Koepp can Cruise my Fanning
WAR OF THE WORLDS
Reviewed by Matt Brown
June 29 2005
There are three significant problems with the SpielCruise production of War of the Worlds: Tom Cruise, David Koepp, and Dakota Fanning.
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Let's start with Dakota Fanning, not because it's fun to pick on an eight-year-old, but because realistically, of these three listed problems, she's the only one who probably bears no personal fault. Fanning is a strange little actress. She is uncanny in the way that Gollum was uncanny; she performs in such a detailed simulation of normal life that she might very easily be explained away as the work of Industrial Light & Magic. (And as the rest of their work in WotW is uniformly outstanding, photorealistic almost to a fault, this would not necessarily be surprising.) Fanning is particularly adept at playing 40-year-olds. Normally this is played against the script of whatever film she is in, but in War of the Worlds, the script does her the great disservice of actually writing her as a 40-year-old, and the result is just plain spooky. There are a whole lot of ways in the universe that kids behave, even under extraordinary circumstances, and this ain't one of them. Given that Fanning's Rachel is the emotional touchstone of the film - an updated, poor-man's Drew Barrymore from E.T. - this creates a vast problem in the audience's willingness to engage with the picture.
If Rachel's writing isn't Fanning's fault, it is most certainly David Koepp's. Koepp has been a mundanely base-hit screenwriter for his entire career. When a film he's written rises up and becomes something really special (most notably, Jurassic Park and Panic Room), it's usually in spite of the material, rather than because of it. (In both cases, the weakest element of the film was its script, nevertheless brilliantly enlivened by top-notch direction and production.) The rest of the time, Koepp is reliably solid at crafting screenplays that hit all the requisite beats, without any ingenuity or life to them. This is the man who gave us the Spider-Man snooze-fest, and here, he isn't even stretching. He's just rewriting his own "troubled parenting" material from The Lost World, with Tom Cruise and Dakota Fanning replacing Jeff Goldblum and Vanessa Lee Chester. The results are limp - a sketchy, bad-daddy narrative doing its best to create a beating human heart in the midst of an even sketchier 9/11 allegory. If there's one thing that Koepp has never had, it's the subtletly to pull off this kind of metaphor. He's too fond of the big cheats - none bigger than having Cruise's son demonstrably killed at the end of the second act, only to turn up miraculously unharmed in the film's ludicrous finale. Credibility is strained to the breaking point throughout: the why's and how's of this supposedly-superior intergalactic species' attack on Planet Earth are all unsupportably zinging off in so many different directions that one's head begins to spin when trying to reconcile it all into a realistic chain of events. The only good thing we can say for Koepp is that he's doing his level best to create an "everyman trauma" movie, where an identifiable slice of American man-ness gets put through a Spielbergian ringer. And here, like Fanning before him, Koepp too is undone by someone else.
Tom Cruise is not an everyman. Tom Cruise has never been an everyman. That he would even attempt to essay this role - or, really, any of the roles he has taken since Jerry Maguire - is essential proof of how his own elephantine ego is only matched in size by his astonishing lack of self-awareness. Tom Cruise has become so fundamentally incapable of discerning his particular wheelhouse in the Hollywood community that one wonders if he's going to tackle Hamlet next. There are two types of performers in Hollywood: actors, and moviestars. From the moment he first stepped on screen, Tom Cruise has been a moviestar. His entire career was designed, consciously, to be that of a moviestar. Where a film like War of the Worlds is crying out for a craftsman character actor to take the lead role (hell, even the other Tom would be a mercy), here we must withstand two hours of Tom Cruise pretending, with less skill than Dakota Fanning, to be a normal human being. It's an utter failure from start to finish: Tom Cruise will never escape his own, inherent Tom Cruisiness.
I worry about Steven Spielberg. In the post-Schindler's world, he seems to have completely lost his way. He brought Koepp, Cruise and Fanning together for this project, and apparently didn't notice that it mattered. Rather than be guided from project to project by the sort of creative vision that cemented the first two decades of his career, he seems instead to be attempting to achieve a kind of Fordian density, hoping that quantity may someday equal quality. In the meantime, he remains capably adept at shooting just about anything. The set pieces in this film are largely outstanding and fit neatly among the director's best work. Most particularly, the initial emergence of a tripod in the middle of a city street, cloying 9/11 visual connections notwithstanding, is a technical marvel; and the whispering-to-roaring tension incline of the ferry attack makes grand use of the director's visual dexterity.
The story points, though, and the thematics beneath them, are troubling. Spielberg comfortably trots out his standard bag of tricks (a masterful long take in and out of Cruise's escaping minivan; a startling shot of God-light pouring through the portal of a church-front that has been ripped away from the rest of the building; the unsettling two-tone roar of the tripods, which akins them to Jaws, and makes them walking Spielbergian dins) with the detached amusement of a toddler in the sandbox, but he never seems to see that the work he's doing now is actually betraying the work he did then. Both he and his best friend, George Lucas, have returned to the cinema in 2005 with inversions of their blockbusters from 1977, but only Lucas seems to have thought it through. Revenge of the Sith's robust tragedy succeeds at contravening, while complementing, Star Wars' faithful optimism, but pity poor Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Daddy's been bad indeed - he's gone away for a long time, and come back thinking that the light pouring out of that spaceship, the light that healed us thirty years ago, might instead have been a killer death ray.
I prefer the first version. When is Steven Spielberg going to get back to making Steven Spielberg movies?