Could Steven Spielberg, the director who's vacationed with Bill Clinton, advised John Kerry, and raised millions of dollars for Democrats, be a secret Republican apologist?

That's the charge in an essay by Village Voice film critic J. Hoberman in the new issue of the Virginia Quarterly Review. His thesis: that America's most successful maker of escapist entertainment has provided invaluable cover to the Bush Administration with his recent films.

Spielberg's career as a Republican propagandist actually began, he says, in 1998 with Saving Private Ryan. Bush has called the World War II drama his favorite movie—and that makes sense since Ryan's underlying theme seems to provide Bush with a key rationale for his military adventurism: "The purpose of the war is to support those troops that are already there."

Minority Report, about clairvoyant mutants who prevent future crimes, signaled Spielberg's "support for the extra-legality of Bush's war on terror," Hoberman claims. (Even if you don't buy that, it's worth noting that both Spielberg and star Tom Cruise voiced approval for the coming Iraq war while promoting the film, Spielberg's first to open after 9/11.)

Hoberman flounders a bit in trying to find evidence of a right-wing agenda in The Terminal, a heartwarming human-interest flick, but he moves back onto firmer ground with War of the Worlds, an adaptation whose us-versus-them use of 9/11 imagery drew a hearty thumbs-up from the likes of Bill O'Reilly. Sayeth Hoberman: "In tracking the emotional development of the frightened child's father (Tom Cruise) from callow, immature hotshot to responsible mensch, War of the Worlds provided an allegory, if not a defense, of George W. Bush's crisis-inspired growth into leadership."

That leaves Munich. Hoberman takes the film's tortured depiction of Israeli revenge killings as evidence that Spielberg is conflicted over his own newfound hawkishness. "Still, with its closing shot of the World Trade Center, Munich makes it clear that we defend Israel because we could be next," he writes. "No less than War of the Worlds, Munich seeks to express support for an American foreign policy doctrine."

NEXT ITEM: The Terrible Trials of Tigger
and Friends >>