In defence of Hook – Steven Spielberg’s grown-up ode to childhood

Some­times a movie can throw you sim­ply by turn­ing out noth­ing like what you were expect­ing. Take Steven Spielberg’s much-maligned 1991 film, Hook. If you watched it expect­ing an Indi­ana Jones-ed ver­sion of Peter Pan, chances are it didn’t work for you. Tak­en on its own terms, how­ev­er, Hook now looks like the end point of the first phase of Spielberg’s stel­lar career.

Occa­sion­al­ly it’s the less appre­ci­at­ed films that reveal the most about a director’s body of work. At the time of Hook’s orig­i­nal release it was sub­ject to large­ly dis­mis­sive reviews, yet one crit­ic saw some­thing that most oth­ers did not. In his two-part essay for Film Com­ment enti­tled ​‘The Pan­ning of Steven Spiel­berg’, Hen­ry Shee­han made the case for the film as one of Spielberg’s most sig­nif­i­cant achieve­ments up to that point.

In the mid 1980s, Spiel­berg con­sid­ered direct­ing a live-action musi­cal ver­sion of Peter Pan, even get­ting John Williams to sketch out sev­er­al musi­cal num­bers. Although that ini­tial vision didn’t mate­ri­alise, the musi­cal DNA still found its way into Hook. If you’ve nev­er seen Hook before, it’s worth approach­ing it as a musi­cal only with less singing and few­er dance numbers.

Key to Hook’s musi­cal and the­atri­cal vibe are the con­tri­bu­tions of pro­duc­tion design­er John Napi­er, who served as visu­al con­sul­tant on the film. Napi­er spe­cialised in the­atre and worked on the Coppola/​Lucas/​Jackson short film, Cap­tain EO, from 1986. Hook was ren­dered almost entire­ly on sound­stages. This was in part due to the fact that Sony had just acquired Colum­bia Pic­tures and were under­stand­ably keen to show the indus­try the large scale resources they could now muster.

The arti­fice fore­ground­ed by the film is essen­tial – the sto­ry being about a man’s jour­ney away from real­i­ty. Once we arrive in Nev­er­land, the shal­low­er focus images con­trast neat­ly with the deep­er focus of the non-fan­ta­sy scenes.

At the film’s mid­point, amid all the fran­tic Lost Boys shenani­gans, sits one of the most ele­gant­ly ren­dered sequences that Spiel­berg has ever direct­ed: the scene where adult Peter remem­bers his past. The screen­play by Jim V Hart expert­ly chan­nels the the­mat­ic core of Peter Pan, but not its entire plot. The sequence in ques­tion is a great exam­ple of this, draw­ing from the chap­ter ​‘The Home Under the Ground’ in which Wendy Darling’s mem­o­ry of home is referred to.

The nar­ra­tor observes that, ​“she was absolute­ly con­fi­dent that [her par­ents] would always keep the win­dow open for her to fly back by…” This detail becomes a key line of dia­logue in Hook and it also gets due treat­ment in the above sequence. Hart and Spiel­berg do fur­ther jus­tice to the novel’s open win­dow image, which works espe­cial­ly well when the focus shifts to Tin­ker­bell and not Peter; in close-up we see her look­ing for­lorn­ly through a closed win­dow, Peter and Wendy togeth­er reflect­ed across Tink’s face.

Light as a souf­flé at first glance, Hook actu­al­ly deals with some heavy themes. It’s the first Spiel­berg film to use mem­o­ry as a key motif. The direc­tor presents a pro­tag­o­nist strug­gling to recov­er his past in order to move on with his future. Maybe it’s this that makes Hook more a film adults than young kids. After all, when we talk about look­ing at a film more deeply, aren’t we real­ly talk­ing about look­ing deeply at ourselves?

Refract­ing real­i­ty through the lens of fan­ta­sy has long been a rich seam for movies to explore. When Hook’s teas­er trail­er was shown in cin­e­mas in late 1991 it brought that dynam­ic to life – a mag­ni­fy­ing glass sweeps across an old map reveal­ing the Known and Unknown worlds side by side. As a reminder of how one sto­ry can lead to anoth­er, this bril­liant­ly effec­tive teas­er brings to mind a line from Her­man Melville’s nov­el ​‘Moby Dick’: ​“It is not down on any map; true places nev­er are.”