The Fabelmans
Or the power of movies
(Proceed with caution: possible spoilers below).
Steven Spielberg is a natural storyteller and his genius is one of endless creativity and invention. He is a master filmmaker in every aspect of the craft and he has made masterpieces that are also enormously popular blockbusters: Jaws, E.T, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind make my list. He has also made some very good movies: Empire of the Sun, Catch Me if You Can, the first Jurassic Park, Lincoln, the first two Indiana Jones movies, most of Schindler’s List, most of Saving Private Ryan, and most of Munich. I’m not as fond of A.I, Minority Report, Amistad, The Color Purple and West Side Story. But every one of his movies has at least one breathtaking sequence. He is at his best when he lets loose his wildly imaginative sense of mischief. He has always shown a unique talent for understanding, directing and creating indelible child characters. He changed the scope of movies. There were big movies before him (look up Cecil B. de Mille), but he brought charm, humanity, intimacy and playfulness to the biggest spectacles. His Achilles heel is that he is unapologetically sentimental and his tendency towards schmaltz stops some of his movies short of greatness. In playwright Tony Kushner he has lately found a collaborator who seems to curb the Spielberg corn.
Spielberg’s sweet “semi’-autobiographical film starts with a young Sammy Fabelman who is afraid of going to the movies. His parents take him to see Cecil B. de Mille’s The Greatest Show on Earth and the kid doesn’t want to go in because things in the movies are too huge and scary (a nice inside joke from the man who brought us a giant white shark, enormous dinosaurs, and the Indiana Jones serials). That Cecil B. de Mille was the Spielberg of his era (without the charm) is perhaps not a coincidence; his huge, crowd pleasing, corny spectacles seem to have been a big influence. Young Sammy is both horrified and mesmerized by a sequence of a spectacular train crash and soon his Chanukah wish is to get a train set so he can wreck it just like in the movie. He gets his wish and proceeds to recreate the crash with preternatural precision, over and over again.
But there is a twist. He keeps destroying his toy trains, so his mother, in a spurt of insight, gets Sammy a camera so he can shoot the crash once and screen the outcome as many times as he wants in lieu of totaling all his toys. She understands that what Sammy wants is to have control over the chaos. Aren’t we lucky she does.
Whether you like Spielberg’s movies or not, the man was born to make them so it is very fortunate that he found his calling so early in life. With a script co-written with Tony Kushner, Spielberg spins a heartfelt personal tale of a loving Jewish family constantly uprooted and on the verge of imploding. Sammy’s father Burt (Paul Dano) is a talented engineer whose work gets him to move the young family all over the United States, creating emotional havoc. Mitzi, his mercurial, creative mother (Michelle Williams) is a frustrated concert pianist who is as eccentric and prone to melancholy as his dad is consumed with taking machines apart. Plus, there is charming “Uncle” Benny (Seth Rogen), Dad’s and Mom’s best friend. A complicated thing.
Spielberg revisits his coming of age as a man and as a filmmaker to reflect on the power of movies. From his father he imbibes the technical curiosity of an engineer: how do things work? From his mother, he gets the impulse and inspiration to let his creative imagination run wild. His dad, one of the great nerds in film, explains to him how movies work (still images are run at 24 frames per second, so fast that they fool the human eye and give the illusion of movement. If this isn’t magic, I don’t know what is). Soon Sammy is enlisting his boy scout troop to make Westerns and war films. Spielberg doesn’t have to be coy about his own talent. He has fun showing what fascinates him: shooting scenes, cutting the strips of celluloid and labelling them to then put them together, learning to speak the language of film; coming up with shots and ideas with the playfulness and inventiveness that are where his genius resides. Behold a sequence where Mitzi, who is crazy enough to take her children in the car to watch a tornado, gets very close to the eye of the storm. This in itself is exciting enough (the kids are mostly petrified) but only Steven Spielberg would show a gaggle of shopping carts careening down the street in the pouring rain, a sight both funny and frightening, which makes Mitzi realize how demented it was to take her kids out to the middle of the storm.
Teenage Sam (Gabriel LaBelle) is busy creating homemade movie spectacles with his buddies, when his dad asks him to make a movie of the footage of the family’s camping trip, which we just witnessed. Sam doesn’t want to do it because he has a production scheduled for the next day with a cast of thousands (boy scouts and friends). I thought that him being a proxy for Steven Spielberg, he could surely put it together in 5 minutes. As he cuts this little home movie, Sam discovers something in the footage that he has not been aware of in real life and this sends him reeling. He discovers that the camera doesn’t lie. It sets its gaze on the edges where people fail to look and turns spontaneous moments into indelible truths. It can heal or it can hurt. Once set on film, it reveals more than the eye can see. It can be a window into the human condition. Sam’s coming of age is inextricably tied to his discovery of filmmaking, and both are exhilarating and terrifying. Sam realizes the power and responsibility he wields in choosing what to include in the final cut.
The Fabelmans looks into the family’s troubles with an unflinching and compassionate eye, particularly in the portrayal of Mitzi, an ebullient but also depressive woman. It gets a bit maudlin with all the family tzuris, and Sam’s movie making escapades are far more compelling than the family drama, as perceptive as it is. Spielberg delves frankly and at painful length on the antisemitic bullying he endured in his teens (ain’t revenge sweet, though? He became the most spectacularly successful Jewish nerd ever). The movie is unapologetically Jewish, which is as should be. Sam’s rite of passage into adulthood includes a very pious and fun-loving evangelical Christian girl (Chloe East) who wants him to come to Jesus. Like any teenager, Sam is willing to do anything to cop a feel. As the only Jewish kid at his new Northern California high school, full of Chads and bullies, Sam is an American-born outsider in America, and it is through his movies that he gets to belong.
The great Judd Hirsch steals the show as Uncle Boris, a bohemian eccentric who worked in films and the circus and who prophesies to Sam that the conflict between art and family will tear him apart. This warning ultimately seems to spur Sam on.
The ending of The Fabelmans includes a delightful cameo by David Lynch (Spielberg’s opposite in many ways). Make sure you catch the subtle little visual pun that ends this lovely film — a sincere acknowledgment by Spielberg of the many sources of his gifts, and a love letter to the power of movies, the love of his life.
