As I was taking my seat at the Tasveer Film Center for Disclosure Day last week, I recall thinking how lucky I was to have lived the entirety of my life in a time when I had the opportunity to catch a new Steven Spielberg movie on opening weekend in theaters.
One day in the not-so-distant future, on whatever terrible website eventually replaces Reddit as the place where people go to wallow in their own worldview with like-minded wallowers, young film buffs will have serious conversations about how thrilling it must have been to be in the audience for Jurassic Park or Minority Report or E.T. before most people in the world had seen them, and before opinions about the movie became calcified into conventional wisdom. The experience must have been blissful, the future movie nerds will enthuse.
So, yes: let me acknowledge that it is, in fact, pretty neat to live in a time when one can pop into a movie theater--an independent, nonprofit neighborhood movie house, if you're lucky!--and watch a Steven Spielberg flick in cool air conditioning on a hot summer day.
But that's about the beginning and the end of pleasant statements I have to make about Disclosure Day.
Actually, wait. Here's another pleasant thing I can say about the movie, and it's a statement I've never made before in my life: Emily Blunt is fantastic in this picture. She blows away her previous best film performance, in The Devil Wears Prada, in her role as a weatherperson for a middleweight TV news show who suddenly starts speaking fluent alienese.
Blunt has never given a bad performance that I've seen, but she's never been a magnetic, charismatic performer. What she does in Disclosure Day is actually Oscar-worthy, a performance of depth, skill, and high-wire intensity.
Too bad the rest of the movie isn't anywhere close to playing in the same league. All the other characters are shoddily constructed ciphers, the plot is laughable, and the climax is an embarrassment, an old man's idea of a technocratic fairy tale.
I mean, for real: How do you make Colman Domingo boring? How in the name of God is that even possible?
Everybody is doing their job here, which means viewers will have artistry to admire. The camera work is deft. The cinematography is doing very interesting things with reflections on glass. John Williams's score is not his catchiest work, but it improves every scene. There are a couple of cool set pieces that would be absolute trash in the hands of virtually every other director.
But in the end, Disclosure Day is bad. And it's the worst kind of bad, which is to say it's uninteresting. I'd put it near the bottom of Spielberg's efforts. And I have to wonder what would have happened had Tony Kushner, the screenwriting collaborator on four of Spielberg's best recent films, put his estimable talents toward the story that Spielberg wanted to tell instead of David Koepp, a screenwriter who has never once in his long career managed to make bad material good or good material bad.
But to return to my initial thought: it really is a wonderful thing to be alive at the same time Spielberg is making movies. And that blessing applies equally to his bad movies, because frustration is a key component of the Spielberg movie-watching experiment. Any number of his best movies, including Catch Me If You Can, Lincoln, and even Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, are near-perfect theater experiences that come to a crashing halt, typically near the end, while Spielberg stops to again unnecessarily reemphasize the importance of the nuclear family, or sentimentality, or nostalgia, or parental love.
There is no universal truth that Spielberg hasn't reinforced, celebrated, and then underlined in red ink with aching sincerity. Even when he's making the best movies in the history of cinema, he has to stop and frustrate the viewer lest anyone in the back of the theater come close to missing the point.
Maybe that frustration is somehow an essential part of Spielberg's magic?
Every great director has their central flaw that keeps popping up in their work. Most of Hitchcock's best films feature a queasy lingering of the lens on his leading ladies, suggesting something subtly disgusting is happening on the other end of the camera. I've never watched a Kubrick movie without wondering at some point if the director would go five steps out of his way to save a child from being smashed to red paste by a runaway mail truck. Can we really begrudge Spielberg his pathological need to pause all the glittering spectacle for a minute or two in order to lecture us about how we should be nicer to each other? So far as directorial kinks go, it's a pretty tame one.
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