An ace police officer is tarred as suspect by his own employer, a high-tech societal guardian; and is “entrapped” into being suspect by means of a grisly familial insinuation
Another Washington
[Edits done 12/19/12.]
Subsections below:
An early directorial attempt at making the film relevant
Spelling out the film’s precognition/intervention premises
The film’s possible relevance in another context: Mass health-care intervention, among other bugbears (such as police entrapment)
The esthetics of saturation and color/tone
The plot aspect of the “flaw in the system,” and premised on an evil “father” of the system
The baubles on this “Christmas tree” of a movie, conducing to a story of loss and redemption
Though this film is science fiction, and I am not a big fan of science fiction, it still is interesting—to me and to a potential range of people—for its main thematic component, represented by the dramatic arc of John Anderton. I’ll come back to how this film seems to work unusually well in the science-fiction mode, even for those of us who aren’t really big on sci fi.
On the specific-premises side, with the original short story by Philip K. Dick, this film might almost seem a Sixties-era, drug-inspired weird fantasy with a certain Kafkaesque slant (meaning, the story involves gross or profound intrusion on individual rights). But apparently this film updates the original story with many high-tech details that are meant to square with what seemed technologically possible-in-the-future in 2001, when the film probably was mostly produced.
An early directorial attempt at making the film relevant
Then, released in late spring 2002, it seems to have been given a marketing-type tweak to accord with the “new normal” that followed the 9/11 attacks (I’m thinking of the scene near the end where Tom Cruise is viewed with the Washington Monument in the background—which tries to make a real-life connection that, to me, seemed rather flighty but not totally out of line).
A little more specifically to the point, director Steven Spielberg seems to square—to the extent a fantasy can be squared—with the actualities of the U.S. government’s policing capacity in DVD commentary (which seems more glibly marketing-angled than retrospectively analytical); that is, he seems to keep in focus—at least in explaining its theme—this film’s thematic affinities with the issues posed by the new policing (especially intelligence-related) powers assumed by the Department of Homeland Security. Specifically, he talks about how a Precrime-type system would be acceptable if precognition could be used to detect a crime before it occurred and such a policing system had “the blessing of the Supreme Court” and was voted on “by a referendum” (these quotes may paraphrase slightly)…all very hypothetical-type considerations (and perhaps a way to try to justify a film that seems to err a lot on the side of fantasy). (Of course, we know—and I can even tell you from my own passionate view of it—from the past year’s experience with the Supreme Court’s vetting of the Affordable Care Act [Obamacare] that such a life-value–oriented issue as how to handle health care in this country can still run into enormous political divisiveness.)
Of course, this is one solid way to try to spell out how we can relate this film to real life, from Spielberg’s ~2002 considerations.
Today, as unexpected in 2001 perhaps, this film has a resonance with current “difficult conditions facing our lives” that makes it still worth a look, and for appreciating what Anderton’s odyssey can be interpreted to say for us today. While we may not be so concerned (as the film suggests) with the possibility of a state presuming to have a way to predict when a certain serious crime will occur, and therefore have a tough means to catch the “perpetrator-to-be” before he commits his crime and put him away in a sort of eerie catacombs, we can still match this film’s elaborately portrayed conceit about precognition and societal spying with another, ongoing issue: invasion of privacy via Internet and social-media–type means, especially where a police function coopts this “infrastructure” for “catching bad guys before (or just after) they do their evil deeds.”
First, let me take a detour to look at a philosophical problem.
Spelling out the film’s precognition/intervention premises
The main thematic underpinnings that we have to take on faith—which those who don’t like sci fi may be unwilling to swallow, but which I would be willing to indulge because of what good there is in this film—is that the “precog[nitive]s” used in the film to detect a coming crime are able to do what they do because when it comes to murder, it is posited, “nothing is more destructive to the metaphysical fabric that binds us” than it (a notion espoused by the precogs inventor, Iris Hineman, whom we meet later in the film, played by the quirky Lois Smith).
In the same scene in which such premises are spelled out conspicuously, the “commission of the crime is absolute metaphysics—the precogs see the future and the precogs are never wrong.” Now, if you were to go into a discussion (from the angle of a philosophy major) of what metaphysics is, and whether today such a “science” has any validity, you could get into a hairy discussion, somewhat like talking about whether outer space is filled with “ether.” But OK, let’s assume the film’s premise about the nature of how murder is especially representative of the worst kind of “rift” in the metaphysical fabric, and how the precogs are infallible in foreseeing a murder in advance (this sentence contains my own scare quotes). (And as the film will have it, because the Precrime system, serving only Washington, D.C., at first, has had a deterrent effect, almost the only kinds of murders that still occur are ones of passion. Which pits such expressions of passion against the cold “infallibility” of the state.)
Then we get to the more realistic philosophical conundrum of (pre)determination: if you stop a murder that precogs predict will happen, can you really stop it? Or did they really foresee a murder that was to occur? This is less a sophomoric question than you may think. The same sort of plot problem comes up (but only as a small detail)—more due to sloppiness in this latter case—in the likes of director M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense (1999), where the child psychologist played by Bruce Willis (who is looking into whether Haley Joel Osment’s character can really see dead people) talks (alone) into a dictaphone about the possibility that the boy is schizophrenic. We later find that Willis’ character—who was also a ghost—was trying to help the boy and knew what was up all along. So why then did he speculate about the boy being schizophrenic, when he was alone with his dictaphone? He should have known the boy wasn’t. (This is my memory of the film; I haven’t seen it since it was in the theater, over 10 years ago.)
In Minority Report, Tom Cruise’s character John Anderton engages in what almost seems like chicanery when he says (in the scene where the philosophic underpinnings are laid out) that the precogs “don’t see what you intend to do, only what you will do.” Obviously it is difficult to establish a set of story premises that explain how precognitives will foresee a future that then people have the option of changing. But if we leave this paradox aside, and ride along with this flashy film, we come to some satisfying situations (more or less) later on, which actually can be considered relevant to the thematic question of a society using technology to “predict” behavior and therefore targeting some intervention to the relevant individual in order to prevent or change the behavior.
Now let’s get back to the real world for a minute.
The film’s possible relevance in another context: Mass health-care intervention, among other bugbears (such as police entrapment)
You could also think of this in the more commercial (or pretending “health-care”) realm: Big Pharma companies targeting certain consumers with ads “tailored to them.” Think of the assumed “purpose”: “to stop your depression before it starts”; “to treat someone lest he or she do violence”; “to get a treatment to an AIDS patient before he gives another unwitting soul his dread disease” (these are not tag lines I’ve ever heard, but they certainly conform with medical-advertising mentality; and I do have a story to tell about the AIDS idea—not now, though). But what if such a message goes to the wrong person? Will it “send him over the edge”? Will it constitute an unforgivable invasion of privacy, or harassment, or even assault?
Or what if a policing agency—a county prosecutor, a state Attorney General’s office, or the FBI—were following individuals’ Internet communications with some “preemptive interest” in mind? Do we thereby have the potential for (on the part of the policing agency) a sort of malfeasance similar to, in police contexts, entrapment? Suppose some police entity, based on monitoring a person’s Internet communications, got in touch with the person’s doctor to advise the doctor to look into something about that person? Maybe that violates HIPAA laws, or some other federal or state statute. Does that sound so far-fetched?
But it’s certainly feasible. Technologically, it’s almost child’s play today, what with the Internet and other electronically based forms of communication. The real problem: the ethics of handling individuals this way, the privacy issues, the way the Internet “giveth freedom, and taketh it away.” It’s remarkable how Philip K. Dick’s paranoid world view, as fleshed out by Spielberg in a movie like Minority Report, can still be used as a template to consider analogous situations involving individual freedom and the paradoxes of modern options for communication that are really at our disposal today.
One side issue: Consider the film script’s aspect of Precrime having an “utter infallibility” (or however it’s phrased) or Iris Hineman’s comment (made ironically in her jaded retirement), “Who wants a justice system with doubt? It may be reasonable, but it’s still doubt” (which seems to make an odd point about reasonability connected to doubt in a legal context; “reasonable doubt” in a criminal case usually means that a juror has reason to doubt that the state has convincingly made its case). This seems to go along with Dick’s thematic idea about an authoritarian (if not a totalitarian) government (whether in the U.S. or not), in its trying to be perfect (and hence freedom-infringing) in what it does. I think we wouldn’t be so much afraid of this today in terms of what ordinary policing powers there are in the U.S. (the idea of flying police who can come and haul us off sounds more like a 1930s-70s fear). But where the infringements on liberty and certain legal rights come today is in the information realm—a whole area worthy of discussion I don’t want to indulge in here.
Another thing to think about is that, during the heavy-fear-of-the-Soviets time of, say, the 1930s-70s, the “U.S. becoming totalitarian” was feared by members of the public mostly as possibly arising in the state-related (FBI, CIA, etc.) and military realms. Today, I think, the locus of overreaching power in this country for many is where the U.S.—not in an official sense—has traditionally allowed carte blanche: in the commercial realm, not in the state realm (in which latter carte blanche has always been allowed in, say, Russia). Big business, big money, is the god (lowercase intentional) of the country, not the state. So, again, consider the ideas of Internet advertising I noted above.
Before I look at film details, let’s look at another general premise….
The esthetics of saturation and color/tone
One of the things that may strike viewers about this film—in addition to a noirish darkness than some may find a surprise to come from E.T.-delivering Spielberg—is its richness in visual and also sound terms. This side may appeal to both sci fi enthusiasts and the young—and actually, it appeals to me in this film, too. And I’m not normally one who likes a crazy carnival ride of a movie.
You might recall what I said in my September discussion of another genre-heavy film, Martin Scorsese’s remake of Cape Fear
I find there are some very general categories that pop art seems to fall into, particularly when you consider how your tastes change with age. In popular music (rock, country, blues, dance music, etc.), two very broad categories (which I propose provisionally) seem to be (1) “confection” versus (2) “heartbeat-expressive” or “made for moving”….
I find that with Minority Report, it seems useful—when it comes to the combined themes of police / life crisis / privacy / alienation / family-type-aims-invaded-by-government—to see how it is quite different from the likes of the Coens’ Burn After Reading (see my previous review), and yet it offers an alternative choice along differing esthetic lines. Say you were asked what you thought was The Beatles’ best album. If you’re like me and you consider your views as they’ve changed over years, and you also consider how critics have talked and how audiences have reacted, you could say, “Well, it’s hard. I hate to cop out, but I could say there are four—Revolver (1966), Sgt. Pepper (1967), The Beatles (“The White Album”) (1968), and Abbey Road
Sgt. Pepper = largely influenced by McCartney (consider how he uses the vague “concept album”/reprised theme song on some of his later albums: Ram, Band on the Run, Venus and Mars, and maybe Back to the Egg); very much a confection style, fairly uniform in style, and dense; lyrics-wise, focused on city life, and its associated alienation to an extent; and it reflects the group to a good extent working together. In view of all these things, it is a sort of young people’s album.
“The White Album” = influenced more by Lennon (he wrote a greater percentage of its songs than on Pepper, and the bolder songs are by him); oriented much to rhythm, country & western, experimentation, and a sense of spatial stretch; oriented to rural life in good part, and endorsement of life values (differently among the different Beatles) is conspicuous; the album reflects individual members of the group musically “doing their own thing” to a large extent. In view of these things, if it isn’t a “middle-aged person’s” album, it is one reflecting someone feeling they’re getting older and wanting to stretch their wings and “leave the nest.”
So, in a way that may seem superficial yet I think has some value, Burn After Reading takes a sort of “White Album” approach to its look at government intelligence, midlife crisis, and so on (though of course Burn is more oriented to suburbs than it is to rural influences, as “The White Album” is), while Minority Report takes a more Sgt. Pepper approach to some of the same themes (and a lot of its settings are in congested city areas).
And yet Minority Report can still appeal to a “jaded” sort like me, and why? Partly because of its overriding darkness (though I don’t like darkness for its own sake), but also because of how it handles some of its themes, including on the level of its vivid details.
But also, and most importantly, its focus on character—as we watch Tom Cruise not only athletically make his way through his odyssey and “run from the overreaching law,” but also struggle emotionally—allows us to “keep our eye on the ball” in terms of remembering that there is something ahead to discover about Anderton himself, as we wash down the stream of rich details. We meet all sorts of side characters, and see the plot unwind elaborately but not incomprehensibly; but we feel there is something ahead to discover—and what is it?
The plot aspect of the “flaw in the system,” and premised on an evil “father” of the system
I hope I don’t spoil this film for any viewers—it is worth seeing a second or more time—by commenting on the end section of the plot (the last 20 minutes or so). Leonard Maltin, whose opinions I usually respect, seemed confused or a bit vexed by this movie (I seem generally, across films, to accord more with his apparently baby-boomer assessments—he and I even like Hitchcock’s Topaz, while most of the country probably doesn’t, while I am more hit-or-miss in according with the views of Videohound, which seems aimed to younger viewers; the latter gives Minority Report three and a half bones out of four, which I would tend to agree with). Maltin says in his compendium that the film goes on too long, and he seems to find it ironic it was adapted from a short story (though as maybe he doesn’t know—and I actually scanned the story a bit—the story is sketchy and abstract [almost too much so], compared to the film [one of the screenwriters comments more or less on this on the DVD]; and with today’s fantasy audiences, or even back in 2002, you couldn’t have so skeletal a story on screen; you needed to flesh it out with eye candy).
Granted, the movie is a bit manic in its richness of action/character detail and atmosphere. But the main skeleton of the plot, I think, is simple enough, and should be kept in view when appreciating this film.
Recall the premises of the Precrime department I noted above. The precogs see a crime to happen in the future; the Precrime police go to stop it (often against a fast-running-out clock). When an alert about a future crime comes that alleges John Anderton is about to commit a premeditated murder, not a murder of passion, of course Anderton is shocked and, scared, goes on the lam. Danny Witwer (played by Colin Farrell) is suddenly on hand as the representative of the Department of Justice who—giving an air of being a competitor with Anderton at first—seems to be present officially to sniff out whatever flaws might be in the Precrime system—which until now has been operating on an experimental basis only in Washington, D.C. His “vetting” agenda seems to serve the larger agenda item of the Justice department’s wanting to take the system over to make it national. And of course, Lamar Burgess (played by Max von Sydow), who helped start the D.C. experiment of Precrime, is leery about his baby being taken away by the federal outsiders…. In some ways, of course, this seems a story of territorialism, jealousy over a magnificent project someone has started, and so on.
But now, the ace cop, Anderton, who in his virtuosity seemed an extremely important component of the Precrime program, is suddenly identified as a potential murderer by the system he helped become so successful. He suspects that Witwer set him up. Lamar Burgess wants to shelter Anderton, but Anderton, following wise instincts, decides to stay aloof from his elegant old boss, as he is essentially on a search to find out whom he is supposed to kill (and why).
Later we find that Anderton has come upon the hotel room where the man (Leo Crow) he is supposed to kill, has been holed up, and Crow seems to be a child molester/murderer who, Anderton discovers partly via photos laid out on a bed, had abducted and killed Anderton’s own years-gone son. Anderton then realizes, yes, he is going to kill Leo Crow—by the passion newly stirred up in him.
But free will intervenes, so to speak, when, just on the cusp of putting a bullet into Crow, Anderton has a change of heart and recites to Crow his Miranda rights. But Crow himself—some kind of drifter or the like—has been “set up” to take the fall of being killed so that his family is provided for…and in a hectic semi-struggle, he causes Anderton to shoot him dead. So, the precogs foresaw the murder after all (even while Agatha, the chief precog, is with Anderton after he has “kidnapped” her).
But Danny Witwer, who has been the ad hoc leader of the Precrime team on Anderton’s trail, is the one who comes intuitively to smell a rat: after checking out Leo Crow’s hotel room (signs of murder remaining) from which Anderton has fled, he says this can’t be a real murder scene—too much inculpating evidence is present. “This is what we called an orgy of evidence,” he says, comparing the situation to his old work in a homicide squad. “This was all arranged,” he says.
So, Witwer had a good-faith interest in disinterestedly testing Precrime for flaws after all. He goes back to Lamar Burgess to present his suspicions and theory. Witwer has already obtained the “minority report” of precog Agatha’s vision of a years-old murder, which—crucially—she has interested Anderton in early in the film (she showed this to Anderton when they had been alone in the precogs’ “temple”—where the precogs reside in order to have their crime-stopping visions). This image-stream of the old murder from Agatha’s mind varies in details from the images that had originally been gotten—and stored in the database of the Precrime system—from the other two precogs, who have less “talent” than Agatha (as is pointed out by a couple characters).
Agatha’s vision, it will be shown, is the real one—i.e., reflects a true murder. Witwer has been told that the precogs tend to suffer “precog déjà vu”—where they see the same crime (the worst ones) again, and the technicians have to disregard them. The fact is that the early murder that Agatha has interested Anderton in, has ultimately led Witwer to discover that the other precogs’ “reports” (the majority report, so to speak) don’t match Agatha’s minority report. Hence, he theorizes that Agatha’s report represents a real murder, and the other report reflects a faked murder staged to cover up the real murder. So who committed the actual murder, and why was there a coverup?
Burgess, after patiently listening, kills Witwer.
As we find, Burgess turns out to be corrupt in a particularly “rich” way. Years before, he had killed Agatha’s mother, a “neroin” junkie (“neroin” is the drug that seems of choice among many in this society, and even Anderton is addicted to it). Agatha’s mother had wanted to get her daughter Agatha back into her fold after beating her addiction. But Agatha was the precog who, because of her talent, was key to Precrime. So Burgess killed the mother himself, after having a drifter take part in a fake murder beforehand, which is what the Precrime system first thought it detected (and hence stopped). Once the Precrime police took away the fake murderer, Burgess killed Agatha’s mother himself. Only Agatha saw this actual murder, and it apparently had haunted her ever since.
Not only that, but when Agatha has clued Anderton to the murder of her mother in the arcane way that, early in the film, we can’t fully understand (and neither can Anderton), Burgess has caught on (when Anderton shows her his recording of Agatha’s vision of the murder), and Burgess elects to have Anderton gotten rid of. Hence (in what we can only insert into our understanding of the story on second viewing), he apparently arranges for Anderton to be chased after by the Precrime system, with Anderton trying to find out what it is about this man (Leo Crow) he’s supposed to kill, while Crow has been set up by Burgess (similar to the drifter who killed Agatha’s mother) to be the supposed abductor of Anderton’s son….
Near the film’s end, Anderton vehemently yells at Burgess through a cellphone that Burgess had used Anderton’s grief over his son to try to trigger him into killing Leo Crow, etc. (Earlier, Burgess fit with Anderton’s more innocent understanding by saying that Anderton’s pain at loss of his son cemented his dedication to Precrime, which helped the public be won over to Precrime.)
The whole plot is a little labyrinthine—and even the evil machinations seem unusually convoluted—but this story, as outlined, is not nearly as hard to understand as it may first seem. I think what makes it seem more complicated than it really is is the sheer nastiness of Burgess’s motivations, in a man who (played by von Sydow) seems like such a “nice old man.” Many you could say the film’s cynicism, at least aimed at the likes of Burgess, is one factor that makes it tough to swallow.
(Actor dossier: von Sydow has had a career that almost seems like a history lesson: he was the knight paying chess with Death in Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal [1957], one of the priests in William Friedkin’s The Exorcist [1973], a demanding companion to a female in Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters [1986]…and of course you can read his Wikipedia bio for more. Today he is a good example of a courtly old Scandinavian man—something of a Walter Cronkite or an Eric Sevareid [these were news anchor and commentator, respectively]—who carries an aura of credibility and reliability, making his character of Burgess all the more shocking.)
Anyway, once you understand this pattern to the story, then watching the film wind through its story (for beyond the first time) isn’t so hard.
Now let’s look more at the film on the level of some of the details.
The baubles on this “Christmas tree” of a movie, conducing to a story of loss and redemption
For one thing, the principal photography of this “post”-heavy film (“post” refers to being subject to postproduction work) seems to have been done pretty quickly. Actors mispronounce names or terms—
* Anderton’s estranged wife is variously called “Lara” (correct) and “Laura” (the latter even [in DVD commentary] by the actress playing her, Kathryn Morris, who is otherwise fine in the varied-tones role);
* Anderton is called “Anderson” by precog Agatha in the hotel lobby scene;
* and the drug to whom many are addicted is various called (phonetic spelling) “neroin” and “neuronin.”
