5. Hook

Children's theater meets pop religioso cinema near the very top of my Spielberg/Williams list

Why do I love Hook so much?

My obsession with this 1991 film is a matter of public record. In 2021, I wrote a long reported feature for The Ringer about how Hook was nearly a musical, and about how Steven Spielberg had been toying with a potential musical film for his entire career. In 2023, I produced a story for NPR on the same topic, pegged to the release (finally!) of the songs written and recorded for that aborted musical version.

I should also now confess to you that the Hook section in my book was so long initially that I actually cut some 700 words.

But my love for Hook really has nothing to do with its near-musical backstory. It’s genuinely one of my favorite films of all time, and number 5 in my Spielberg/Williams list. Why does this divisive film, reviled by critics and rejected by Spielberg himself, mean so much to me?

Yes, I first saw it when I was a young boy (probably 8 or 9). And yes, its “children’s theater'“ quality¹ had me enthralled and enchanted at an impressionable age. I loved the fairytale adventure to Neverland; the Lost Boys and their treetop village and giant slingshot and creamy, technicolor confections; the pirates and the clock-smashing and the baseball game and sword fights and death by gargantuan stuffed crocodile. It really was a boy’s fantasy, told with Spielberg’s hypnotic, spectacular, delectable confidence.

As I’ve now said on multiple episodes of Why We Love Spielberg/Williams, the films we loved as kids do carry a certain nostalgia, which can be extremely potent, and our love for them as children surely colors our feelings about them as adults.

But as I’ve also repeatedly argued, the films that stick with us, that continue to resonate, that deepen and ripen with time, cannot be merely dismissed with the charge that “You only love it because you saw it when you were 12!” When I get feisty and defensive about that accusation, I’m always thinking about Hook.

I once interviewed the great filmmaker George Miller about the 1995 masterpiece, Babe (which he co-wrote and produced), and I always think about something he told me when I’m analyzing my ever-intensifying love for certain “children’s” films as I grow older. Miller said: “Someone wrote that the key to any story which appears to be a childhood story, like Babe, is that it is for the adult in the child and for the child in the adult. In other words, the child is invited to confront things, not in a blatant way, but it can confront issues and process issues which they’ll need in later life. It’s how we basically learn to do that. And I think also, when you’re watching this with a child or even by yourself, you’re basically invited back into your own childhood, still processing those things.”

Yes, Hook is unapologetically juvenile in certain respects; it’s easy to focus on the skateboards and crotch-sniffing flowers and the moment when a large child (whose name is, indeed, Thud Butt) folds himself into a ball and rolls down a plank to knock over a group of pirates like bowling pins. It is children’s theater, from the broad, pantomime humor aimed at children to the arch performances of Dustin Hoffman and Bob Hoskins and Glenn Close in piratical drag.

But it is also great children’s theater. Hoffman and Hoskins are simply terrific in this movie, so utterly committed, so villainously, campily fun. The usually zany Robin Williams is, here, the straight man—inversely surrounded by phenomenal dramatic actors who get to be the zany ones, and that upending contrast is so powerful. I’ve always loved Robin Williams’ more serious performances; he was a truly great actor, but also there was an inherent melancholy in him (tragically so) that made his serious performances richly dimensional and sympathetic. And in Hook it’s loaded as a perfect metaphor: the great, gonzo ball of childlike energy and humor is acting like a dull, suited, scolding adult. How viscerally painful to see Robin Williams—Peter Pan—has lost his inner child…

The children’s theater extends to the exaggerated artifice of the gigantic ship and soundstage-bound sets. The colors and the materials and the world are all blatant fantasy, existing somewhere between a stage play (albeit a lavishly produced one) and a dream. Hook is like one giant game of make-believe—pure wish fulfillment.

But Hook also carries messages that plumb depths which, per Miller’s argument, the very best childhood stories do. It is also as deeply revealing of its director’s heart and wounds as any film he’s ever made. It’s a movie about a man who is losing his family from neglect, and about children who resent their father for his absence. It’s a story about an adult who has gotten too caught up in the seductive game of work and profits, and has forgotten how to play and be present. It’s about orphans, abandoned by their parents, who respond to their abandonment by remaining in a permanent state of arrested development—lost boys.

It’s about misplaced priorities and missing out on the most important years, which here can possibly be read as a lament about Spielberg’s parents, or about his own workaholism in a new season of fatherhood. “We have a few special years with our children where they’re the ones that want us around,” Moira says to Peter. “After that you’re going to be running after them for a bit of attention. So fast, Peter. It’s a few years, and it’s over. And you are not being careful. And you are missing it.”

Bilge Ebiri pointed out that auteurs are those filmmakers who make personal, self-illuminating movies—and I think in Hook Spielberg pointed a flashlight at so many of his own feelings and failings, both as an abandoned boy who got stuck in a state of childlike fantasy escapism, and as a father, burdened with commercial and corporate enterprise. I’m struck by the many echoes between Hook and other films in his body of work which get taken more seriously. I think of the image of a boy, out in the snow, staring longingly at the warmth of a family he’s been divorced from…

I think of the way that Jack and Maggie comfort themselves in a place of fear with the music their mother sang to them (cue Mrs. Fabelman and her piano). I think of Jack, after the destructive catharsis of smashing a roomful of clocks, suddenly reverting to a fragile little boy crying about not being rescued by his dad—much like Jim Graham crying about not being able to remember what his parents look like.

Is it heretical to think of Hook as an (extremely fantastical) sequel to Empire of the Sun? That masterful 1987 film is about a young, precocious and naive boy who loves flight, who is abandoned / divorced from his parents and is forced to grow up, and who at story’s end is a weary, shell-shocked young man. When children are forced to “grow up” by tragedy or trauma, they can become alienated from their childlike innocence and playfulness, their sense of wonder. Hook is about a character just like that, and it is all about learning how to rediscover and awaken—how to heal—that lost boy.

Spielberg has been on a lifelong continuum of excavating his feelings of alienation and abandonment, of creating escapist worlds where his Peter Pan-like soul can hide and fly, and of reckoning with the costs of such avoidance—but also the costs of forgetting how to fly. From Close Encounters to E.T. (which features a scene where E.T. marvels as a mother reads the story of Tinkerbell being brought back to life through clapping and belief) to Empire of the Sun to Hook to A.I. to Catch Me if You Can to The Fabelmans. He’s also not repeating himself over and over in these films; he is working through his own evolution, revisiting his childhood wounds at new phases of maturation, and through a variety of lenses both allegorical and historical.

It is all important. Hook is not an aberration or an embarrassing misfire; it is essential.

And then there are what I call the holy moments.

When the littlest Lost Boy, Pockets, examines Peter’s face with his tiny hands and exclaims: “Oh there you are, Peter.”

When Peter finally finds himself, and after taking a joyride through the Neverland sky rejoins the Lost Boys and is hailed, at last, as Peter Pan (“You are the Pan”).

John Williams doesn’t just score the nautical adventure and pixie-dust whimsy and children’s theatrical ballet of Hook (although he does all of that better than any composer, living or dead, ever could). He provides the soul, the faith, in this tale—a tale which is so potentially ludicrous and juvenile, and yet in his able hands it becomes sublime. He treats the above scenes with the same dignity and spiritual nobility that he did in Empire of the Sun. He treats them as holy ritual.

Was that a waste of his powers? A popcorn joke? Or did he, with his powers, give Hook—and Steven Spielberg—the gift of a spirit and heartbroken beauty that transcendently made this movie join the pantheon of pop religioso cinema that I keep beating my drum about?

The answer is in the eye of the beholder, obviously, and I’m never going to convince any Hook skeptics that this movie is a masterpiece. But for me it is. It’s a delicious and nourishing Never-Feast of humor, adventure, and heart. It’s about children and their fathers. It’s about reanimating a spirit that has died within. It’s about how truly living is the greatest adventure.

And Spielberg’s libretto, as child-targeted as it may be, inspired one of John’s most glorious operas. An endlessly melodic score that bounces, twirls its mustache, flies, and goes into the heart of childhood and right into the very soul of life’s adventure.

Have you forgotten how to fly? One does.

1. Bonnie Curtis, who was Spielberg’s assistant at the time of Hook and who went on to produce films for him, said Spielberg told her that “he ended up making something that was akin to children’s theater” with Hook.