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By John Demetry
Every single shot elaborates on Spielberg's central theme, challenging, exploring, and threatening - with scissors-and-eyeballs - the audience's perceptions. Minority Report moves from, as a friend describes it, "the politics of perception" to the spirituality of seeing. Always elucidating ideas with feelings, Spielberg makes demands of his audience. He restores spectator sovereignty by offering an existential choice: either to use cinema as an escape or to engage the imagination. The same challenge confronts Anderton. He chooses escape, using drugs and virtual recordings of his dead son and estranged wife to disengage from reality. It's the result of a culture - 2056, but really 2002 - that reduces human individuality to retina scans and consumer histories, while also poignantly signifying Anderton's fragile humanity. Anderton's anguish extends, like ripples in water, into the sociopolitical reality of rigid class divisions and the fluid boundaries of the law. The Precogs, predicting future murders, are the children of drug addicts. ("It's best not to think of them as human," rationalizes Anderton.) Anderton, preventing the murders before they happen, becomes a victim of the system. He gets tagged as the perpetrator of the next murder. He runs. Anderton's quest to change fate and solve the mystery takes him and the audience through the future metropolis and to its enchanted outskirts. Each daredevil action sequence, sci-fi vision, and film-noir-inspired encounter cannot deter Anderton from his destiny. Fritz Lang meets Buster Keaton? Spielberg rocks!
Cruise and Samantha Morton take direction from Steven Spielberg
Anderton's adventure is also an imaginative one. Piquant detail: Anderton crashes through the floor of a lower-class tenement bedroom in which a Black boy plays the saxophone. Anderton sees how the real world both reflects and flows from his own spiritual suffering. That's the nature of Spielberg's post-cinematic social and spiritual philosophy. He exposes the spiritual connection shared by Agatha and Anderton - and the audience. The totalitarian-capitalist system's exploitation of pain binds all. "Everybody runs." Anderton remains the emotional focus, given his need for spiritual healing after his son's death. However, Spielberg subtly edits the film's two emotional climaxes around Cruise, allowing Morton to mirror audience emotions. As with the audience, Agatha achieves catharsis through Anderton's/Cruise's moral crisis and awakening. By making this the crux of spectator identification (not eye-dentification), Spielberg critiques the flippant, cynical Cruise persona of Mission: Impossible 2, Vanilla Sky, and Magnolia. Liberating Cruise from his status as a billboard icon, Spielberg validates Cruise's humanity, his spiritual essence - and the audience's. Spielberg includes all the performers in his humanized iconography. Significantly, Jessica Harper as Anne Lively, whose death links Agatha to Anderton's quest, haunts the film in Agatha's "minority report." Harper is an icon of the 1970s American Film Renaissance that once radicalized film politics and aesthetics. Her appearance brings John Williams' score to a moan.
Further relating the process of movie and religious iconography, a Dreamweaver - a peddler of narcotic virtual entertainment - kneels and crosses his chest in the presence of Precog Agatha. Agatha's/Morton's empathic sensitivity and shaved head resurrects Renee Falconetti of The Passion of Joan of Arc - and movie art. Cinematographer Janusz Kaminski transforms these faces into ecstatic renderings - evidence of the divine. Kaminski desaturates the images; smoke gets in your eyes. Not only updating the black-and-white of film noir, Kaminski achieves - in color! - an investigation of forms - of light and flesh.
Such graphic imagination - exciting the eyes, stirring the spirit - is, now, rare in movies. Anderton's wife, a visual artist, uses her work to deal with her grief over the death of her son. One of her pieces: a swing set with a lonely, dislodged swing. Explaining why she left her husband: "Every time I looked at him, I saw my son." Minority Report inspires the spectator to see with a Precog's empathic grace. (The digitally altered 20th Century Fox logo preceding the film proper baptizes spectator vision.) "Can you see?" must be the essential question of our lives. I'm not just referring to the topicality of the film's handling of surveillance, privacy, and profiling. Minority Reportuncovers clues to eternal mysteries. It's a question of faith. |
Tom Cruise is a futuristic cop -- and suspect -- in Minority Report
Max von Sydow 