"I've discovered I've got this preoccupation with ordinary people pursued by large forces. A personal movie for me is one about people with obsessions."
-- Steven Spielberg
I was among the faction disappointed with Steven Spielberg's "The Fabelmans," his Oscar-seeking effort from 2022.
Disappointed, in that I'd hoped Spielberg, inspired by the recent rash of memory plays from directors looking back on some formative time in their childhood, like Alfonso Cuarón's "Roma" or Kenneth Branagh's "Belfast," would have told a more personal kind of story. He didn't -- he basically gave us a romantic, candy-colored gloss on his own myth.
"The Fabelmans" is pretty and wistful and while it might feel authentic to Spielberg, it struck a lot of people as phony.
My own take is a little less severe: He polished his familial résumé the way most of us do, and when things got difficult defaulted to the crowd-pleasing instincts that have been there since the beginning. He made the sort of movie we should have expected him to make, the sort of movie he wanted to make. I imagine that in a few years, a lot of critical assessments of "The Fabelmans" will shift. I know I am always changing my mind about Spielberg movies.
On Tuesday, they're showing his very first feature film at the Riverdale 10, and it's a movie that may be my very favorite Spielberg movie. (And I like a lot of them, just not as much as the people who really like Steven Spielberg movies do.) It's called "The Sugarland Express," and it might be his most obscure movie. It's certainly an anomaly in his oeuvre; it fits in well with the idiosyncratic, independent cinema of the late '60s and early '70s -- an aesthetic that Spielberg would help to obliterate with the outsized success of his next movie, 1975's "Jaws."
Some film geeks tend to dismiss "Sugarland." It's easy enough to claim that Spielberg's real first feature was "Duel," the 1971 ABC Movie of the Week that was released theatrically in Europe. "Duel," to my mind at least, feels like a expertly accomplished technical exercise -- a tight (the original release was only 74 minutes long) and vaguely mythic horror story that wisely made the evil truck (as opposed to its largely unseen driver) the antagonist.
It's impressive, especially when you consider Spielberg was just 24 years old when he directed it, but it's like the compulsory figures that were once part of figure skating competitions. Much of the strength of "Duel" is in the script -- and the short story by Richard Matheson. Spielberg's direction is excellent, but I'm not sure we should consider him the author of the film.
But "Sugarland," though dismissed by some critics as shambling and mild, is definitely a Spielberg film, even if it's not especially Spielbergian. It's a small story, based on an actual incident, driven to a large degree by the performances of Goldie Hawn, William Atherton, Michael Sacks (who had played Billy Pilgrim in George Roy Hill's "Slaughterhouse Five") and Ben Johnson, at the time not far removed from his Oscar-winning performance in "The Last Picture Show."
FOSTER PARENTS
The film begins with Lou Jean Poplin (Hawn) freshly released from a Texas correctional facility herself, visiting her convict husband, Clovis (Atherton) in a pre-release facility. Clovis has just four months left on his sentence, but Lou Jean tells him a court has placed their child with foster parents who plan to adopt him. She wants Clovis to go with her to help her get the kid back.
Initially they hitch a ride with the Nockers, an elderly couple (A.L. Camp and Jessie Lee Fulton, who also had a part in "Last Picture Show") who'd been visiting their son in the facility. They all pile into a 1956 Buick Roadmaster -- which even in 1974 presented as a comically large whale of a vehicle -- which Mr. Nocker refuses to push past 25 mph. (Mrs. Nocker bracing herself against the dashboard as they hurtle along is a nice touch.)
This dangerously slow driving gets them pulled over by rookie Texas Highway Patrolman Maxwell Slide (Sacks), and a panicked Lou Jean drives off as Slide questions the Nockers. Slide pursues them; they wreck the Buick and manage to disarm Slide and take him prisoner. They demand he drive them to Sugarland, southwest of Houston, so they can retrieve their baby from the upper class home he's living in. (It's hardly a coincidence that the foster father resembles former Texas Gov. John Connally -- he was played by Connally's brother Merill, who would also have a role in "Close Encounters of the Third Kind.")
SLOW-MOVING CONVOY
It's not long before Slide's kidnapping draws the attention of law enforcement, and soon Slide's police cruiser is at the head of a long line of pursuit vehicles from various law enforcement agencies and media outlets. There's comedy in the slow-moving convoy, which prefigured the O.J. Simpson white Bronco chase by a couple of decades, but the film plays out as an American tragedy. Clovis and especially Lou Jean are likely awful parents, petty criminals without much impulse control and no real hope of re-integrating their family.
But as they make their way toward their destination, and an denouement that echoes Arthur Penn's "Bonnie and Clyde," they are received as folk heroes by the common people who line the roads to cheer them on and sympathize with Lou Jean's mad and desperate effort to recover her child. "Hon, it's yer baby," one tells her.
Of course, the kindly Capt. Tanner (Johnson), the Highway Patrol commander in charge of the posse, cannot let the Poplins win. Still, in 18 years as a cop he has never had to kill anyone and he'd like to keep it that way.
The fact that Tanner and Slide are more sympathetic characters than Clovis and Lou Jean might speak more to Spielberg's humanism than, as some have charged, some sort of innate conservatism. Lou Jean and Clovis aren't the only ones being "pursued by large forces." Tanner and Slide take their duty and dignity seriously -- that they are able to empathize with the Poplins permits us to also root for them.
A LOT OF THINGS
"The Sugarland Express" is about a lot of things -- about America's obsessions with guns, cars and reckless blondes with larceny in their blood, about how we confuse infamous celebrity with merited fame, and even a little bit about the class struggle in this country and how the police serve to protect the upper classes.
Spielberg is not exactly consistent in his depiction of ordinary folks as natural aristocrats -- a lot of the comedy of the movie derives from caricatures of bumpkins like the drunk Buster Daniels (played by a man named Buster Daniels, who apparently never had another film role), the Nockers and to some extent, even Slide, though the patrolman is at least accorded an instinct for empathy and genuine intelligence.
But it's mostly a move about a crazy mama, and the chaos she causes as she tries to enforce her will. Clovis is not primarily driven to participate in her plan because he wants to get the baby back -- maybe he does, but he thinks they can wait until he gets out of prison and then talk to a lawyer about it -- but because she'll leave him if he doesn't. Clovis knows he's on a suicide mission, but he can't stand up to Lou Jean's irrational need to do something now.
An armchair psychologist, armed with Spielberg's biography, might point to the break-up of Spielberg's own parents, as chronicled in the lightly fictionalized "Fabelmans." It's instructive that a note at the end of the film informs us that Lou Jean only served a few months in prison and eventually regained custody of her child. (This also happened in real life.)
A BIG INFLUENCE
Spielberg has talked about Billy Wilder's "Ace in the Hole" (1951) as being a big influence on the film, and in contemporary interviews he said he "wanted to make 'Sugarland' because it made an important statement about the Great American Dream Machine ... and it was obviously meant to say something about the human condition which, obviously, isn't terribly optimistic."
Other obvious antecedents are Terrence Malick's "Badlands" (1973) and Dennis Hopper's "Easy Rider" (1969). Though Spielberg is a little too square to be hip, his commercial instincts perhaps required him to endow the authority figure of Capt. Tanner with a surfeit of folksy decency, echoing Johnson's Sam the Lion character in "Last Picture Show." (In Malick's version he might have been matter-of-fact and professional; in Hopper's a dogged and bloodthirsty Javert.)
And it's not an optimistic film -- it's a messy and complicated one that plays like a farce until, about midway through, the snipers show up with their lethal hardware, talking about brain stem shots that can kill a suspect before he hears the report of the bullet. (Spielberg cast real Texas Rangers in the role.)
An icy finger touches the audience's heart.
Email:
pmartin@adgnewsroom.com