be greeted with grinning recognition. It’s a chaos – like an entire universe made up of a Facebook that was also endless-Las Vegas inside a Grand Theft Auto Disney World – presented at once naïve and ugly (with just one winking nod toward the world’s digital Love Hotel pointing to how dirty the corners of such a place would inevitably become). I often found it flatly horrific, but the screenplay seems to find it praise-worthy. The structure of the story rests on a quest for three Easter eggs hidden by the late game’s creator (Mark Rylance). These special, well-hidden prizes, once obtained, will give the winner ownership of The OASIS, and thus, considering how many manhours and economic activity take place in the fictional space, the future itself. Spielberg splits the difference between my cynicism and the source material’s slobbering, following a team of scrappy underdogs fighting to beat cold-hearted corporate goons to the Eggs, while still fleetingly recognizing that maybe they should just unplug and chill out, at least for a couple days a week.

So perhaps it’s a shade too acquiescent to its society – and, by extension, ours – taking a bland, gamified approach to pop culture. It's as visually clear as any Spielberg, but undoubtedly his most thematically incoherent. Our heroes – orphan Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan) and his online friends (Olivia Cooke, Lena Waithe, Win Morisaki, and Philip Zhao) who don’t know they all live in the same towering future-Ohio slums – view art and pop culture as trivia to be acquired, points to be won, hardly ever interacting with them as experiences or creations unto themselves. The kids mine the taste of the game’s creator – a child of the 80’s obsessed with Atari, John Hughes, Back to the Future, Van Halen and so on – for clues on how to win the game. It echoes the hollow nostalgia listicles and empty snark of some of the worst contemporary discourse from people who want points for catching references instead of experiencing and interpreting. But, though Spielberg serves it up, he can also see this problem. For all his rah-rah bombast about the underdog protagonists – and cheery hissing at the corporate baddies, including a boardroom tech company shark (Ben Mendelsohn) who is all-too chipper announcing they’ve been able to pinpoint exactly how many ads can be in one’s field of vision without “inducing seizures” – he watches as all their checklist skill pales in comparison to fleeting moments of real-world connection. OASIS may find them fantasy heroes, but the real world is where you can meet eye to eye, shuck off artifice, really know someone, and maybe even kiss. Only sometimes does the movie see this as the better option.

The point, ultimately, is that the game’s creator, given a quiet, recessive affect by Rylance’s charmingly soft performance, was terrified of the real world. He hated his inability to connect with others and therefore built a digital simulacrum of his fantasy life and cultural diet to share, yes, but in which he could have complete control. All he wanted was to make people happy, but watched as people loved it so much it slipped out of his control, even as he was made into a tech god. (A slyly stupid faux-archival headline reads: “Bigger Than Jobs?”) His genuine, eccentric fanboy love and isolation is lost inside too much muchness. What to do with this tension in the larger context? Spielberg, similarly deified by many who see his creations as shallow entertainments and miss the real humanity in every frame, builds a film that’s a dazzling modern sci-fi construct (climaxing in a CG characters swarming a computerized battlefield) uninterested in the bigger picture. How does this world operate? What are its technological practicalities? What is its economic outlook? The movie doesn’t know or care. (This is no A.I. or Minority Report.) It’s simply attuned to the rhythms of the action bopping through eye-popping Janusz Kaminski frames – the washed-out reality intercut with a vivid, colorful, almost-real animated space. The performers are charming, the world is a constantly shifting fantasy of the creative and the derivative, and the spirited pace is zippy. Its vision of a fight to save a massive VR world is simultaneously Pollyannaish and cynical, twinkling Spielbergian touches over a yawning void. It’s exuberant celebration of shallow pop culture love, and a melancholy vision of the creator’s need to let go. It’s a busy visual explosion of an anything-is-possible tech-dystopia, and a recognition that no matter how fun a virtual world may be, it’s healthy to take a break. In the end, it’s perhaps the most excessive argument for moderation ever mounted.

Bedtime Stories: THE BFG

It’s hard not to see something of director Steven Spielberg in the humble craftsman at the center of his lovely adaptation of Roald Dahl’s The BFG. He’s a big friendly giant who hears all the hopes and fears of mankind, harvests magic from a land of imagination, and mixes them together lovingly into dreams and nightmares. He keeps them bottled up, stored in his workshop for safekeeping. Then, in the middle of the night, he gingerly steps out of giant country and into our world, toting his spells to send our slumbering minds drifting into tailor-made dreamlands. He, like Spielberg, knows how to cast the right spells for the just the right effects, speaking directly to our hearts and minds with a purity of intention and skill. He’s a master at what he does, and when his art starts to glow before our eyes, we know we’re in good hands. Here is a movie of such prodigious filmmaking skill deployed so gently and so casually that the trick is how easy it looks. Spielberg’s enchanting approach to family filmmaking is to allow the story to unfold at its own pace and tone, inviting empathy and letting magic appear without overly insisting on itself.

As the movie begins the towering BFG (a digital creation soulfully embodied with a sweet melancholy in Mark Rylance’s performance) encounters Sophie, a little girl (Ruby Barnhill). A precocious child, she spends her nights unhappily roaming the halls of her orphanage. She has insomnia, she’ll solemnly report, explaining her habits as well as her unfamiliarity with dreaming. Obviously it’s quite a scary thing to see a lumbering giant outside your bedroom window in the dark stillness of three o’clock in the morning. Scarier still is the moment when a hand the size of Sophie’s entire body slides in past the curtains and picks her up, spiriting the poor girl away to a hidden realm where she cowers behind enormous everyday objects. There’s a moment of unease at the initial kidnapping, but the girl quickly sees there’s nothing threatening about this gigantic man. He’s harmless, shrugging as he explains he had no choice but to take her with him. Can’t risk being reported and hunted by “human beans,” the linguistically tangled chap says.

This is a potentially worrisome situation, but Spielberg is quick to comfort the audience by revealing the BFG to be the runt of giant land. A scrawny, lanky sweetheart with twitchy big ears and a goofy grin, he’s much shorter than the others of his kind. He is picked on by the other giants (voiced by Jemaine Clement, Bill Hader, Ólafur Darri Ólafsson, and others) for being a vegetarian instead of a cold-hearted cannibal gobbling up human beans three meals a day. Their diet is only implied, but certainly puts our Friendly Giant in a position of sympathy. He just wants to work his magic in peace, but the bullies push him around, hector him about “vegi-terribles,” and start sniffing around when they smell the scent of a girl-sized snack. Sophie sees in him a loneliness she recognizes, and quickly comes to trust him. The thrust of the plot sees her protected by him, and brought into the secret dream factory he’s made his life’s work. They become buddies, trusting one another to do what’s best. There’s charming storybook logic here – surely it’s no coincidence Sophie is reading with a flashlight under the covers when he appears – as two kindred spirits bond over a desire to enjoy a life of peace, kindness, and friendship.

It’s a pleasure to exist in this movie’s world, unhurried and relaxed, allowing long dialogue scenes between the very tall man and the small girl to stretch out, the awe of the fantastical interaction seeming simply normal while seesawing in pleasing tongue-twister tangles of eccentric giant jargon and childlike innocence. Giant Country is a fantasy drawn in convincing and warm detail of delightful picture book simplicity and appeal. Spielberg is always adept at integrating effects and live action with a brilliant eye. Here he allows the digital space to create a light floating camera, and a sense of space for real emotional rapport. It’s not easy to generate a relationship between characters who only share the frame through trickery, but here he draws it out perfectly. The world itself – a humble hovel, a cave of dreams, a field of grumpy giants, swirling clouds, a glowing tree in an upside-down reflecting pool – is striking and comforting, representing the most primary colors cinematographer Janusz Kaminski has ever had in a single shot. It sparkles with pop-up book confidence.

Spielberg, and the wonderful screenplay by Melissa Mathison (the late, great writer of E.T., The Black Stallion, and Kundun), respects children’s capacity for comprehension, their ability to put together visual puzzle pieces of plot and follow a story’s imagination. The movie unfolds with a dreamlike trust in its fantasy’s power to carry away all who are receptive to it. There’s conflict, yes, as the mean giants need to be stopped before they become a deadly danger to Sophie. But the real core of conflict is found in two lonely people who make a connection, a fragile, unsustainable friendship that might as well be imaginary, but has the potential to leave them both more confident and self-sufficient individuals. It’s moving, but not condescending. The avuncular BFG (Rylance’s non-threatening eyes twinkling behind the effects) and the adorable Sophie (Barnhill the sweetest orphan this side of Annie) need only figure out the right dream – assembled in a Kinetoscope blender casting flickering shadows on the dream factory wall like Plato’s cave – to explain the situation to someone who can help. What a perfect metaphor for storytelling, and a gentle child’s-eye-view to conflict resolution.

Eventually the film reaches a poignant resolution through quietly magisterial whimsy that flips the fish-out-of-water scenario, bringing the BFG to new people and places. (It’s great fun watching surprising characters interact with his enormity, including struggling to make him feel at home in the human world, culminating in, no joke, one of the best instances of flatulence in cinema history.) But there’s no cruelty here, or in the eventual solutions to everyone’s problems. The movie’s gentility is a much-needed tonic for a cruel and cynical world. Spielberg’s masterful use of the moviemaking tools at his disposal is at once classical restraint and clear-eyed use of the cutting-edge. The result is a film of genuine absorbing, heartwarming magic. Refreshingly tender and thoughtful – like a giant gingerly moving a child’s tiny glasses to safety – the movie is soothingly composed and playfully imaginative. It’s welcome respite from all those family entertainments, good and bad alike, operating with manic panic of allowing downtime. The BFG has patience, the visual poise to play out in long takes and to treat its digital creations as wonders instead of routine spectacle. Best of all, it has the confidence to let small, delicate feelings animate a production so big and strong.

The Man Who Went Into the Cold: BRIDGE OF SPIES

A powerfully humane legal drama, Steven Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies tells the story of James Donovan, an American lawyer who, at the height of the Cold War, was asked to defend an alleged Soviet spy. Donovan’s humble professional commitment to fairness, justice, the value of hard work, and the worth of all persons takes his case much further than he ever expected, into the halls of United States’ power and beyond, into shadowy negotiations between foreign powers. This causes much fear and prejudice directed towards him, his family’s doubts and worries about the stigma of providing legal aid to an enemy spy validated in the sneers he gets when recognized in public, and by the bullets shot through their front window by some angry concerned citizen. Even the cops responding to that frightening incident wear a how-could-you snarl.

This is a story that affirms with beautiful moral clarity aspirational bedrock American values, but not the sanctimonious sort used as smarmy stand-ins for greed, intolerance, and crypto-fascism. It’s a hopeful movie with Capra-esque ideals upheld and uplifted: kindness, compassion, empathy, and the willingness to do what good you can. Late in the film the lawyer, weary from his task, confides, “It’s not what other people think. It’s what you know you did.” We see Donovan as a man who values his logic and thinking, preparation and good judgment, tenaciously following his moral compass. Who else could embody those qualities but Tom Hanks? With every passing year his screen presence embodies more easy everyman paternal gravitas, the sort that used to be found in Lewis Stone’s Judge Hardy, vintage Atticus Finch, or evening newscasters. His projecting steady moral certitude goes a long way selling this earnest material.

Of course it also helps that Spielberg is a master filmmaker whose works are almost unfailingly absorbing and well crafted yarns. Here he’s taking talky scenes of legal process and tense negotiations and making them riveting. He has a script by Joel and Ethan Coen, masters of dry dialogue and complicated plotting, and the effect is watching great voices working seamlessly together. From a draft by Matt Charman, they’ve generously provided an unrelenting tick-tock pace and fluid crackling conversations. It’s a true story told with warm humor and disarming expressions of wit and character in every exchange, a lively and reverent story that’s as entertaining as it is moving. Donovan is a character who exudes decency, and who is generally a nice guy, stubborn only in his belief that even one person can make a difference. It’s amazing how much humor and suspense can be wrung out of good old plain niceness.

Spielberg opens with a great silent cat-and-mouse espionage sequence that introduces the Soviet spy (Mark Rylance, calm, sly, meticulous, droll, unknowable) as he’s captured. From there the film quickly sets up the trial, intercutting Americans abroad who are on a path to importance in the plot later on. Complicated geopolitical terrain and historical context are brought to life with immediate vivid clarity, while characters’ dynamics are established with wordless flickers of expression and clever blocking. The sharp dialogue is nonstop, and Spielberg knows his way around a scene, moving lightly and clearly through exposition, allowing clever turns of phrase to land with pleasing snaps. The storytelling economy is breathtaking, especially as a potentially muddled everyman-turns-LeCarre plot unspools with riveting precision and perfect focus. There are scenes with layers of subterfuge, where characters we’ve never met are, through smart placement of details, instantly understood to be putting on a show for the sake of spycraft.

For spycraft is what enters the film as the CIA understandably wants to use the captured spy for their own interests, using him as leverage in some high-stakes, top-secret Cold War negotiations. A wry handler (Scott Shepherd) ends up recruiting Donovan for the task as civilian middleman for the government’s offers, the better to disavow if it all goes wrong. This creates a complicated scenario in which Donovan is more prepared to follow the letter of the law than agents eager to punish the Russians in any way they can, and through which the layman can never be sure how much truth is being told by any other person he’s talking to, even and especially suspicious Soviet and East German agents (Mikhail Gorevoy and Sebastian Koch). The air is thick with Cold War paranoia as frigid and frosty as snow-swept Berlin streets. Spielberg has once again entrusted a film’s look to cinematographer Janusz Kaminski who here captures every bit of the uncertain situation and the sturdy man at its center in fluid camera movements and gorgeous textures, bathing grey areas in cold blue and white glow from every light source.

Spielberg and crew create a sympathetic political drama, attentive to actors’ movements and expressions in relation to one another with gentle precision. (His longtime editor Michael Kahn provides sharp cuts and meaningful juxtapositions, while accommodating unshowy one-take master shots.) It thoroughly humanizes every participant. We see little home life (though what we do is drawn in great shorthand by the likes of Amy Ryan and Eve Hewson), little of the men whose lives are being potentially traded by their governments. Instead, we’re to view people as the movie tells us Donovan does: as equally valuable human lives. Take, for instance, Rylance’s caught spy, who dryly assesses his plight, sees Donovan as an admirable advocate, and in the end emerges not as a martyred other or enemy combatant, but as a man, warm, pragmatic, and doing his best. We see in the faces of every man in a suit a person who’s juggling expectations of bosses and countries, who might be convinced to do what’s best through nothing more than the right smart argument.

Like so many of Spielberg’s historical dramas, Bridge of Spies puts his skill for crowd-pleasing spectacle to use illuminating sharp complicated ideas. In this case, hard-fought optimism emerges from clear and refreshing political resonances. It’d be difficult not to think of our gridlocked national discourse while watching a movie squarely situated on a talking cure, the value of compromise, of speaking with those you hate or distrust to find mutually agreeable ways forward. (It makes a fine pairing with his last film, Lincoln, in that regard.) Donovan realizes there are reasons to find fault with life behind the Iron Curtain, seeing fleeing Germans gunned down on the wall, knowing an American POW is tortured in interrogation that’s certainly “enhanced.” But still he insists the Americans treat their prisoner well, ensures a fair trial, and follows due process every step of the way. Hanks wears this American heroism in all its exhausting, modest, rewarding weight. The film is a deeply moving vision of a man doing the right thing in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds.

When Dinosaurs Ruled the Multiplex: JURASSIC PARK

Returning to Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park, back in theaters for its 20th anniversary, is a hugely enjoyable experience. The by-now classic story of a theme park of cloned dinosaurs descending into chaos one stormy weekend is not simply the fun dinosaur picture I had thought it was as a younger person renting the VHS. Seeing it dwarfing my senses on the big screen reveals it to be an uncommonly skillful work of blockbuster engineering. Its building blocks are stock schlock spectacle with a pulpy Michael Crichton novel streamlined by the author and David Koepp into a screenplay of B-picture archetypes: the noble scientists, the kindly mad billionaire, the smarmy lawyer, the slimy saboteur, and the cute kids. What Spielberg and his collaborators understand is that just because a scenario lends itself to certain tropes doesn’t mean it can’t transcend them through masterful craftsmanship.

This time through, I was struck most of all by the film’s structure. At the time of its release, some complained that it got to the point too quickly, unlike the long tease of Spielberg’s Jaws. Why, the scientists gape at a living, breathing CGI brachiosaurus first thing upon arrival at Jurassic Park, after all. Those critics were so dazzled by the effects that they felt they were a distraction. Now, though, when CGI spectacles can and do cram digital doodads into every cranny of the frame and modern pacing would have a full-blown dinosaur setpiece in the first reel, it’s easier to see how the time in the Park is so carefully built up. For a long period of time, we follow Dr. Grant (Sam Neill), Dr. Sattler (Laura Dern), and Dr. Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) as the white-haired rich man (Richard Attenborough) introduces them to the way the theme park operates and the audience gets to hear all about each of the dinosaur species and their behaviors. Spielberg dips into pleasant popcorn philosophy – chaos theory, “life will find a way” – and introduces cute, instantly sympathetic kids (Joseph Mazzello and Ariana Richards) while casually situating lived-in performances into a just-convincing-enough sci-fi scenario.

Part of what gives pleasant weight to these quickly sketched and off-handedly fully-formed characters is the sense that the performers are finding ways to put unexpected twists on the sometimes clunky lines. They may be archetypes, but they feel pleasingly low-key and real, or at least real enough. Goldblum’s always been a master at putting an offbeat cadence to his dialogue, looping words around as if they’re arriving in his head so quickly that they back up while he decides if he’ll second guesses each clause as he speaks them. Dern is always quite good as well. At the time, she was coming off a string of eclectic performances in the likes of Peter Bogdanovich’s Mask and David Lynch’s Wild at Heart and here provides a center of glowing capability. She, like Sam Neill (also doing great work), provides the film with a great center point. They’re sympathetic and knowledgeable professionals and it helps ground the film in a feeling of determined professionalism. I especially like the subtle arc their relationship has. It’s romance underplayed marvelously. Between that and the fairly restrained Grant-learns-to-like-kids sub-subplot, those who fault Spielberg for hitting emotional beats too hard should find some pause.

When the dinosaurs attack, the scientists and park technicians for the most part maintain a sense of scientific curiosity and harried practicality. They leave the freaking out to the audience. And what a freak out it is. When the power goes out and the storm rolls in, the movie about a theme park gone mad turns into the ultimate amusement park ride, delivering jolts of perfectly orchestrated creature feature horror at irregular intervals. By now, we’re well aware of what the park’s limitations are and what the dinosaurs are capable of. Spielberg has been operating with the knowledge that the best roller coasters aren’t all high-speed dips and loop-de-loops. You need plenty of time to build there through a meticulous climb. It can make the drop all the more fully, memorably terrifying to be aware of the danger well beforehand. Say the words “raptors in the kitchen” to anyone who has seen Jurassic Park and the whole tense sequence comes rushing back.

To the tune of John Williams’s tremendous score, Spielberg, with cinematographer Dean Cundey and editor Michael Kahn, brings a wit to the staging and a satisfied snap of no-nonsense visual competence to the setpieces. The utilitarian pop art beauty of the imagery captures visible beams of Spielbergian high-powered flashlights and casually emphasizes gadgets and weaponry, making vivid figures of action out of convincingly real-world workaday academics and scientists. The film becomes a relentless thrill machine that builds terror as much through anticipation as on screen happenings. In a film of spectacular (and largely still convincing) dinosaur effects (a blending of practical and then-new computer graphics), one of the most memorable images is the simplest, the sight of vibrations rippling in a cup of water, an ominous impact tremor of foreboding, foretelling the arrival of a T. Rex on its way. Because we’ve come to know and care about the characters and are well aware of the potential carnage the prehistoric creatures can bring, Spielberg can make the sight of a character staring past the camera at something unseen by us so nerve-wracking. And then, out pops the dinosaur, teeth chomping, roar rattling the theater’s speakers. It’s worth the build up to be so startled.

Spielberg’s a master filmmaker not because he can get these responses, but because he can modulate so quickly without losing a grip on the audience’s emotions. Take, for instance, the sustained terror of the first T. Rex attack. Its massive head has burst through the sunroof of the first jeep, pinning two screaming children underneath its gnashing teeth. We cut to the second jeep for a split second as Goldblum wipes fog off the windshield so he can see what’s going on. It’s such a slight release that it registers as both a funny throwaway gag and a minor escalation of tension by denying information about the real danger for that moment. Jurassic Park is perhaps the best creature feature of the last two decades, much like Spielberg’s own Indiana Jones films are the best adventure serials of the last three. He, to paraphrase Hitchcock, another master audience manipulator, gets pleasure out of playing the audience like a piano. It works just as well today as it did when it was first released. Just ask my sister, who saw it for the first time ever when I took her with me to the multiplex yesterday. She was quite literally on the edge of her seat.

Note: The rerelease is unfortunately in largely superfluous 3D. It subtly pops the depth in a few moments and sometimes a blurry object in the foreground will appear marginally closer that it should. I, for one, was happy that it was unobtrusive enough that I quickly forgot it was 3D at all and simply enjoyed seeing the movie again.