PhantomKnight Goes Spielbergian

It only gets weirder

The Color Purple was the film debut of Whoopi Goldberg, who plays the main role of Celie, and the film follows the character over the course of her life as she experiences numerous hardships in 20th Century rural Georgia. So, let’s start with Whoopi Goldberg, because the vast majority of this movie is pretty much dependent on whether or not we buy into her performance. Fortunately, we do. There is a lot of emotional heavylifting required for the role of Celie here -- obviously, given the material -- but Goldberg just crushes it quite impressively. Of course, I’m more used to her comedic side as an actor (namely Ghost and Sister Act), so I was even more impressed by her work in this movie. She really succeeds in embodying the put-upon, depressed and just drained quality that so many years of abuse would do to someone in her position. There’s a scene towards the end of the film where she finally stands up for herself and speaks out against the man she was forced into a marriage with as a teenager, and that scene is very powerful and rewarding because the film effectively communicates the sense of oppression that Celie has had to live under her whole life. Concurrently, Danny Glover gives a strong and menacing performance as Celie’s abusive husband. Glover’s work leans decidedly more into the typical sort of portrayal of a character like this rather than a more subtle or nuanced take, but he’s still effective. On the whole, the acting is one of the strongest aspects of The Color Purple.

However...that’s about as far as most of my praise for this movie can go. Because while The Color Purple is a far cry from being an outright bad film, it’s also a far cry from the great one it’s striving to be. This is a movie with great scenes more than it is a great film overall. Now, I’m not going to get caught up so much on the differences between the book and the film, because I’ve only read the book once in my freshman year of college and that was twelve years ago. But I can say that the film I was presented with had its fair share of problems even as its own thing.

The first and perhaps biggest issue that jumped out at me was the film’s balancing of tone, or lack thereof. It’s not so much that the film is ineffective at conveying the traumas and hardships that Celie goes through over the course of the story, but rather it has a pretty big problem of trying to incorporate comedic flourishes in places where such things shouldn’t go. The film starts out well, on the other hand, and rather starkly presents all of the abuse that Celie has to go through. That stuff definitely carries a certain weight and pulls us in. The problem first comes about, though, after the film’s first significant time jump, particularly in the way it characterizes Harpo (Willard Pugh), the oldest son of Mister (Danny Glover). Harpo is very much presented as a comic relief character, i.e. something of a doofus, and the shenanigans with him really do intrude on the drama inherent in the rest of the film. But it doesn’t stop there. Throughout the film, there are more instances of poorly-placed comedy, such as a character having trouble getting a car to start driving and a barroom brawl that briefly brings back to mind a similar scene from 1941. Things like those seem like the touches of Steven Spielberg himself, and I can only assume it’s because he was maybe relatively nervous/uncertain about handling his first outright drama, so he threw in moments like those to try and give himself something of a “comfort zone” to work with here and there. But a movie like The Color Purple really doesn’t feel like the right kind of movie to do that with. That’s not to say that comedic moments in this movie couldn’t have worked at all, but they needed to be incorporated better than they ultimately were. It just ends up messing with the overall tone, making for an overall inconsistent film.

That inconsistency doesn’t help when it comes to the film’s runtime, either. This is a 2 ½ hour film that feels like it could’ve had at least half an hour cut from it. Earlier, I mentioned a scene where Celie finally stands up for herself, but it feels like the movie peaks there and there’s still at least 25 minutes left to go after it. The reason why it doesn’t end there is because the question of Celie’s agency and her finally standing up for herself is only half of the film’s emotional drive. The other half is her connection with her sister Nettie, whom she’s separated from early on in the film and desperately wants to get back to. Only...the movie mostly tosses this by the wayside for almost all of its middle stretch, instead focusing on a bunch of other subplots that contribute to the film’s overlong runtime. The movie tries to justify the absence of any progression of the Nettie subplot later on by having a certain reveal, but by then, it’s kind of too little too late. The conclusion/payoff to this separation arc is where the film actually ends and while it is admittedly a touching moment, it’s also one that tries to sort of redeem a certain character at the same time, and that felt unearned to me.

What a boooooooooring movie

Both

Yeah, both.

Let’s just agree that episode 14 of the Mandalorian is better than both, which by SnoBorderZero’s definition, means that Robert Rodriguez out directed Steven Spielberg.

Set during the days of World War II, the film focuses on a young boy named Jamie Graham, the privileged son of a British family living in Shanghai when the Japanese invade and force all foreigners living there into prison camps. The main thing that Empire of the Sun is notable for is that it features a very young Christian Bale in the role of Jamie, in his theatrical/Hollywood debut. Hey, when your first major film role is in a Steven Spielberg film, you must be doing something right. And with the film dealing with such heavy and intense subject matter, a lot of its success rides on who you have at the center of it. So, then, let’s start with Christian Bale’s performance. He’s honestly pretty great here. Like I said, this film really depends on whether or not we buy into him as the character guiding us through this story, and we do. Bale was 13, if I’m correct, when he made this film and already he was bringing a lot of the intensity we’d come to expect from him when his career would later take off. But more importantly, he brings a youthful innocence and vulnerability that not only informs the character as a whole, but also perfectly suits the situations he gets into throughout. Spielberg has since said that a major theme of Empire of the Sun is the death of innocence -- both in Jamie as a character and in the entire world. It’s something most certainly achieved through Jamie’s arc and Bale’s performance, but most notably through the use of the imagery of the bombing of Nagasaki towards the end of the film, and it works. The film may have a looser plot structure and be driven more by the character’s experiences rather than a tightly-constructed story, but the way it ultimately expresses its themes and central message through its main character’s journey is very effective. Also worth noting in the castis John Malkovich as Basie, an American expatriate and street hustler who becomes a sort of mentor/father figure, albeit a complicated one to say the least, to Jamie and makes for an equally strong presence in the film.

Now, I mentioned that I think Empire of the Sun succeeds as a film more than The Color Purple did, and that’s mainly because it feels like Steven Spielberg is more comfortable with the material here than he was in his previous film. Empire of the Sun has a couple of themes and ideas in it that have popped up before in his body of work up to this point: there’s a child being separated from his parents (The Sugarland Express, E.T., Close Encounters and Poltergeist) and World War II (1941 and Raiders of the Lost Ark), so thematically, this film definitely seems like it’s in Spielberg’s wheelhouse. And as a result, there’s more of a confidence in the presentation and storytelling that was sort of missing from The Color Purple. Now, that’s not to say that there’s still not the occasional tonal inconsistency here and there, but in the case of this film, it’s a little bit more forgivable than it was in The Color Purple. And that’s mainly because (especially when it comes to some of the internment camp scenes) the characters expressing hope, humor and the like feels like a natural coping mechanism for them in their current circumstances. Now, John Williams’ score -- while very good overall -- is also sort of guilty at times, as it can try to inject senses of whimsy in certain areas where it doesn’t feel quite appropriate. But overall, when there’s drama to unfold here, Spielberg knows to let those moments speak for themselves and knows how to sell them. And with the whole idea of people being rounded up into internment camps, one could look at this film as sort of a testing ground/trial run of material Spielberg would later tackle in Schindler’s List years later. You can clearly tell that this material speaks more to him than The Color Purple did. Not that he didn’t put in effort with The Color Purple, but there’s just a sense of passion behind Empire of the Sun that translates into a more effective piece of storytelling while feeling like a more refined and clear vision of Spielberg’s voice as director up to this point in his career without genre conventions boosting it up.

I think I watched Empire of the Sun on HBO when I was something like twelve. Probably the Spielberg movie I have the least in the way of a concrete opinion on.

I enjoyed Empire of the Sun a lot. I barely remember the story, but Spielberg feels a lot more energized than on something like The Color Purple. The pacing is a lot better, there's some real strong imagery, and young Christian Bale is really endearing as the lead.

Then again, who fucking knows. Ranking Spielberg movies is not as fun or easy a task as it sounds. He's made a lot of great, a lot of good, and very few bad and sorting them all out is difficult.

It's a lot of personal preference when it comes to him. Schindler's List is his most artistic work as a filmmaker, but is it better than Raiders of the Lost Ark? Is Jaws better than Saving Private Ryan? I don't think any of those movies sitting at the top of someone's Spielberg list is wrong, but you ask ten people to rank Spielberg and you're gonna get a lot of different variations among those tiers Neverending mentioned.

And actually I think it's a lot of his good movies that will present the most variables. Jurassic Park vs. Minority Report, Lincoln vs. Munich, those are the decisions where people will really deviate.