Beastie Boy

Later, when the wonderment started to look processed, in films such 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 okay 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 were 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. Spielberg's 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 of 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.

The Lost World: Jurassic Park.
Written by David Koepp; directed by Steven Spielberg; with Jeff Goldblum, Julianne Moore, Pete Postlethwaite, Vanessa Lee Chester, Vince Vaughn, Richard Attenborough, Arliss Howard, Richard Schiff, and Peter Stormare.