1993 Year in Review : SPIELBERG : He’s Bigger Than His Dinosaurs

Imagine the author of “The Bridges of Madison County” showing up in Stockholm to collect the Nobel Prize for literature. Or Snoop Doggy Dogg and Mariah Carey joining the Berlin Philharmonic and outclassing the field with their exquisite versions of delicate Shubert duets.

That’s the kind of year it’s been for Steven Spielberg.

On the one hand, he inaugurated a blockbuster summer at the box office with “Jurassic Park,” his super-popular film version of the Michael Crichton novel that has fetched a current worldwide gross of $850 million and still counting. More than simply earning money, “Jurassic Park” became a symbol to the European community of everything it feared about the power of Hollywood and turned the dinosaur into a potent negative rallying point during the just-completed global trade talks.

On the flip side, we now have “Schindler’s List,” a restrained and powerful story of the Holocaust that has had critics dusting off superlatives not used since “The Birth of a Nation.” An agonizing black-and-white tour de force that has already been named the year’s best picture by a gaggle of critics groups, “Schindler’s List” has made Spielberg the favorite to win the best-director Oscar he hasn’t been nominated for in a decade.

While most directors don’t get to have these kinds of diametrically opposed experiences in a lifetime, let alone in a single year, Spielberg has always been different. Blessed with a gift for popular filmmaking unparalleled in his generation--and one of the marvels of “Schindler’s List” is how deftly it fits into that category--Spielberg has had a career that has periodically shown the kind of split-level yearnings that 1993 wrote especially large.

Though no film ever made has gobbled up dollars like “Jurassic Park,” Spielberg’s pictures have always attracted a paying public. When Daily Variety inaugurated a series of special sections called “The Billion Dollar Directors,” he was the inevitable choice to lead it off: His films have managed a worldwide theatrical gross of more than $4 billion.

Spielberg’s first films, from the made-for-TV “Duel” through “The Sugarland Express” and the hugely successful “Jaws,” were both fiscal and critical successes; an admiring Pauline Kael of the New Yorker, for instance, called “Jaws” “the most cheerfully perverse scare movie ever made.”

But the sound of applause may have gradually felt like a curse and then an addiction for Spielberg. When a genuinely exceptional work like “E.T.” won only the least prestigious of Oscars because the academy felt its huge popularity made it suspect, the director seemed to take the easy way out and retreat to the comfort of undiluted mass approval.

And like many another hooked user, he began to be willing to do less and less to jeopardize his pleasure. His movies got blander and blander as their popularity increased, with “Jurassic Park,” its special-effects-generated grosses to the contrary, marking a kind of creative nadir. With acting and characterization very much a footnote, “Jurassic Park” felt like the work of a man who had given up on any but the most mechanistic aspects of his craft.

Still, if Spielberg was not willing to abandon this kind of success, there were indications that it was not enough for him. He involved himself with a pair of celebrated novels--Alice Walker’s “The Color Purple” and J. G. Ballard’s “The Empire of the Sun”--a sure sign in Hollywood of wanting to improve your cultural credentials.

But with “The Color Purple” he was too young and simply lost his nerve, overemphasizing every emotion in sight. With the much more effective “Empire,” he unfortunately became a victim of his own reputation and got much less credit than he deserved.

But the question with Spielberg, even in these films, was always what was he willing to risk to prove that he was more than a director of dizzying rides on the Universal Studios Tour. With “Schindler’s List,” yet another prestigious book, he finally steeled himself for the plunge, sacrificing major stars, the glibness of color, even the comfort of heavily underlining emotions. It must not have been easy or natural for him after all these years, and in fact he does slip up in a few places, but the extent to which he succeeds is remarkable.

Yet the beauty of “Schindler’s List” is precisely that it does not come out of nowhere. Again and again, even in the most difficult scenes, we can see the hand of a director whose instinctive storytelling skills have been polished with decades of practice. For though he may not have known it at the time, this is the film Steven Spielberg has been preparing for for all of his professional life.

Having touched all the bases in 1993, the real question for Spielberg is what a year like this means for his future. Will the lack of attention to character, already visible in “Jurassic Park,” intensify after “Schindler’s List”? Will he no longer be as passionate about fluff as he was in the past? Or will the emotional content of that film lead Spielberg back to stories like “E.T.” that combined popular themes with non-canned emotions? That would be a Hollywood ending indeed.