Somewhere between Leonardo da Vinci’s study of man (Vitruvian Man) and an orchestra conductor in rapt concentration, Tom Cruise, as Detective John Anderton, stands with his arms outstretched, his eyes, ears and mind fully engaged when performing Minority Report’s futuristic crime investigation. And it is a performance: in the Justice Dept.’s glass-paneled Pre-Crime Unit, Det. Anderton shifts and arranges media representations of crime–in mid-air–just as director Steven Spielberg surrounds the audience in the midst of imaginary events. Anderton conducts scenes from the future that have been downloaded to prevent crimes from happening. These horrific images cannot be watched or manipulated dispassionately. They require an ethical response from Anderton, his full, personal investment (both esthetic and moral). It is, coincidentally, a metaphor for moviewatching as very few filmmakers these days demand it.
Set in the year 2054, Minority Report posits a future recognizably close to our contemporary social anxieties. The government believes it can eliminate crime by monitoring the premonitions of three psychics sequestered in a sensory deprivation tank. Mediating their brain impulses into two-dimensional images makes it possible to see crimes before they happen, deduce the time, place, victim and perpetrator–then intervene, preventing the occurrence of iniquity. The resemblance between government and divine authority is blatantly perverse. Anderton isn’t a lawbringer, he’s a soldier used to enforce society’s misguided will and Spielberg, essaying his first cop hero since Jaws, understands the dilemmas of that occupation. This time–unlike with most recent cop dramas–the crisis is internal, exposing Anderton’s flaws and society’s.
Minority Report has nothing to do with racial "minorities." Spielberg obviously doesn’t buy into that conservative canard. Instead, Minority Report’s arcane title is subtly critical; it refers to a singular–possibly exculpating–crime report that’s been suppressed because it disrupts the standard, politically convenient view. (Spielberg implies that corrupt, fallible police procedure is an inevitable social threat.) Anderton’s pursuit of this typically ignored–misfiled–truth makes Minority Report a socially significant, moral mystery–an extraordinary moral inquiry–rather than a film noir in the classic sense. The movie is way ahead of cliche cop dramas (and news reports) that exploit urban chaos by reducing it to racial antagonisms. Class tensions are still observable in the shocking difference shown between the exurban lives of moneyed citizens and cramped city-dwellers. But more than noir, this is poli-sci-fi–the first movie since Godard’s Alphaville to truly connect moral fiction with political science.
And still Spielberg, working from a story by Philip K. Dick, adds his transforming spiritual emphasis. Each pre-crime that Anderton investigates has been prophesied by society’s scapegoats who are the damaged offspring of drug addicts (spawn of cultural dystrophy and mankind’s imperfection). This psychic trinity, with the names Arthur, Dashiell, Agatha (after Doyle, Hammett, Christie, the progenitors of mystery fiction, seers into human culpability), displays a wide-eyed, childlike sensitivity to suffering. They’re generous, yielding creatures, even in the face of their government’s exploitation. When Agatha (Samantha Morton) predicts Anderton’s involvement in a future crime, he abducts her to clear his name and change his destiny. Wandering through the demoralized city–where everyone is watched, identified and their superficial desires hounded by advertisers and merchants–Agatha’s pale, bald-headed languishing is a purified version of Anderton’s strapping, aggrieved duty. In need of faith and deliverance, they’re a pair of death-defying, spiritually questing moderns.
While the name Anderton suggests a declension of the traditional "Anderson" with "automaton," Anderton’s mission also evokes the image of Freder, the industrialist’s son in Fritz Lang’s futuristic Metropolis, who at one point sacrifices himself by taking over the arms-out, cruciform drudgery of one of Metropolis’ exhausted workers. That arms-wide, da Vinci stance perfectly symbolizes this film’s ethical struggle–the difficult balancing of potential and necessity, life and death, cinema and reality. It’s not a coincidence that Anderton’s position recalls a music conductor, a film director or a film editor at his console; Minority Report explores the conscious manipulation and reception of images through Anderton’s work with prophesy, dream and memory.
Spielberg engages cinema’s history of visual investigation from Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou, Hitchcock’s Rear Window and Antonioni’s Blowup all the way to Coppola’s The Conversation and De Palma’s Blow Out. Anderton could be conducting his own movie, his own imagination–he’s swept into moral conflict like John Travolta’s character in Blow Out, a sound recorder who gets implicated in political conspiracy. These image-shifting/shuffling/conducting sequences dramatize the representation of crime–like a state-of-the-art, three-dimensional probe of the legendary Blow Up photograph. We’re put inside the scene of the crime. An extraordinary edit from the crime location interior to an exterior of Anderton rushing forward, and into it, kinetically measures the relationship of vision to humane obligation. (The scene does a De Palma on De Palma.) Not only does Spielberg repeat Buñuel’s legendary surrealist assault on the eye in several shots (as a way of magnifying the issues surrounding perception), he also considers the consequences of vision that fascinated Hitchcock and Coppola’s famous social treatises.
At this particular moment in pop history, Spielberg’s existential forensics restore the moral excitement of images. Most contemporary filmmakers, rushing to embrace digital-graphics license, have shut their eyes to the esthetics of action. Minority Report’s big setpieces–Anderton chased by police, levitating through streets, alleys, tenements and an auto factory–offer dizzying, dynamic angles plus speed and humor. Spielberg shames the flashy techno-geeks James Cameron, David Fincher, Michael Bay, Ridley and Tony Scott, who are never concerned with what action means. His omniscient perspectives of crowded streets, shopping malls and housing blocks reveal the future’s social structure (capitalism and totalitarianism in lockstep) while being dazzling. In Windtalkers, John Woo’s high body-count distracts from his appalling lack of craft (pixilated critics and audiences, caught up in adolescent shock, can’t tell the difference); but Spielberg’s action craft lets viewers grasp a violent or thrilling event and situate themselves philosophically.
With cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, Spielberg has devised a desaturated look real enough to avoid insult and abstract enough to avoid obscenity. Trumping the cgi fallacy of perfect imagery, Spielberg’s simulated "vision" (the future in a glimpse) enhances how we see. In a garden and greenhouse where Anderton confronts Dr. Iris Hineman (Lois Smith), the scientist who pioneered the use of precognitive children as criminal prognosticators, only the brightness of one rare orchid-like plant contrasts the gray-drab miasma, the film’s color scheme of distorted nature and society. Haze and flares make Minority Report Impressionist. Action kinetics perfected into art.
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How Spielberg conducts Anderton to his greatest dread is bound to be controversial. In that climactic moment, Spielberg asks the toughest question that, perhaps, has ever been proposed in the popular cinema. He goes against the easy gratification of less serious, less conscientious films such as The Pledge and In the Bedroom. It’s consistent with Tom Cruise’s best-ever performance (especially good when Anderton’s anger is checked by his propriety) being mirrored in the principled zealotry of his government rival, Witwer (Colin Farrell), and his gravitas reawakening his mentor Burgess (Max Von Sydow). These echoes reinforce the idea of individual moral choices over vacuous movie heroism.
Both Anderton and Agatha’s urgent rebound from death (his son, her parents) deepens what otherwise would simply be another Philip K. Dick conceit. Minority Report challenges audiences unaccustomed to optimism in this usually dystopian genre. Spielberg’s babes-in-the-woods postulants want morally satisfying lives and this is startlingly richer than what recent movies like Fight Club, The Matrix, Memento, Training Day, Black Hawk Down, The Sum of All Fears and The Bourne Identity have fed audiences. Numerous sci-fi/action antecedents get summarized then surpassed. (The fairytale verities in Anderton’s meeting with Dr. Hineman are not to be discounted; Minority Report’s humanist answer to sci-fi pessimism shows the influence of Gloria Foster’s scene in The Matrix, although its payoff, Agatha’s stirring recitation, is pure, beautiful Spielberg.) Spielberg’s challenge stays consistent with the complex view of human behavior that started his career: Anderton’s self-identification through his eyes–and his sight–evokes the story of greed and sacrifice in the 1969 Night Gallery. Spielberg’s great skill has always exalted vision and he’s always recognized its cost: responsibility.
Like da Vinci’s study of the body, Spielberg graphs the body politic through Anderton’s behavior–a reflection of morality, law and cinema esthetics. It’s a rare achievement because these days a moral movie is a minority report.
