Good morning, readers. This week, I'm hijacking The Cliff-Hanger from Josh Rosenberg, the Sheridan-verse correspondent you've come to know and love over the past few months. I'm Brady Langmann, Esquire's senior entertainment editor. Why am I behind the wheel of the newsletter on this fine Monday morning?
Well, we did a very big thing at the end of last week. We ranked all thirty-five Steven Spielberg movies.
If you somehow missed it—or, if your local bar didn't have a killer Jaws night with four-dollar Narragansetts (as mine did)—Jaws turned fifty years old on Friday. So marked the occasion of our send-up of one of the greatest directors of all time, as well as quite a few battles between Esquire editors I will not name here. But I'm proud of where our list landed, even if my personal favorite, Jurassic Park (hold on to your butts!), didn't claim the top spot.
Of course, there is so damn much to say about Jaws, and an infinite amount more about its then-twenty-seven-year-old director, Steven Spielberg. I only have space for one of the two today—and longtime movie critic Chris Nashawaty wrote what just might be the best Jaws tribute I've ever read on Esquire.com. So, I'll take on Mr. Spielberg, because there's still something we don't quite think about when we consider the director's legendary oeuvre.
Confession time: I'm a child of the '90s, but I saw embarrassingly little of the director's films growing up. My dad showed me all of the Indiana Jones entries, plus one traumatizing, way-too-early War of the Worlds screening—but Spielberg's classics weren't my classics. If he ever made a sports movie (he didn't, which was something that actually surprised me during our reappraisal of his work), it'd be a different story, but I was a Remember the Titans, Field of Dreams, and Happy Gilmore kind of kid.
Then, sometime in the fall of 2022, I was having a shitty day. It was a rainy Saturday and I had fought with my girlfriend, but it wasn't just that—my father died earlier that year and I was still feeling it, even if I didn't quite understand what I was feeling. I lived in Brooklyn at the time, so I laced up my running shoes and jogged into Manhattan, made my way to the West side, and slowly inched my way uptown. Eventually, I ended up, as I often do, at the AMC Lincoln Square. I wasn't ready to go home, but my legs were tired. What's showing? The Fabelmans, Spielberg's quasi-autobiographical film. I bought a ticket in the back, still soaked from the rain and sweat. (Gross, I know.)
Many assumed that The Fabelmans, which debuted in the thick of awards season, would see Hollywood give Spielberg his flowers. That didn't really happen. The film depicted a fictionalized version of his origin story: An impressionable, curious boy undergoes a life-shaking, cross-country move—only to watch his parents' relationship deteriorate on the other end. You'll see a big ol' 92 percent on the movie's Rotten Tomatoes page, but that doesn't really tell the full story. Many critics and fans praised the leading performances from Paul Dano, Michelle Williams, and Seth Rogen, but felt the film was overlong and didn't quite rival Spielberg's best work, let alone its awards competition that year.
The 2023 Academy Awards were all about Everything Everywhere All at Once. The Fabelmans earned seven Oscar nominations—including Spielberg for Best Director—but the film went home empty-handed.
But at the Lincoln Square theater, Spielberg was pulling me closer. The Fabelmans hit me square in the chest. There was the way Spielberg gazed at his younger visage, Sammy, with pure love—but also despair, knowing the hurt to come. And his portrayal of Sammy's first experience at a movie, followed later by unfiltered joy when he directs his own, feels like what we all feel when we find something we love. But there's a deep pain there, too.
Lonely and confused as a child, Spielberg found his escape through a big screen, in a dark room, surrounded by strangers. His scars and his vocation are forever intertwined. It's the other end of following your dreams, the side no one wants to talk about—the part when you leave your family, friends, and move away from home to keep doing what you love, even when it hurts. I'll never forget the speech from Sammy's uncle, played brilliantly by Judd Hirsch: "Art will give you crowns in heaven and laurels on earth, but also, it'll tear your heart out and leave you lonely," he says. "Family, art—it will tear you in two."
On a rainy Saturday, there I was: Big screen, dark room, surrounded by strangers. I finally got Spielberg.
Since then, I've slowly worked my way through all of the Spielberg films I missed over the years. This week's Spielberg screening? Minority Report. Fun as hell, but I can't scrape the image of a blindfolded Tom Cruise hacking on a moldy sandwich out of my head.
Commentaires
Enregistrer un commentaire
Thank you to leave a comment on my site