There’s an increasingly vast division of films and film-makers we now call “critic-proof” – the gunky action franchises, family-targeted animations and superhero adventures that need no critical endorsement to connect with audiences – and Steven Spielberg remains their patron saint. The man who, more than 40 years ago, altered the generic model and business strategy of the studio blockbuster with Jaws has long proven that commercial success and artistic acclaim needn’t be interdependent: he’s raked in the millions with films as beloved as ET and as beleaguered as Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
Critic-proofing himself has given Spielberg the least restricted career in Hollywood, one that pinballs to this day between popcorn entertainment and conscientious prestige drama. In 1993, it seemed impossible that one film-maker could release Jurassic Park and Schindler’s List in the same year, appearing equally committed to, and stimulated by, both films. Actors and film-makers straddling the mainstream-arthouse border often speak of a “one for me, one for them” principle. For Spielberg, just about every one is for him; commerce follows his will.
Spielberg’s cordial but non-dependent relationship with film critics makes him a complex subject for an expressly critical biography, not least one by a relative agnostic. In the preface to her saltily insightful, entertaining and not-long-enough-by-half volume, Steven Spielberg: A Life in Films, the eminent Molly Haskell admits to a conflicted stance on him throughout his career: “We both had our blind spots,” she admits, “[but] Spielberg’s blind spots were my see spots, and vice versa.”
She’s not being glib or unkind. Haskell, a veteran of the Village Voice and New York magazine, is a fizzily provocative, politically engaged writer, among the great feminist voices in US criticism. Spielberg, meanwhile, routinely gives women short shrift in a filmography heavy on boyish wonder, masculine unity and daddy issues. A Democrat in private, he’s nonetheless so resistant to political identification that he delayed the 2012 release of Lincoln until after Barack Obama’s re-election.
This unlikely match of biographer and subject – further underlined by Haskell, a Gentile, writing the book as an entry in Yale’s Jewish Lives series – gives her study the tension and snap of a good romantic comedy, the genre to which Spielberg is most allergic. There’s brisk, teasing affection in her scepticism, particularly as she addresses the widely perceived sexlessness of his work, but her revisiting of his work has also, by her own admission, yielded admiration and sympathy for his films – and for the tangled personal identity politics they betray.
Spielberg’s long-resisted embrace of his Judaism, cathartically processed in Schindler’s List, is perceptively treated as a narrative throughline. The book’s opening, purely biographical chapters are its most illuminating, tenderly outlining the outsider complex that grew from being a Jewish nerd in the suburbs of Arizona, laying the groundwork for his conflicting impulses as a storyteller between otherworldly exploration and home-is-where-the-heart-is sentimentality. That yearning both to escape and to belong underpins many of Spielberg’s greatest films, particularly the science fiction raptures of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, ET and, more guardedly, the Stanley Kubrick-inherited AI. Yet it’s in a suitably cutting but unexpectedly protective critique of his 1989 whimsical folly, Always, that Haskell most fondly and incisively nails her subject: “If Spielberg’s heart isn’t ‘into’ romance or desire,” she concludes, “the emotion of longing is one he deeply understands.”
Indeed, it’s often on the least obvious films that Haskell’s arguments crystallise most excitingly. She doesn’t quite mask her indifference to some of the most popular titles in the Spielberg canon – stepping back only fractionally, for example, from her 1975 statement that Jaws is “like a rat being given shock treatment” and admitting to feeling “artery-clogged” by ET. Sacrilege to some, sure, but the world isn’t short of published valentines to pop-culture totems that practically exist in a post-critical space anyway.
You’d have to look hard, however, to find a defence of Spielberg’s nervy JG Ballard adaptation Empire of the Sun – to Haskell, his finest film – as impassioned as the intricate chapter she devotes to it here. Her celebration of the thrilling, exquisitely flawed, still misunderstood AI, meanwhile, is marvellous, offering a welcome corrective to critical assumptions about which “parts” of the film are Kubrick’s, Spielberg’s or both. She surprises, too, with her astute but forgiving appreciation of his divisive take on Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, standing up for the sensuality of its lesbian dynamics.
Such passages of brilliance are enough to make this an essential volume on an artist whose aversion to interviews has shortened the shelf of worthwhile studies on him. Even so, Haskell’s fire and wit peter out in the final chapters, as the last decade or so of Spielberg’s career (including such testing works as Munich and brash formal experiments like The Adventures of Tintin) are dispatched in a few pages. (Not too scant, thankfully, to preclude a clean, sharp jab at the custardy faux-English romanticism of War Horse as “[John] Ford seen through Young Adult Eyes … begging to be admired”.)
Whether she ran out of time or interest in his latter-day work, one hopes an eventual revision is forthcoming on a career that still has – to borrow her jaded observation on the Indiana Jones franchise – “much derring left to do”.
• Steven Spielberg: A Life in Films by Molly Haskell is published by Yale University Press (£16.99). To order a copy for £14.44 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
