Steven Spielberg

When I think of a film-maker who fits into the studio system like a hand in a glove, I think of Spielberg. His most significant contemporaries all got their big breaks with smaller indie movies: for example George Lucas made American Graffiti as an indie; Coppola made waves with his thesis project, You’re A Big Boy Now; De Palma took 13 years to get noticed and so on. But Spielberg was studio from the moment he dropped out of CSU Long Beach to work for Universal.

There is no condemnation from me. He was doing what he loved. He did it well and progressed his career. It says a lot about his prowess that his 1971 TV film, Duel, is still so well regarded. His big screen breakthrough was 1974’s Sugarland Express, which he followed up with the first true blockbuster in 1975 with Jaws. Universal liked it so much they gave it the then rare wide release combined with a TV ad blitz.

Spielberg has cranked out a remarkable 36 feature films in his career. Many of them have stood up extremely well to the test of time, for example Jaws, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Shindler’s List. Others are broadly viewed as simply not very good: 1941, Hook, The Terminal. There are a few curios, too, such as the never-ending desert-dry biopic Lincoln, or Ready Player One, or War Horse.

But for all the success and acclaim that Spielberg has enjoyed, which of his works has elicited the most shrugged shoulders and rolled eyes?

When Spielberg was on the set of Jaws with Richard Dreyfuss, they discovered a shared love for a war film called A Guy Named Joe. Spielberg had wanted to remake it for a long time, and had the script being worked on from the late 1970s. He finally got the production together in 1989. Dreyfuss took the lead. The result was Always, released the same year.

Always is a pretty simple story. Dreyfuss plays Pete, a risk-taking aerial firefighter whose devil-may-care attitude horrifies his girlfriend, Dorinda (Holly Hunter). Pete’s best friend, Al (John Goodman) suggests that he takes a safer job training fledgling aerial firefighters. But Pete refuses until Dorinda breaks down in front of him and tells him her fear of losing him. Pete backs down and promises to take the new job.

However, the following day, Pete dies after saving Al. He finds himself in a burned-up forest where he meets his spirit guide, Hap (Audrey Hepburn in her final role) who gives him the bad news - you’re dead, and the good – you get to go back as a ghost and have a mission to inspire others. He returns to Earth to find that Al has taken over the training job and persuaded the still mourning Dorinda to join him. A new trainee arrives, Ted Baker (Brad Johnson), who Dorinda slowly falls in love with.

Pete, like Dorinda, can’t let go and tries to stop Ted and Dorinda from getting together. Hap intervenes and tells Pete he can’t move on until he moves on. Pete promises to do better.

Ted and Al are now fighting fires. Pete inspires Ted to take on a dangerous mission to rescue trapped firefighters. But Dorinda steals Ted’s plane and goes to do the mission herself. Pete guides her and she gets the job done and, before the damaged plane ditches in the lake, Pete is able to tell Dorinda all the things he couldn’t in life. Dorinda dumps the plane in the lake, escapes and Pete gives his blessing to Dorinda being with Ted before departing for the afterlife.

On paper, this should have been a success. Top director. Good actors. Story taken from a popular film in the 1940s. What could go wrong? Let us count the ways.

The biggest problem lies with the protagonist. Pete is a dick.  He’s arrogant, possessive and quite deeply chauvinistic. Dreyfuss’s performance is mostly fine. He plays Pete as a wanker and it is entirely credible. The issue is simply that if you’re going to have a bastard as a protagonist, they need to be a magnificent bastard, likeable despite all of their flaws, or the movie is solely about said bastard repeatedly eating shit for their flaws until they fix them. Always fails to take either route and instead is happy to make Pete a fairly vile chap to be around. He holds himself a funny guy, always playing tricks on those around him, but never laughing at the jokes of others. His arrogance gets him killed, but by far his least attractive traits are his chauvinism and jealousy. He refuses to take Dorinda seriously in the first act, until her distress proves deep enough to break through his thick skull. His jealousy then becomes a major plot point, which I suppose must be tolerated.

Part of the blame for this can be laid at the feet of the screenplay, but most must be owned by Spielberg for casting Dreyfuss. Despite Dreyfuss and Hunter having good chemistry, I didn’t find their relationship credible. A different, more charismatic actor may have been able to find the right balance for Pete yet Dreyfuss couldn’t. Paul Newman could have done it, but he was 62 in 1989 and therefore much too old to be romancing a 30-year-old Holly Hunter, and even Dreyfuss looks too old.

The other two issues are found entirely within the screenplay and then therefore in how Spielberg directed it. The first problem is structural. The first 40 minutes of the two-hour runtime is spent setting up Pete’s character and his relationship with Dorinda. At the halfway point, Al is persuading Dorinda to join him in Colorado. The last half an hour is the climax with Dorinda flying Ted’s mission. How long does the film allow itself to show Ted and Dorinda falling in love? Two scenes. Two. The pacing is off, which is odd for a film with so few moving parts. Let’s see, essential moments…

1.      Set the scene. Pete and Al fighting fires, taking risks.

2.      Establish Pete and Dorinda’s relationship. The birthday party scene.

3.      Pete and Dorinda argue and Pete agrees to take the job.

4.      Pete saves Al and dies.

5.      Pete meets Hap.

6.      Al and Dorinda and Ted meet in Colorado.

7.      Dorinda and Ted falling in love, as much as Pete hates it.

8.      Hap tells Pete to catch himself on.

9.      Dorinda flies Ted’s mission.

10.   Pete says good bye And Ted gets all of Dorinda.

Points 1 to 5 make up the first act. Points 8 to 10 make up the third. Here’s the big question. Where the hell is the second act? Normally in a Hollywood movie, you can expect the first quarter of the runtime to be setting up the story in the first act. You can expect the last quarter of the runtime to be concluding the movie in a satisfying way, leaving half of the story for everything in between. Now, normally you would say that the second act is where the story drags, where not enough interesting things happen. But I think Always is one of those rare movies where we need more story in act two. Ted and Dorinda have those two major scenes together, and it isn’t enough. Spielberg and writer Jerry Belson do their very best to make Ted a worthy alternative to Pete. It almost works. Ted is kind where Pete is cruel. Brad Johnson was a former model, and so is tall and handsome in contrast to the short, moustachioed Dreyfus. Nonetheless, it isn’t enough. It doesn’t work. Everything happens too slowly and then too fast.

The second screenplay issue is one of tone. While Spielberg is no stranger to comic moments in his films and Belson enjoyed a very long career writing TV and film comedies, the dialogue in Always is very rarely comedic. Instead, many wacky things happen, from the pranks Pete plays as man and ghost, to the stampede of fire fighters cleaning up to dance with Dorinda. Always is frequently amusing, but never actually funny. I’m not too sure what tone they were going for. They missed comedy. And there isn’t really enough action to categorise Always an action film. Yes, there’s romance and sentiment, but nonetheless, what genre is this film?

It isn’t too surprising, then, to discover Always was not a box office smash. Timing was also an issue on its first weekend on release. It had to contend with National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation hoovering up the comedy space, Tango & Cash for action fans, Back to the Future II for families and the War of the Roses for more adult audiences. An unbalanced, tonally off, sentimental ghost story would need to be an absolute banger to compete in that space. Always is not good enough.

More’s the pity, as flaws aside, there’s a lot to enjoy. Spielberg’s direction of the actors is excellent as ever. John Goodman is good, man. Johnson does his best in a terribly thin role. Holly Hunter, though, is incredible as Dorinda, a character who is alternatively sackcloth rough and silky smooth. Dorinda is a tomboy who longs to be regarded at as a woman. And Hunter switches between these two poles with aplomb. She carries almost the entire emotional weight of the story. If that sentiment is sometimes overbearing, it is, after all, a story about death and mourning and learning to move on and love again. It is sentimental and old fashioned, but never schmaltzy, never cheesy.

The flying sequences are fantastic, too. They are shot beautifully. See the opening shot of two fishermen with a flying boat bearing down on them like a leviathan. The threat of the fire is perfectly communicated at all times. For this we can thank the cinematographer Mikhail Solomon, who did a great job. The film is always magnificently lit and enjoys many wonderfully framed shots. This is a pretty, pretty movie.

In conclusion, does this film deserve to be the least watched of Spielberg’s movies? Well, probably not, given the handful of stinkers in his career, but it doesn’t fit easily within his body of work. It doesn’t carry the same level of excitement as Jaws or the Indy movies, nor the same sense of fun and wonder that you might see in ET. He isn’t a director famed for comedy. He’s more of a man whose best work was in action movies and thrillers, even though he also had great success with drama. Always is none of these things. On that basis, I understand why no one watches it any longer. It isn’t especially good. It isn’t especially bad. It exists and that is simply not enough.