Stephen Spielberg’s Reckless, Audacious “Disclosure Day”

Margaret is entirely aware of what she’s doing when she pulls off these empathetic maneuvers, but she remains oblivious to how she herself is being puppeteered—when she speaks Russian or Korean, when she clucks. There’s a link between these conscious and unconscious forms of mind control, and for Spielberg Margaret’s eventual coming to consciousness is a matter of fundamental morality. It’s also a self-regarding, self-challenging portrayal of his own art of moviemaking.

The workspace from which Hugo runs the liberation group bears a peculiar resemblance to a movie studio. The space is big, bare, and hangar-like, filled not with secret agents glued to monitors but with craftspeople putting up frames and walls for what looks like a set where a fictional scene would be filmed; Hugo indeed calls it a “staging area.” Throughout “Disclosure Day,” every glimpse of the workspace reveals that set in a more advanced state of construction, until its point is finally revealed: Margaret is brought, for a sort of regression, to visit a perfectly detailed replica of her childhood home—where, at the age of ten, she was, not to put too fine a point on it, captured by aliens. She has no memories from before that event, and she’s filled in the blank with guilt and regret. Her psychodramatic home tour is meant to restore her childhood to her—in other words, to restore her to herself.

This conceit highlights the essential difference between Margaret’s powers and Daniel’s. Where she deals in feelings, he is a numbers guy—the noises that Margaret makes on TV are as clear as English to him, because he recognizes the sounds as eight-bit code. He is the master of the plot, the bearer of the backpack, the metteur en scène of the film’s titular disclosure day. Yet he’s unable to put his script into action without the aid of Margaret, the player of multiple roles, the master of guises—in movie terms, the actress, who is drastically transformed into characters radically different from herself and who, in turn, touches her spectators in the most vulnerable recesses of their souls. In Spielberg’s vision, Margaret is the performer who is required to give of herself, indeed too much of herself, for the needs of the overarching plot and the common good. It’s her vulnerability that, ethically, matters most.

The scene of Margaret’s self-confrontation is an extraordinary combination of exaltation and kitsch. Spielberg himself is palpably in the grip of its overwhelming emotional power, its combination of metaphysics and theatre. But he builds Margaret’s operatic transfiguration on a core of suburban sentimentality, and at times the schmaltz wins out. It reminded me of something I’ve long felt about Spielberg’s work, which is that his storytelling tends toward the cultural average, with representative types whose individuation is subordinated to the backstory-light and digression-free speed of his action. Sentimentality is approximation; Margaret’s regression slips “Disclosure Day” back into Spielberg’s comfort zone of a generic, all-too-familiar pop-culture past.

There’s nonetheless a critical tweak built into the scene involving the uses of childhood sentimentality, and here, again, Spielberg suggests a self-awareness of the dangers of his practice, and the essential importance of having a virtuous idea system at the heart of such a drama. Margaret has effectively been the victim of a childhood trauma, albeit one that was ostensibly inflicted morally, for the planned benefit of all humanity. In Spielberg’s democratic vision, the benefit of humanity at large is impossible without the redemption of its victim zero. (The notion brings to mind a colossal precursor: the cosmic redemption of a woman named Margaret, in Goethe’s “Faust.”)

As astonishing as much of the movie is, it’s padded with sequences that seem contrived to sell its extravagant conceits. There’s even one high-stress scene, involving a train and a car (as in the primal scene from “The Fabelmans”), that plays the same role as the hilly chase in Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another”: to make a movie of emphatic ideological orientation play like an action film. A far more satisfying action scene takes place when Margaret, after the regression, finds a new form of principled power, laying a hand on one of the mighty sticklike devices and leading Hugo’s group in battle—now, with consciousness restored, doing so fully as herself. The resulting action makes delicious use of special effects to conjure a classic cinematic trope—invisibility—in a spectacular new form.