Scene Selection — Geoff Carter: Spielberg expertly brandishes ‘Minority’ whip

Friday, Dec. 20, 2002 | 9:44 a.m.

Geoff Carter is a Seattle based free-lance film critic and entertainment writer. Reach him at carter@pre2k.com.

Say what you will about his oeuvre, but there's no denying that Steven Spielberg has taken some fascinating left turns of late.

"A.I.," his homage to Stanley Kubrick, is as beautiful as it is flawed, while the upcoming "Catch Me If You Can" finds him working in pure comedy for the first time in years.

Aware that no failure (or string of failures) could kill his career at this point, Spielberg is experimenting with his craft in a way few directors could ever dream.

Case in point: Last summer's sci-fi hit "Minority Report," now available on DVD (DreamWorks Home Video, $29.99). Spielberg starts with one proven element -- star Tom Cruise -- and piles on the wildcards: a script based on a story by Philip K. Dick, a protagonist who robs citizens of their civil liberties and more visual effects shots than Spielberg's ever used in any two films.

In other words, Spielberg places his bankable star against an expensive sci-fi backdrop created by an author that used more hallucinogens than Jefferson Airplane. It could have flopped and failed and Spielberg knew it, but like John Anderton, the drug-abusing antihero of "Minority Report," he wanted to see.

The result is one of the best films of Spielberg's career, one of the best films of 2002 and a first-class genre thriller for adults.

The year is 2054, and aside from magnetic levitation cars, assorted futuristic weapons and great strides in the realm of direct advertising, the cultural climate of America is much the same as it is now. Cruise's Anderton is head of the Pre-Crime unit, a police operation that prevents homicides foretold by a trio of psychics.

Pre-Crime has reduced the annual homicide rate in Washington, D.C., to zero, and its creator, Lamar Burgess (Max Von Sydow), wants to take it national.

There are snags, of course. The Justice Department would like to take over the operation, and its representative, Danny Witwer (a terrific Colin Farrell), wants Anderton's job.

Anderton himself is a wreck, decimated by the kidnapping of his son and near-suicidal -- a perfect character to build a film noir around, which the story promptly does when he's framed for the murder of a man he's never met.

The script, by Scott Frank and Jon Cohen, is fleet and fun and layered with Hitchcockian jolts. It soars until the two-hour mark, at which point it completely runs out of gas and Cruise begins bellowing like a foghorn, as he does when he wants to express anything stronger than grim bemusement.

Farrell steals every scene from him, and almost takes the picture away, too.

I'd hoped for a commentary track to shed light on Farrell's quirks, but Spielberg doesn't seem to believe in them. Considering the scope of the film, the two-disc "Minority" has scarcely any extras at all.

A volley of short documentaries have Cruise and Spielberg congratulating each other, while two of the film's strongest creative talents -- production house Imaginary Forces (which created the fuzzy, intriguing images the "Precogs" provide) and production designer Alex McDowell -- get scarcely five minutes of documentary apiece.

These omissions are the only real mistakes Spielberg has made with "Minority Report" -- and placed against a record that includes the dismal "Hook" and "Amistad," they're not all that serious. Besides, as "Minority Report" proves, too much insight can be a burden as well as a blessing.