MINORITY REPORT Reviewed 9/16/2002

Pity Steven Spielberg, the Richie Rich of science fiction high school.

He wants to be accepted. He knows all the hip jargon. He steals from the best (Philip K. Dick, by now quasi-deified among sf intelligentsia) and pays his due homage (his three pre-cognitive detectives are known as Agatha, Arthur, and Dashiell). He brings absolutely the best toys (in MINORITY REPORT, his cars are pure TRON by way of BLADE RUNNER, with marvelous computer sequencing) and he always does his homework (retinal identification). But no matter how cool he tries to be, he betrays his rich-kid background:

• He cannot follow through on his premise (breathtaking precognitive ability but no face-recognition software, retinal recognition as a key to entry but no shutdown of access when a person has become a fugitive) when it interferes with his story.
• Instead of making his protagonist a flawed jumble (Harrison Ford's Decker in BLADE RUNNER) or feckless dweeb (Jonathan Pryce's Sam Lowry in BRAZIL), he presents us with granite-jawed Tom Cruise, whom we cannot see as anything other than Heroic Top Gun. Are we surprised when Tom is accused of a future crime? Do we think he'll do it?
• Instead of a fearful grim conclusion (Ridley Scott's original BLADE RUNNER, or Terry Gilliam's BRAZIL), he perks us up with a saccharine Hollywood ending.
• Instead of trusting to his audience's intelligence, he must overlay every scene with visual and auditory organ music (in one scene, literally!). His police headquarters is Stygian, his political power rooms are clothed in backlit black-and-white straight out of Hammett. No moment is without its gloss.
• Instead of working with the powerful themes available--What is free will? Is the state justified in intervening before a crime is committed? If we lust in our futures, are we at that moment guilty?--he devolves his story into a standard-issue Spielbergian lost-father-child-grief coupled with a standard-issue virtue-triumphs morality play.
• Instead of character complexity, he gives us Ionesco puppetry monomania, each figure standing for Something, his most complex character (Colin Farell as a Department of Justice figure) suffering the usual penalty for being emotionally complex in a Spielberg film.
• Instead of surprising us, he delivers a by-the-numbers melodrama that had Nancy and me whispering plot "twists" to one another half an hour before they appeared. I guess we're pre-cog.

Only in his peripheral characters is the story allowed true life: Tim Blake Nelson (O BROTHER?) as a loopy caring stasis-prison security guard, Peter Stormare (FARGO, MILLION DOLLAR HOTEL) as a grandiloquent Russian ex-con turned black market eye swapper (delivering an unbelievably chilling casual soliloquy before clamping Cruise's John Anderton into a face vice).

Yet this is almost a great movie, if only Spielberg would examine his own manias:

• Anderton's ability to capture visual images from the pre-cogs and scan them for clues is played before a huge illuminated screen, a symphonic, auto-erotic technological kabuki. Like a film director, Cruise storyboards the future, conjuring up stories from visual snapshots ... and what he storyboards, comes true (as do a director's dreams become works). This fusion of creation, implied procreation, and technology in pursuit of visual story is such a perfect expression of moviemaking craft that to see it so worshipped (visions come from the Temple) is striking, disturbing, and compelling, as if we have glimpsed forbidden fantasies.
• Submersion in water as concealment, death, subconscious, and even peace, very Jungian (see SOLARIS, coming soon to a remake near you). "Till human voices wake us, and we drown," writes T. S. Eliot at the finish of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, a fate evocative of brilliant pre-cog Agatha (Samantha Morton, a mesmerizing plaintive performance).
• The recurring motif of seeing as a physical objective correlative for insight. "Can you see?" gasps Agatha. "Can you see?"

Like George Lucas, Spielberg is at once fascinated by technology's power for good and frightened of its power for evil. MINORITY REPORT is a gripping film except when he succumbs to his moviemaking nature ... but without that nature, the film would never have been made in all its marvelous sf detail.

In high school, rich kids have a use. Even if they never quite get it, without them we would never have access to their cool toys.

ã Copyright 2002 David Alexander Smith