Boy wonder

Back in 1978, a young and already successful Steven Spielberg told a bunch of would-be moviemakers at the American Film Institute not to ‘worry if critics like… Molly Haskell don’t like your movies’. Four decades on, and just in time to mark his 70th birthday, Haskell has written a biography of Spielberg for Yale’s series of Jewish Lives. Since the series is essentially celebratory, and since Haskell is one of the hanging judges of feminist film criticism, this is an interesting commission.

But is it a wise one? Whatever you think of Spielberg’s work, its emphasis on motherhood and apple pie hardly makes it feminist fodder. Little wonder Haskell hesitated before agreeing to the project. ‘I had never been an ardent fan [of Spielberg],’ says this lover of European arthouse cinema. In fact, she and Spielberg have nothing in common. Where she goes for ‘irony’ he goes for the ‘inspirational’. Where she adores ‘brooding ambiguity’, he loves ‘moral clarity’. And while they ‘both had blind spots’, there was no getting away from the fact that his ‘blind spots were my SEE spots, and vice versa’. As Fred said to Ginger, ‘Let’s call the whole thing off.’

Yet Steven Spielberg: A Life In Films turns out not to be a hatchet job. Haskell has barely a bad word to say about the man and his movies. Even when she has Spielberg on the ropes, she invariably pulls her punches. Take her comments on his love story Always. She isn’t wrong when she says the movie fails to ‘imagine the full spectrum of adult heterosexual emotions — attraction, flirtation, desire’. But she doesn’t add that since that criticism can be made of all Spielberg’s work — indeed, that he isn’t really interested in the relations between men and women, period — he is therefore crippled as an artist, and his movies only ever likely to be of sociological interest.