When I saw Steven Spielberg’s “The Fabelmans” at the Toronto Film Festival in September, I absolutely loved it. And while I never expected the movie to be such a huge hit, my hope – and my cautiously optimistic expectation – is that it will find a connection in culture. I assumed the drama about how Steven Spielberg became the genius he is would resonate with movie fans of multiple generations. Well, not so much with those under 35. But that still leaves many of us!
I think “The Fabelmans” has a bad title – it sounds like a sitcom starring David Schwimmer and Mayim Bialik as parents. But the movie is a wonderfully enveloping experience, a true memoir of film. (If Spielberg had written the story of his youth in book form, without changing the names, I doubt it would have been more intimate or detailed.) Like all good memoirs, the film is about a few things at once—in this case, adventure. Growing up, the pleasures and perils of becoming an artist and the agony of watching my parents break up.
The Fabelmans holds its own in divorce cinema, as the relationship of Mitzi and Burt Fabelman, played by Michelle Williams and Paul Dano, unravels over time, almost in slow motion, in more grief than rage. It’s not that the two hate each other; They are not suitable for each other. For decades, pop dramas of divorce have produced their own fight-and-revenge clichés, to the point where they never capture this common reality quite as well as The Fabelmans does.
But, of course, the saga of Spielberg’s parents’ divorce, which he has discussed in interviews several times, and which has become the model for broken homes in his own films going back to Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), is not a topic likely to excite many viewers. The lure of “The Fabelmans” is how Spielberg, as a Middle American kid growing up in the 1950s and early 1960s, fell in love with making movies — and how he reinvented movies from the ground up. This is because he was flying blind, making up everything as he went.
You might say, “Spielberg and the scribbled 8mm home movies he made as a kid? Sorry, but that sounds like something serious inside a baseball boomer.” However, Spielberg occupies a special place in our culture. What other director was, at the same time, cathartic as a populist like Alfred Hitchcock and a pure, gritty artist like Martin Scorsese? Answer: no. Just Spielberg. His films moved people — to their souls, but on a grand scale — in a unique way. He is a filmmaker who, following his muse, has remade the language of Hollywood. And that’s what I mean when I say “The Fabelmans” sounded like a movie that could, and should, have broad appeal. The greatest films Spielberg has ever made are part of us. Dramatic film about his filmmaking is in a funny way Around Us – about his discovery and cultivation of a gift that changed pop culture, and maybe even the world.
Over this weekend, it became apparent that the audience for this movie is much more limited than it was just a few years ago. There are reasons for this: the streaming revolution, and older moviegoers hunkering down on gritty theaters in the wake of the pandemic. But let’s leave aside the box office. “The Fabelmans” is a marvel of a movie, featuring a performance, by Gabriel LaBelle, as Sammy Fabelman – Spielberg’s teenage analogue – this is the most nuanced and lively performance as a teenage hero I’ve seen since John Cusack’s “Say Anything” and Jean May Pierre Laude in “400 Blows”. I realize I’m not supposed to compare a movie like “The Fabelmans” to Truffaut’s timeless classic, but the performances are actually quite similar – LaBelle, as Léaud, shows us the quiet whizzing of the hero’s mind, the inner reactions I won’t say out loud. It might be the best performance by an actor I’ve seen this year.
What “The Fabelmans” shows us so dramatically is the filmmaking obsession that gripped Spielberg. Genuine obsession is a difficult quality to dramatize, but Spielberg, working through the intricate, note-perfect script he wrote with Tony Kushner, does so in the subtlest way. He turns the story of what he did as a novice kid filmmaker into a journey, an adventure that we follow, with twinges of triumph and flashlight creativity along the way. He invites us to participate in the seduction, deception, and ecstasy of filmmaking. He does this by showing us, at every stage, how Sammy discovers who he is in the films he makes. He formulates his identity in what cinema can We see, the way it reflects and shapes life. Here’s how it happens.
For Sami, cinema begins with a fantasy of disaster. The Fabelmans begins with Sammy going to see his first movie, The Greatest Show on Earth. He’s an 8-year-old (played by Mathieu Zurion Francis-Difford) and the scene in Cecil B. DeMille’s saga that catches and chases him is the climactic train accident – he’s traumatized by it. But where does the trauma leave and the magic begin? On a young Spielberg, they are a spaced mustache. At home, Sami orders and receives a toy train set, then takes his family’s 8mm home movie camera and attempts to relive – and film – the accident, using multiple camera angles, all as a way to overcome his fear, and master it. Crash through control. It’s amazing to think about the dark place Spielberg’s DNA came from. But it’s not such a big jump, really, from the toy train disaster to “Jaws” or “Duel,” the 1971 TV movie about truck demons that put Spielberg on the map. The whole reason we watch movies like them is that in their spinning axis of fear, danger, excitement, and death, they express, metaphorically, our existential fear and anxieties. Spielberg understood this as a kid because he was haunted by it.
He becomes a poet of reality. As a teenager, Sammy was making a Western. When he looks at the footage he shot of the shooting, he is disappointed; It looks fake. So he got the idea of punching small holes in the reels of film, creating the effect of each gunshot being a dissonant pop. The effect is kinetic. With a visual impact that seems primal necessity is the mother of invention, it’s really ahead of mainstream Hollywood – it gets you Feel Lead. It is his drive that will drive him far. Spielberg has always taken and augmented the reality that other films show us, most dramatically in his war films and alien visitation films, but in countless other ways as well.
Invent what movies are for himself. In The Fabelmans, we don’t see Sammy watching movies or TV. He’s on the show “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,” and it’s not like Spielberg is pretending he hasn’t seen other movies. Obviously, this is where he steals his home movie images of teens from the buses and battlefields of World War II. But the road He calls them another story. He moves the camera freely, not so much mimicking Hollywood as taking what you see on the Hollywood set and shooting it with his high-flying, anything-goes-going enthusiasm. Hitchcock, after seeing “Jaws,” famously said of Spielberg that “he’s the first to not see a stage arch.” More than anything else, it was Spielberg’s uneven shot-framing method, in the ’70s, that defined him as a revolutionary talent. His framing imparted an odd kind of awareness; It’s like he’s shooting a movie and at the same time circling around the movie you were watching. The Fabelmans show you never saw a stage arch. He was too busy letting the camera drift through him.
He learns that movies can see more than we know. “The Fabelmans” is not a drama lacking in plot. For a while, it becomes a visual thriller like Blow-Up when Sammy discovers his mother’s romantic feelings for his “uncle” Benny (Seth Rogan) – actually a family friend – by observing their subtle interactions on the home movie he has made of a camping trip. I think we’re meant to understand that Mitzi and Penny, at this point, have a platonic relationship. But what Sami unintentionally filmed speaks volumes. It’s not just a gesture or that foreplay. He captured, on silent film, their incomprehensible feelings. Talk about realism! Such is his discovery of the hidden power of film – to show us what is real, perhaps more than what reality does.
Turns reality into myths. Throughout “The Fabelmans,” we see Sammy gaining things as a film director: techniques, gimmicks, insights, better equipment. He puts it all together when he’s clicked to film his class’s first trench day trip to the beach. This would be his greatest hit – and also his act of revenge against the WASP bully who tortured and beat him for being Jewish. But the coolest thing Sammy does, and the most mysterious part of The Fabelmans movie, is when he uses his mini-film to turn his bully friend, Logan (Sam Richner), into some kind of Golden Aryan god. Is Sami making fun of him or glorifying him? Maybe both. But when Logan confronts Sami in an empty hallway, we see that Logan isn’t just feeling cynical or guilty. (feels both) steam Powerfully how a film can reshape its identity. And what Sami has shown himself is this: Movies can be revenge, they can be transformation, they can be lies – but most of all, movies can be myths. They have the power to elevate anything to its truth.
Upon meeting John Ford, he was given a lesson in turning Hollywood classics on their head. The movie’s final scene, which re-enacts an encounter between a teenage Spielberg and John Ford, gives the movie a sweet ending. It’s all about—aside from the damned charge David Lynch plays Ford with—is the lesson Ford teaches Sammy, after asking him to look at several paintings of the Old West, each one with a skyline in a different place. Ford’s message seems to be his rule of thumb for how to frame a shot. However, Spielberg used this lesson to cement his intuitive sense of “non-stop” framing, so that audiences see the picture like they’ve never seen it before. At that moment, Ford would pass the baton to Spielberg, but Spielberg would turn Ford’s classicism on its head. (This is the great joke in the final shot of the movie.) For Ford, it was all about keeping the compositions “interesting”. For Spielberg, with his spell casting a spell, it was about realizing that the core of life is never at the center.
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