Review of Minority Report

by Roger Baldwin

Minority Report is Philip Dick's dark, conspiratorial paranoia as filtered through Stephen Spielberg's gauzy, sentimental child's eye. The results are rigorously entertaining and occasionally mawkish. Most of us know Dick's novels via the big screen of Blade Runner and Total Recall. Both are accomplished bastardizations of the original stories and both address the themes of perplexed, possibly fraudulent identities within the context of corporate authoritarianism. Minority Report shuffles the deck a bit to ask not do my memories belong to others or are my human qualities a robotic deception, rather it confronts Tom Cruise's John Anderton with a puzzle of the future. Anderton mans a Washington P.D. pre-crime task force that tracks down murders which haven't yet happened, but are predicted by three prophetic precognitives—emotionally deformed miscreants maintained in a pond, discarded children of drug-addicted mothers tossed into social services who, for whatever reason, are gifted with prescience and consequently are exploited by the System, imprisoned in brine to make the nation's capital a kinder, safer place.

We may wonder how three largely hairless misfits can keep pace with Washington's raising-the-bar body count, but they are up to the task and they never err. So when Anderton, rifling through the visual files of his cyberdesk in the course of his workday sees himself directly implicated in a murder, he first assumes someone has corrupted the process of justice. Spielberg indulges the audience in this belief, but more to Dick's point is that Cruise's character knows who he is, knows he is not a killer, but he has seen the future and it involves his gun. And so, a man committed to eradicating homicide finds himself a perpetrator and must ask what veiled demons inhabit his clean, Cosby-like (minus the wife and especially the kid) persona.

A contemplative film maker might justifiably brood over this conundrum. Spielberg isn't a brooder and his contemplation tends to revolve around glorifying the pre-adolescent innocence in us all, a tendency that gives movies like Close Encounters and E.T. their kick, but which also suffocates most of his serious efforts at social commentary, as in The Color Purple, Amistad, Saving Private Ryan. He located an almost perfect intersection of the two in Schindler's List, but he functions most naturally in clever, locomotive thrust. We get that in gangbusters here, for the first time since Harrison Ford's Indiana Jones retired his bullwhip and patented double-take. Spielberg opens up his big bag of directorial goodies to amuse us, and amuse he does. Despite some cloying scenes in which we have to slow down and feel the protagonist's pain, the depths of which are fairly generic, he joy-rides us through a science-fiction fantasy which doesn't leave you with a lot to think about afterward, aside from inconsistencies in the plot, but with boastful swagger displays the visual wit with which film stories can be told.

Spielberg is the most talented director we have who also has fundamentally conventional sensibilities, he's a square. He is a wholesome family man raised on movies and his craft reflects his life. We don't expect the neuroses, conflict and unpleasantness that inform the work and personalities of the other, more idiosyncratic luminaries of his generation, the Scorsese's or Altman's, the Coppola's. And while his movies rarely offer insights into the underbelly of urban subcultures, violent impulses and skewed Americana as do those colleagues, his product over three decades, approximately from Jaws to here, has grafted a moral thread across the ragged weave of post-modernist pop culture. You can dislike his movies only after conceding his talent and iconic status. His stature in the industry and in film history not only makes it impossible to disregard his aggravating qualities—the naiveté, the stretching thin of obvious emotional responses—it makes them the cinematic equivalent of comfort food. As embedded as Spielberg is in our collective awareness of him as a mass-entertainment landmark, his sometimes puerile excesses and callback to a simpler, mostly imagined time when good and evil were unequivocal reminds us that somewhere deep in the bowels of the behemoth of Hollywood, at its most critical, money-earning juncture, the moral compass still points due North.

Minority Report has many eye pleasures and a couple of memorable performances. Tom Cruise does what he does best—he works hard trying to be a good actor and he's an earnest and ingratiating enough of a star, and we have become so familiar with him, that we don't mind his modest talents, although he has matured in his calling. He seems more and more a commanding natural on screen, like when your buddy tells you a funny joke that might bomb if said by a professional comic you'd never seen before. Max von Sydow's hackneyed, I-saw-that-coming role as father figure/betrayer is a prestige part, fitting a dignified, serious actor of international cinema stiffly and unnecessarily into a character that could have been filled by anyone with a silver mane and authoritative baritone. It enhances neither him nor the movie. A minor revelation, on the other hand, is Peter Stormare, the scary and taciturn body-chipping ogre in Fargo. His comic gifts were tapped in a Seinfeld episode and directors should continue to explore them. Stormare's brief surfacing as a not-your-first-choice eye surgeon, one of questionable hygiene and with both wholesome lunches and unidentifiably noxious potions lurking in his fridge has enough halting, hyperactive rhythms and backslapping-sinister ambiguity to make you forget the extended, empty lapses of Cruise mourning his failed fatherhood.

Samantha Morton may be the found gem in the movie. I remember her only as the mute in Woody Allen's Sweet and Lowdown and the o.d. in Jesus' Son. And now here as the amphibious precog Agatha, it's unclear whether she can play something other than a gnomish freak, yet she is startling in a role which is both intensively concentrated and several degrees-of-separation emotionally distant. She jerks and tics while absorbing the violent horrors of the nation's murder capital in her unblinking, fishlike eyes. As she stares down Cruise's Anderton and screams, "Ruuunnn!", she bores right through him, seeing not him but the troubled infinity surrounding him, her life has consisted of witnessing an unpunctuated succession of malevolence in which the individual faces continually change. It is impressive and unnerving and abruptly grounds the movie into a gravity we weren't expecting and which the film itself cannot sustain. Morton is the man who fell to earth here, the disjuncture of her appearance is a little uncomfortable, as if Olivier's Hamlet popped up in Pearl Harbor. Spielberg tries to sweeten her up, but that doesn't disguise her ability to make you wince and to expect a jarring, emotional immediacy the movie otherwise doesn't deliver.

The rush of Minority Report pulses not so much in the story but in its telling, its sequences of gathering momentum and wordless, visual narration: the initial SWAT-team sprint-against-time into a murder on the cusp of happening. Highways cascade down highrises. Anderton with his new eyeballs healing plunges himself into a frigid bathtub to divert the android cockroaches dispatched to locate him. Meanwhile the camera pans from ceiling view along the tenement in which he is hiding to peer into the personal mayhem in various apartments which aggressive, high-tech law-enforcement has temporarily unbuckled. The fight scene in which Tom Cruise emerges in a newly-manufactured car; unlike Volkswagen, driver is included. The public pods in which paying consumers quiver while locked into their private fantasies (this is the first movie in which Spielberg acknowledges sexual passion). The mall sequence in which Agatha guides Anderton through a maze of predatory police (stop here, the balloons will come. Take an umbrella, you'll need it later) while instinctively grabbing stray passersby to warn, "He knows. Don't go home." is Hitchcock equaled, if not one-upped. What is truly frightening about the future is its abundance of product placement, The Gap may be as oppressively invasive as the police state that enters homes at will for instant pupil-identification (no movie has fixated so singularly on eye metaphors). The many flourishes compete ferociously with the banality of the message. And much of the time they amply compensate.

The outcome of the story is something of a cheat. Free will is an unavoidable theme in any plot where the future is predicted with precision. This movie plays with the elasticity of the concept early on. The D.C. experiment in prophetic crime prevention has created a murder-free city and the company that runs it wants to go national. A skeptical federal agent (Colin Farrell) arrives to investigate and asks the obvious question—If you prevent a murder before it happens, how can you be sure it would have happened? At which point Anderton tosses him a wooden ball with a soon-to-be killer's name engraved—the movie's Lincoln Logs version of an arrest warrant—he catches it, Anderton asks why he caught it. "Because it would have fallen." "Since you caught it we'll never know. But it would have." It's a neat moment. It doesn't explain anything, but it is the closest the movie comes to sci-fi philosophizing. However the film later violates its own deterministic premise by permitting a change of heart. Precogs predict murders, not accidental killings, not homicidal intentions which aren't carried out. The very instant that a key faux-murder happens, it becomes apparent that the entire program is a sham and ought to be scrapped. How many other felons have been hermetically sealed in penitentiary cylinders in the Department of Containment based on equally false evidence? It's a copout because it invalidates the point of the original story in order to provide a rather vacuous morale-boosting message. The cautionary lesson becomes the incisive revelation, as Agatha whimpers to Anderton, that we can choose, we can control our destinies. If we know our future, we can alter it. In which case that isn't the future, so what predictions have made D.C. America's safest city those past years? The corollary would seem to be that if we don't know the future—which most of us don't—we are stuck in inevitability. According to the movie Washington residents, knowing capture and conviction are certain, no longer plan murders; no doubt the thinking killers in D.C. travel to Philadelphia to vent their rage. Only unplanned crimes of passion happen, although those people also know that capture and conviction are certain, yet are unable to stop themselves, which makes Agatha a liar. It probably doesn't matter, pretty much all science fiction in which the future is visited or the past revisited in order to change what has happened is bound to have incongruities. It is in the nature of time travel. The problem here is not that the story fudges internal logic, but rather that its fudging isn't very interesting. The late reversal is made only to salvage the integrity of the guilt-ridden hero and to leave audiences with one of Spielberg's trademark discount, bumper-sticker epigrams. On the other hand I've never attended a Spielberg movie for therapeutic wisdom. Rather, that's the cross we bear while appreciating the reasons we go to his movies. He's given us enough reasons on this outing to make us forgive his normal-America indulgences, as well as his past duds.

Read about Minority Report in the Internet Movie Database

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