It has basically become a running joke in film geek circles about how much of Steven Spielberg’s filmography involves him fixating on his own parents. Filtered through the kind of industry-defining vision that would make him one of the medium’s most important figures, his films irrespective of genre have involved a lot of father/son conflicts, mourning the loss of connection with family, and just a general sense of unrest concerning authority figures. For decades, Spielberg has been using his complicated feelings about his parents’ divorce to define and later redefine what is now known as the ‘blockbuster’.
And now, it seems that he is ready to stop dancing around the subject, and just make a film about that event in his life... albeit with still a thin layer of fictionalisation, although still the thinnest that he’s applied yet. What comes out of it is not only Spielberg’s best work in years, but something that feels like it had to make.
It’s been a while since a film had me sold right from the very first scene, which here involves Mitzi and Burt Fabelman trying to convince their six-year-old son Sammy to see his first movie at a cinema (Cecil B. DeMille’s circus drama The Greatest Show On Earth). Burt, a computer engineer by trade, tells Sammy about the way the projector uses light and persistence of movement to create a moving picture. Mitzi, a trained concert pianist, tells him that films are dreams. The technical versus the idealistic.
From there, Sammy gets past his fears of the darkened cinema room and… falls in love. He sits there, wide-eyed, hypnotised, possibly terrified at one point, as a classic practical effect sends a train model crashing into a car, derailing every carriage on the track. The expression on Mateo Zoryon Francis-DeFord’s face was a pretty good approximation of my own in the audience. Already, this has outpaced other autobiographical works from this year like Belfast and Armageddon Time, and we’ve only just started.
Well, I say that I was sold from this scene, but quite frankly, I was sold from the concept alone. As an auteurist and a lover of metafiction, this is the kind of cinematic narrative that is exactly in my wheelhouse. Seeing teenaged Sammy (Gabriel LaBelle) making silly Westerns and war flicks with his Boy Scout troop (all of which are recreations of Spielberg’s actual amateur films), there’s a genuine thrill to be found in all the little filmmaking tricks shown, like using planks of wood, dirt, and holes in pieces of paper to simulate gunshots. It’s tempting to look at this and see Spielberg trying to pat himself on the back as someone with a profound gift for filmmaking, even at this tender an age, but as the film continues, it’s clear he’s not interested in deifying himself. Or anyone else, for that matter.
Through Mitzi and Burt, the way he depicts his parents is entirely lacking in any kind of mandated sense of respect or awe; these are human beings first, family members second. Paul Dano as Burt has his moments of sternness (seeing him constantly describe Sammy’s filmmaking passion as just a “hobby” is its own brand of heartbreak), but that practical view of the world still presents something rather vital in Sammy’s (and in turn Steven’s) genesis as a filmmaker. For as much as the film leans into the idealistic side of things, it still shows Sammy getting infectiously excited about the technical side of things, like different kinds of cameras, film stock, and editing equipment.
But he ends up taking the back seat for most of the film, likely because Spielberg has spent a lot of time already isolating him in his recollections of the divorce through his art. Instead, it’s Michelle Williams as Mitzi who gets the lion’s share of development, and this is some of her most potent dramatic work I’ve seen. Her commitment to her family, her pining for forbidden passions, her love for music, her trauma over losing loved ones; she is given a lot to deal with here, and while it occasionally enters the realms of melodrama, her performance manages to keep it all safely on the ground.
And when it gets to
the point where she tells teenaged Sammy “You don’t owe anyone your life, not
even me”, there’s a sensation of a massive weight being lifted, as if Spielberg
has finally been given a chance to forgive himself for how much he’s come back
to this event time and time again over the years, and how much blame he's divvied up in that time.
The importance of both art and family is represented as a dichotomy within the film, epitomised in a legendary monologue courtesy of Judd Hirsch as Sammy’s great-uncle Boris. Speaking from his character's experiences working in the circus as well as the film industry, he explains that in order to pursue art, it would mean having to disconnect from family, because the two coming together would tear them both asunder. And as Sammy films and later edits home videos of his family, that comes right into the foreground as he witnesses the seeds that would later result in his parents’ divorce.
Beyond the echoed depictions of the artist as someone possessed by a need to create, prioritising it over anyone or anything else in their life, it’s also an admission that there is great power in the preservation and presentation of images. To quote another cinematic legend, French auteur Jean-Luc Godard (who tragically passed away in September of this year): The cinema is truth at 24 frames per second. Even when it’s just dreams. And to highlight the inescapable power of dreams, there’s even a cameo from David Lynch later on.
And on the note of what cinema is capable of, Spielberg along with cinematographer Janusz Kamiński and editors Michael Kahn and Sarah Broshar apply their craft to show the many ways that simple refracted light from a projector can shape and change reality around it. It can take simple, ordinary people, and either make them a man more perfect than Adam (to borrow a phrase from Dziga Vertov), or expose them as something far below the strata of humanity. It can uplift, captivate, horrify, clarify, reveal, entertain, transport, transform, or just take up a few spare minutes. It is a language in which the intangibility of fantasies and dreams and could’ve-beens can be translated into concrete matter, showing something more real than the reality taken in just by our own organic cameras. Like with Pedro Almodóvar and Pain And Glory, The Fabelmans shows a master of the cinematic artform using it to relay how vital it is to the human experience, by highlighting how vital it has been to their own.
Okay, enough with the flowery la-di-da prose: I just fucking love this movie. Some of it comes across as jarringly strange (Chloe East as Sammy’s first girlfriend Monica feels like one long reminder that this is still the same filmmaker that had a kid use “penis breath” as an insult back in E.T.), but most of the humour is both very effective and well-fitted to the story being told. Add this to Steve Jobs and An American Pickle on the list of reasons why Seth Rogen deserves props as an actor, not just a funny guy. Both as a nuanced break-up story, and as a coming-of-age artistic odyssey, this is fantastic from start to finish. It felt like one massive reflection of every confronting, harrowing, and joyous experience I’ve ever had watching movies in the cinema, and a reminder of why I’ve spent the last eight years writing so damn much about those experiences: Because it’s magic worth celebrating.
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