Nepotism isn’t something that occupies too much space in my head. Never has been. It’s something that has existed for hundreds, probably thousands, of years. In the world of cinema, nepotism has produced some fairly impressive results over the years, from Sofia Coppola and The Virgin Suicides, to Brandon Cronenberg and Antiviral, to Jennifer Lynch and Boxing Helena. Outside of cinema, we just witnessed the son of filmmaker, Mira Nair, win the Democratic primary for Mayor of New York City, though that had less to do with who his mother was and more to do with his bucking of the establishment (plus I doubt a majority of NYC voters have ever seen Mississippi Masala). Please Don’t Feed the Children is the feature directing debut of the daughter of possibly the greatest living director. That director is Steven Spielberg, and his daughter, and director of the film, is Destry Allyn Spielberg. The 28-year-old is, so far, the only Spielberg child to dive into directing. Sasha Spielberg is a musician and Sawyer Spielberg is an actor, but Destry dared to step into the enormous shoe prints left by her father.
Since it would be entirely unfair to judge Please Don’t Feed the Children against anything Papa Spielberg has done, I’ll keep that minimal, though it’s worth remarking that, by the time Steven Spielberg was his daughter’s age now, he had directed Duel, The Sugarland Express, and Jaws. So, we can’t really blame the failure of Destry’s film on age. And, of all of her father’s films, The Sugarland Express is probably the one she evokes, in tone, more than the others, most successfully. No, the failure of this film runs deep and can’t really be attributed to any one person – it was a mess from inception to completion, hence its unremarkable dumping on Tubi. Despite the addition of top talent like Michelle Dockery and Giancarlo Esposito (likely agreeing to the film based solely on the ‘Spielberg’ name), the picture just can’t escape its own disinterest in itself. If this film were a person, it would certainly suffer from clinical depression.
Set in the not-too-distant future, the film follows a group of orphans who have survived a devastating viral outbreak that has killed off most of the adult and child population. It’s a bit unclear as to how the virus works, and the filmmakers make no attempts to elucidate that mystery, which does lead to some foggy dynamics later on that don’t always add up. After a far too extended opening set piece, the orphans find themselves trapped in the home of a bizarre woman, Clara (Dockery), who traps them and…well…I guess I will skip the spoilers and just say that her home would not be highly regarded by CPS, if CPS existed in that world, which it does not, because everybody seems to be trying to kill these damned kids. Don’t believe me? You even get to see an eight-year-old get her head blown off! Esposito co-stars as Fitz, the local law enforcement for the area, whose intentions are never explained or understood. All we know is that he and Clara have a history through their now deceased kids, which I suppose is designed to make us empathize with Clara, but it’s difficult to empathize with someone who is torturing and murdering kids to feed…again…I will skip the spoilers. But it ain’t good!
There’s a piece of Please Don’t Feed the Children that very much wants to be a young adult post-apocalyptic fable. There’s another piece that wants to be a straight-up horror flick. And there’s yet another piece that wants to be an overly-wordy Heretic rip-off, though I am guessing Heretic was actually filmed a bit after this one. The problem is – it doesn’t really know what it is because it spends so much time worrying about what it wants to be. The opening is dreadfully slow and nothing we haven’t seen in countless other films. Sure, things pep up a bit when they reach Dockery’s character, but even that gets repetitive and uninteresting very quickly. Dockery does the best she can with a role that never fully comes into its own because the filmmaker doesn’t even know who the character is. Hell, the character doesn’t know who the character is at times and relies on secondary characters to remind her. And, since most of the film takes place in an old farmhouse, any attention whatsoever to the geography of said farmhouse would have been appreciated. Nope. And, by the time the film reaches its inevitable bloodbath of a conclusion, all we really care about is whether or not we left the stove on at home. And if you think Spielberg isn’t a fan of Neil Marshall’s The Descent, have I got a massive surprise for you!
Look: everyone has to have a first feature, and they aren’t always great. My first feature, for all the things I love about it, wasn’t at all what I set out for it to be. But, Please Don’t Feed the Children comes from filmmaking royalty, and you have to wonder if she just kept her father completely out of the picture to avoid any claims of nepotism or passing the slate. I mean, people still think Spielberg directed Poltergeist, and that’s always been nonsense. If Papa Spielberg did have any input in this film, he had to have been sabotaging his own child because there are so many fundamental storytelling and filmmaking craft errors on display that it makes your head spin. Does that mean it’s unwatchable? No. Does it mean there aren’t occasional delights to be had? Of course not. I am choosing not to focus on those delights because they aren’t even close to enough to combat the ‘everything else’ of this picture. It’s just a damned shame when you see a director’s first feature and feel almost zero passion or interest from that filmmaker on screen. Did she think she had to go into directing and this was just that? Otherwise, it’s nothing more than a bad movie from an untalented filmmaker, and I cannot accept that from a Spielberg. So, in my mind, something else has to be afoot.
Rating: *1/2/***** (currently available to stream on Tubi)
