You can go home again

I understand that there are people who don't respond to Spielberg's movies. Much as I dislike dogmatic statements, though, I think that if you look at his work from this period and don't realize you're seeing a master of framing, timing and rhythm, a born moviemaker, then in some essential way you don't understand movies. Gently satirical and loving, and often set in middle-class or working-class households and towns, Spielberg's work reminded you of what was good about America -- the optimism, the oddball enthusiasms of ordinary folks and the way people stake out their own space in the noisy, free-for-all bumptiousness of family life. (People talk at the same time in Spielberg's movies, the way they do in Howard Hawks' work, and Robert Altman's.)

Spielberg's movies, despite the way they're often characterized, are not Hollywood idealizations of families and the suburbs. The homes here bear what the cultural critic Karal Ann Marling called "the marks of hard use." The furniture is functional and beat-up, and might have a few unmade payments left to go. The garages carry the detritus of a hundred forgotten projects. Toys and laundry never seem to get picked up. The TV jabbers in the background. The phone keeps ringing. Kids and their friends are always underfoot. Controlled chaos carries the day.

Nobody just sits down to dinner in Spielberg households and talks about what they did that day. The kids (and sometimes the adults) play with their food, keep jumping up to attend to other things, talk over one another and in general create such a hubbub that eating becomes the last thing on anybody's mind. Spielberg also reminded you of what could be good about popular American movies: their capacity for reflecting and celebrating that native casualness, and the way the best of them become communal experiences, modern versions of passed-down tall tales and legends that become part of our common popular heritage.

The disappointment of watching the "serious" Steven Spielberg, the Spielberg of "The Color Purple" and "Amistad" and "Saving Private Ryan" and "A.I.," reminds me of Woody Allen's ridiculous remark about comics not sitting at the grown-ups' table. It's the sad spectacle of a director rejecting what made him good in the first place. You can't blame Spielberg for wanting to move beyond the increasingly closed-off movie world of the "Indiana Jones" and "Jurassic Park" series. But -- with the exception of "Schindler's List," a more ambiguous and thorny movie than is generally understood -- Spielberg's adult dramas have less connection to the real world than his fantasies do. Like those fantasies, they also belong to a Hollywood tradition, but it's the tired, inflated tradition of worthy, impressively mounted prestige pictures. He's the good student in these movies, working less for his own joy in moviemaking than for the approval of those he perceives to be his betters.

There is always a danger that a director's inferior work will be used against him to prove that even his good work was a sham. So it is that a clanking, impersonal thriller like "Jurassic Park" has been used by his critics as if it were indistinguishable from the wit and invention of "Jaws." Or the square self-importance of "Amistad" and "Saving Private Ryan" is used to prove that there was never any real content in Spielberg's movies.

For me, the real drama lies somewhere else in his movies. The single most despairing moment in any Spielberg picture may be at the end of "The Sugarland Express," when Goldie Hawn realizes she's not going to be reunited with the child authorities have taken away from her and, in a frenzy, throws a copy of "The Wizard of Oz" out a car window. That's the act of someone who has reached a point where life has become too painful to accommodate even the possibility of fantasy. But fantasy can be a way back to life rather than an escape from it.

All great fantasies, from "The Wizard of Oz" to the Harry Potter books to "The Lord of the Rings" to "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" to "E.T.," the greatest of all American fantasy movies, are grounded in emotional reality. They provide ways of talking about elemental things that might be considered banal were they treated in a straightforward, naturalistic manner. In the context of fantasy, the emotions associated with basic experiences and rites of passage are heightened and intensified.

The crushing sadness of a teenage girl who sleeps with her boyfriend only to find him turned into a strutting bastard the next morning is a familiar tale. When the girl is Buffy, a vampire slayer, and her boyfriend, Angel, is a vampire with a soul who (thanks to a gypsy curse) loses that soul after achieving a moment of perfect happiness, banality is transcended the way it is in grand opera. Which is not to say that all fantasy takes place at the highest emotional pitch, or on a superhuman scale.

Next Page: Yeah, the effects have been juiced -- but E.T. still has that jerky shuffle and that pot belly

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