Metro Pulse/Movie Guru/Raiders of the Lost Ark

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Nirvana (5 out of 5)

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Raiders of the Lost Ark was Steven Spielberg's last great fake movie.

by Jesse Fox Mayshark I remember cringing during the Academy Awards two years ago when Steven Spielberg got up to accept the statuette for Best Director. "Is it O.K. to say I really wanted this?" he asked, hoisting the Oscar and grinning like a kid who finally talked his mom into buying him that new scooter.

Ostensibly, Spielberg was happy on behalf of his movie, Saving Private Ryan, and the generation of World War II veterans it was dedicated to. But there was more than that to his desire for validation. It was hard to escape the feeling that he wanted the award, the same one he'd won five years earlier for Schindler's List, as one more token of credibility, one more certification of Spielberg: The Artist.

Sadly, that kind of thing can't be measured by awards. And with the re-release last week of Raiders of the Lost Ark, for my money the last great film Spielberg made, it's as good a time as any to reconsider the career of America's most popular director.

Spielberg came of age in Hollywood in the midst of brilliance. He apprenticed to a generation of filmmakers unlike any before them. Influenced by the intellectual rigor and narrative innovation of French, Italian, and Japanese cinema, directors like Scorsese, Coppola, Bogdanovich, and Altman rewrote the rules of what you could do in American movies. They drew on the culture and counter-culture around them, suffusing their films with clear-eyed cynicism, moral ambiguity, and rock 'n' roll.

But while Spielberg shared his mentors' energy and love of film, he was never really like them. From his first effort, the TV movie Duel, a straightforward thriller delivered with nervous, nervy precision, it was obvious that his native talent lay in good old-fashioned storytelling. When his feature debut, The Sugarland Express, hit theaters in 1974, New Yorker critic Pauline Kael pegged him right off: "I can't tell if he has any mind, or even a strong personality, but then a lot of good moviemakers have got by without being profound...He could be that rarity among directors—a born entertainer—perhaps a new generation's Howard Hawks."

For the next eight years, culminating in E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, Spielberg would prove her right again and again. Jaws was the breakthrough, of course, the monster movie that turned movies into box-office monsters. Then his arguable high point, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. (Then, well, you kind of have to overlook 1941, except as an interesting prelude to his later WWII fixation.) And then Raiders.

Produced by George Lucas, Raiders was a Baby Boomer tribute to the adventure films of the '40s and '50s, movies and serials that Spielberg and Lucas absorbed in Saturday matinees and television reruns. More then that, it was a tribute to the imagined innocence of the period, a childlike evocation of a world peopled by insidious villains with heavy accents and dashing American heroes.

The movie came out in the first year of the Reagan administration, and it's built on the same dishonesty that underscored much of American life in the 1980s. There's no Vietnam in Indiana Jones' future (the way there palpably is in the future of Lucas' American Graffiti kids), no race riots or Watergate or Iranian hostage crisis. Can you imagine Indy as an aging archaeology professor in the 1960s, confronted by long-haired students who might take him to task for raiding the cultural treasures of the Third World? Of course not. It's a fake movie, an escapist pastiche that's barely about anything at all.

But it's a great fake movie, one that taps into both of Spielberg's principal strengths: technical razzle-dazzle (from the rollercoaster opening sequence to the elaborate Egyptian sets) and narrative drive. The story doesn't really make sense, but Spielberg's enough of a raconteur to make you go along with it. The ease and warmth of the cast are to his credit, too; Harrison Ford and Karen Allen are as natural a pair of bickering lovers as the Golden Age ever gave us.

That Raiders has a particular alchemy is especially evident when you consider its sorry sequels, the gimmicky, Disneyish Temple of Doom and the outright awful Last Crusade. In Raiders, Spielberg was still working from his imagination; in the follow-ups, as in his uninspired Jurassic Park films, he was running on formula.

I think that's because after Raiders and the overly cute E.T. (where the creak of the machinery started to drown out the whimsy), Spielberg was no longer happy to please the crowds. Unlike Howard Hawks, for example, who went to his grave with no greater ambition than telling stories and getting people to listen ("I think our job is to make entertainment," he told an interviewer in the 1970s), Spielberg wanted to say something important. He wanted respect on the level of his peers (who, in turn, no doubt envied his box-office receipts). He set about choosing important subjects, often gutsy ones. His first "serious" film, The Color Purple, was as deliberately daring a move as he could make, a story drawn from the viewpoint of a different race, gender, and era. Then there was Empire of the Sun. In both cases, he turned wrenching literature into well-crafted middlebrow morality tales. They weren't failures, exactly, but they tried too hard and accomplished too little. For the first time in his career, Spielberg was telling instead of showing.

I feel the same way about Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan, the most notable of his subsequent efforts to make a masterpiece. Although both of them (especially Schindler's List) have moments of cinematic wonder, they're grounded in an inability to think beyond their own received wisdom. The Holocaust was bad because it was bad; sacrifice is necessary because sacrifice is necessary. There is almost nothing personal about them. In these movies, the world is simply as it appears, and the literalness of the vision hems in both the director and the audience.

That's why Raiders, with its cartoon Nazis and mystical mumbo-jumbo, is more viscerally convincing than anything Spielberg has done since. It's the last time he let himself go.