Movie Review: "War of the Worlds"

I think Spielberg's "War of the Worlds" is one of his best films ... primarily for the snapshot it captures of the American mood (I'm resisting with all my might the use of a fancier term, Zeitgeist, which is French, I think, for "Germans sure are paranoid about ghosts" ... or something close). (Spoiler alert: key plot points are revealed in what follows.)

Yes, we're talking American paranoia in the wake of 9/11. "War of the Worlds" dips deep into that swirling eddy and works on our primal fears of being hunted for extermination, just as "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" worked on our fear of Commies in 1956.

The film works because of its point of view, limited very strictly to what working-class New Jerseyite Ray Ferrier (Tom Cruise) and his two precocious kids witness. They don't know the big picture, and neither do we. The big picture doesn't matter here. Only immediate survival matters, and immediate survival becomes increasingly tenuous until I was positively worn out by the Ferriers' struggle. Not to mention the struggle of American-kind. I was a wreck. Because I'd witnessed everything happen on the purely local level to the purely ordinary. The CGI did not, therefore, seem so much grandly staged as organic and totally subversive

I particularly liked the economy with which Spielberg establishes the life of Ray and his community, the side-by-side back yards with clothes flapping on the lines, the life on the street, the sense of totally integrated working-class American life, the utter commonness of these people upon which literally unbelieveable horror suddenly erupts. And how quickly that community disintegrates under stress. This is a movie about Americans acting very American ... as individuals. In that sense, the true American symbol in "War of the Worlds" is not Tom Cruise, who ain't after all any superhero here, but Tim Robbins, as the holed-up survivalist nut-case who is determined not to be individually exterminated and who therefore can't seem to get in synch with anyone else. He lectures Tom Ferrier that running away is no solution, a little before Tom Ferrier is forced to off him to protect his own daughter.

Which brings me to the quiet, insidious secondary theme in "War of the Worlds" that makes Spielberg even more of a prophet of the American Moment -- beyond all that highly visual collective paranoia about being exterminated. This is another movie about the redemption of a bad father. Back when I was actively teaching, I walked around with a mental catalog of all the movies, especially rife in the 1990s, that dealt with bad fathers who redeem themselves. Don't ask me to remember them now. I can't. Suffice it to say that Spielberg himself dealt with the theme in "Hook" in 1991. Americans have been fairly obsessed with bad fathers for some time. It's what "Iron John" was all about, and the whole drumming movement. Hell, it's what Homer Simpson is all about.

Tom Cruise in "War of the Worlds" plays an American bad father. And while the alien exterminators turn out to be wusses when it comes to earthly germs, Ray Ferrier's bad fatherhood is the true dark night that seems in some ways far longer and far more harrowing to get through. He watches like a disconnected bystander as his disaffected teenage son deals effectively with his own sister's emotional melt-down; he watches, paralyzed, as his son heroically risks himself to get people on a (doomed) ferry, people who are calling out to Ray for help: he watches, helpless, as that son breaks free of the (failed) father's authority and chases after the (hopeless) battle against the aliens. Poor ole Ray can't even make satisfactory sandwiches for his kids.

The movie's about the Cruise character's redemption as a father, and one might say that Spielberg has engineered a whole gawdawful alien invasion just to redeem one lousy father. Which in the American scheme of things, seems worth it.

Yes, it's a flawed movie. The whole ending, for one example, which might be summed up this way: "So suddenly and somehow they get to Boston, where the Beacon Hill neighborhoods have miraculously escaped any damage, only to find..." Yeah, a happy ending. It's a mess (though not as big a mess as, say, the last hour of Scorsese's "The Aviator," which is now the contemporary benchmark for "messes").

But, hey! "War of the Worlds" has made me unusually thoughtful now, for more than 24 hours.