AndrewBloom
CONTAINS SPOILERS9/10 one year ago
[9.0/10] There are scads of films about the magic of moviemaking. Hollywood can't resist the self-flattery. Audiences enjoy the suggestion that they’re doing something special. And more charitably, despite all the crap that comes with showbiz, when done right, the end product can genuinely move hearts and dazzle the eye. That is worth celebrating.
But *The Fabelmans* is the rare movie about the power of film, where that power is not feted, not treated as an unambiguous good. Instead, it’s a force that reveals, that shapes, that scares, and that pierces.
Yes, it can be used to make kids playing in the desert look like a wild west shootout. And it can be used to turn a boy scout troop’s ramshackle project into a poignant meditation on the cost of war. But it can also be used to turn an antisemitic young bully into a golden god, and force him to see what he might be in a way that breaks him. And it can be used to peer into the heart of someone you love deeply, even if finding what lies there might break you.
The “you” in that sentence is Sammy, a plain stand-in for director, co-writer, and prime contender for cinema’s greatest living auteur, Steven Spielberg. *The Fabelmans* is, true to the spirit of autobiographical coming-of-age movies, a story about how he discovered a love of film that spurred him to the career he’s become renowned for. From being mesmerized by the spectacle of *The Greatest Show on Earth*, to gathering his friends to make elaborate backyard pictures, to cutting together home movies to cheer up his mom, you can see the roots of Sammy, and Spielberg’s obsession evolve and take hold over the years.
Except that it’s not a simple tale of a young man finding his passion. It is, instead, about how art sometimes sits uncomfortably with the rest of life, including family life. In a volcanic one-scene wonder, Judd Hirsch cameos as Sammy’s Great Uncle Boris, he lays out the central dilemma. Sammy has that pull toward art, but also a pull toward his family, and the tension between the two will tear him apart. The turmoil of having to live with both, will eventually prompt people like them to pick one, and the choice will be gut-wrenching no matter what.
That's particularly true because Sammy, like all children, carries parts of both of his parents. He has a special kinship with his mother, Mitzi, who encourages his passion and imagination and seemingly had the talent to be a world-class piano player herself. Still, Sammy has the determination of his father, a vision and focus that drives him to channel those artistic abilities with conviction. Sammy gravitates toward his mom, who recognizes his artistry, and struggles with his dad, who treats it as an unreal and unserious hobby.
Despite that balance, Sammy’s life and art turn upside down when cutting together footage of a camping trip reveals something awful -- that his mother is cheating on his father with their family friend, Uncle Benny. It rocks Sammy’s relationship with his mother and his view of their father, and the ripples of the discovery steadily shake and eventually cleave the family.
In that, *The Fabelmans* is not just a story of one artistic kid’s ascension to auteur status. Nor is it even a more complex meditation on the crushing power of art, with consequences harsher than the gauzy hues of more laudatory films-about-films. It is, true to the title, a movie centered on the domestic life of a family with something dark and delicate underneath the bliss.
Spielberg injects the slices of life that make period pieces and personal reflections fun. In one expertly-cut sequence, the nights of Chanukah progress and Sammy’s model train grows with it. The antisemitism Sammy faces in Northern California rubs the audience raw with the frank depiction of bullying Jewish children face for simply being who they are. A bizarre but hilarious interlude with a prospective Christian girlfriend who seems to find his religious status exotic tickles the funny bone with well-observed bizarreness. And David Lynch, of all people, nearly steals the show as a blunt and to-the-point John Ford whose advice on composition is taken by Sammy and, in one of the film’s cutest moments, by his real life equivalent.
But Spielberg and co-writer/frequent collaborator Tony Kushner also inject plenty of uncomfortable moments of a family in various states of crisis, both acknowledged and unacknowledged. Family dinners turn into shouting matches. Mitzi has psychotic breaks both large and small. Children make accusations of parents and parents push back on their children. There is physical violence, insinuations of who knows what, and breakdowns of all stripes when the family itself is rent in twain by the places in which passion and pragmatism cannot coexist.
This is not a happy lookback on the pristine family who spurred a filmmaker to greatness. It is a loving but often dark reflection on the widening cracks beneath the surface of a loving but unhappy home. Not since *Close Encounters of the Third Kind* has Spileberg taken such an unflinching look at illness and discord rendering a family asunder.
That look is buoyed, as always, by Spielberg's incredible direction and the expert cinematography of frequent partner and cinematographer Janusz Kamiński. To the extent *The Fabelmans* indulges in standard “power of film” lionizing, it comes in the form of eye-catching sequences where a young Sammy projects the train crash that's so enraptured him onto his hands, symbolizing film’s incredible ability to capture the awe-inspiring in a tiny frame. The spin of Spielberg’s ever moving camera around Sammy as he cuts his movie together conveys the way in which this art, and the act of its creation, can be a world unto itself.
There is a loving focus in the depiction of actual film-making, communicated as much in the visual language of the film as in moments where a fellow boy scout goes from asking Sammy, “So you want me to, like, act and stuff?” to sinking so far into the emotion of the scene that he all but needs to be rescued after the aspiring director yells “cut!”
As transcendent as that depiction is, the artists’ fire that burns in the heart of Uncle Boris and Mitzi and Sammy, comes with its cost. As much as Sammy cannot live without his filmmaking, in the end, Mitzi cannot live without Benny. He feeds that passionate, artistic side of her in a way the noble and gentle Burt cannot, and in the end, it causes her to do that selfish thing she can't deny herself. It causes pain, and hardship, and struggles for everyone. But the same thing that pushes Sammy to forget school and follow the dream that feeds him, spurs his mother to leave and follow hers.
Maybe that's why he forgives her, a mutual understanding that bloomed in a coat closet refuge of projections and imagination, and blossomed in two adults who understand how someone could make that sort of choice to put your head in the lion’s mouth, literally and figuratively. The closeness, the similarity between them, brings pain but also connection, the kind between a mother and her son that isn’t often vindicated on the silver screen.
But maybe that too is the point. More parochial pictures focus on *Shakespeare in Love*-style literalism in their look-back on the formative moments of great creators. A chance meeting here, a key image there, must become the most iconic parts of their collected works.
*The Fabelmans* goes several fathoms deeper than that, though. It asks the question how a young Spielberg gathered the material that would become the core of his films, and the impetus for his calling. But it answers both questions in a more oblique, cutting way than the film’s less exacting counterparts.
Mitzi herself gives away the game early in the movie. Witnessing the train crash from *Greatest Show* stirred something in young Sammy. The stimulation, the explosive imagery, the emotion of the moment overwhelmed it. The ability of the humble camera to capture such bewildering experiences, then, gives him an opportunity to hold them in place, to process them, and in the ultimate act of self-assurance, to control them.
For all the risk of hagiographic or putting cinema on a pedestal, *The Fabelmans* does not deify its subject or his art. But it recognizes where that need to control came from, and the familial and psychological train wreck that drove him deeper and deeper to the comforts that only transfixing the grandest emotions and experiences with light and celluloid can provide.
In that, by capturing his own life, his own journey, his own mixed-up yet precious family between the same frames, Spielberg reaches the recursive peak of that idea. And I hope such a remarkable film gives him the peace and assurance his stand-in needed then, and he may still have needed now.
