Spielberg

It's the nearly 30 hours of interviews that Lacy conducted with her cheerfully self-reflective subject that give Spielberg its revelatory oomph and make it so memorable.

Spielberg's unabashed honesty about his accomplishments, failures and frailties ties a bow on all of it.

To anyone who has grown up consuming Spielberg's work, Lacy has delivered a documentary that will speak to them too -- one that at its best approximates the feeling of the last 40-some-odd years of movie-making flashing before your eyes.

“Spielberg” has the feel of official business, with the man himself happily participating in long conversations about his creative process, while dozens of other sources--his 100-year-old father, Arnold, and his mother, Leah, who died at 97 in February; his siblings, peers, longtime collaborators, actors, film critics and historians--supply their own observations and asides. It also features a thrilling, chronological examination of his movies.

Mostly, though, with its penetrating look at a career that now spans half a century, Spielberg enriches a series of films that you--or, at least, some of us--never get tired of thinking about. It’s like HBO’s free-flowing version of a PBS “American Masters” doc.

It is a studied consideration of what his extraordinary body of work tells us about him, and why it speaks to so many.

Terrifically entertaining and tremendously moving, yet also critical at times, biography. [2-15 Oct 2017, p.14]

Despite an onslaught of every relevant artistic and familial connection to the man in focus, “Spielberg” still feels like a respectful appreciation of a beloved figure more than an insightful study. There’s nothing wrong with that, but whenever such unprecedented access is given, it’s also OK to ask for more.

It’s a testimony to Spielberg’s career that a two-and-a-half-hour documentary on his life and work could both feel too long in some places and yet oddly inadequate in others.

Spielberg is laudatory but not unreservedly so. ... Before Ms. Lacy shows you Mr. Spielberg’s movies, she shows you the movies through his eyes. For all its sweep, Spielberg the documentary succeeds most distinctively where Mr. Spielberg the director has: accessing the child in its subject.

When Lacy starts to tie thematic ribbons around multiple films in Spielberg’s career, her work has more power, especially when the filmmaker himself is open and willing to speak out how his relationship with his father influenced that thematic undercurrent in his work. There’s just enough of those insights to make "Spielberg" valuable--I just wish there were enough to make it great. For too much of "Spielberg," we’re treated to rapturous praise of the title subject.

It’s somewhat refreshing to see a stolid, workmanlike profile acknowledge artistic shortcomings, or even to hear the director himself admit to chickening out when it came to sex in his adaptation of The Color Purple. And yet, Spielberg is such a known quantity that one almost wishes that this documentary had a contrarian streak, or at least tried to defend commercial and critical failures like 1941.

What’s disappointing about Spielberg is that it does far less digging into the intriguing later acts of his career; it doesn’t strive to move past the mythos and into the mind of an iconic artist who continues to make bold, challenging work. Spielberg isn’t quite a hagiography, nor does it completely lack insight into the man who became such an unstoppable pop-cultural force in the 1970s. But it does feel like a story many cineastes will have heard before, with just a little more detail shaded in.