A celebration of Steven Spielberg’s storytelling and his ‘human touch’

Steven Spielberg: The Iconic Filmmaker and His Work
Ian Nathan
White Lion Publishing, $59.99

Ian Nathan has been churning out stuff like this for the best part of a decade. Along with books about the Mad Max films, Peter Jackson’s Middle-earth saga and the screen adaptations of Stephen King’s writings and JK Rowling’s Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, he’s now written a dozen about a veritable who’s who of recent Hollywood filmmaking: Tim Burton, Wes Anderson, Quentin Tarantino, Christopher Nolan, Ridley Scott, Guillermo Del Toro, James Cameron, David Lynch, the Coppolas, the Coen brothers and Clint Eastwood.

More than half of the books share the subtitle used for Steven Spielberg: The Iconic Filmmaker and His Work. There’s a plethora of iconic filmmakers around at the moment, and others doubtless itching to earn the accolade. Nathan and his publishers lie in wait, ready to wave the flag on their behalf.

But they will all have to line up on the podium behind Spielberg, who is, according to Nathan, “the most famous director who has ever lived”, “the most iconic director of them all”, and “the world’s pre-eminent entertainer”. A director whose best work, he proposes – referring to E.T. (1982), Schindler’s List (1993), Jaws (1975) and Lincoln (2012); his order of preference – has “a greatness that is often obscured by popularity”. An artist who tells mythological stories enriched by his “human touch”, and whose protagonists “are marked by their vulnerability, their mistakes, their yearning”.

How does he do it, Nathan asks up front. “Where does it come from – the Spielberg touch?” Then, by way of an answer, and selectively drawing on a range of previous books about Spielberg – by Joseph McBride, Molly Haskell, and others – as well as on others’ interviews with the director, he offers a chronological account of Spielberg’s career and a sketchy critical estimation of his films. Which finally amounts to no answer at all.

That’s not to say that Nathan’s commentary is without merit. When he’s writing about films that he really admires, he can be astute, and the chapter on E.T. – which, he asserts (with good reason), “belongs to the pantheon of great children’s stories” – is the best in the book. In passing, he also offers some telling insights: seeing Duel (1971) as “Jaws on wheels”; finding an unexpected connection between E.T. and Spanish filmmaker Victor Erice’s The Spirit of the Beehive (1973); and judiciously observing that the state of the nation “looms over the second half of his career, most notably in Amistad [1997], Lincoln and The Post [2017]”.

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The weakest chapters are the ones in which he deals with films he has little time for, or is only lukewarm about. He’s (surprisingly) dismissive of Jurassic Park (1993) and has nothing positive (or interesting) to say about its 1997 sequel. Or about Always (1989), Hook (1991), or any of the Indiana Jones films after the first, Raiders of the Lost Ark (1989). And by the time he gets to Minority Report (2002), he seems to be rushing through the films simply for the book to appear complete.