THE FABELMANS
Difficult as it may be to accept, and
despite his career and reputation, Steven Spielberg’s film/memoir The Fabelmans hardly matches up to
anything like his best, or even his less than best work. The picture deals with the childhood and
young manhood of Sammy Fabelman, a surrogate for Spielberg, whose life mirrors
that of the director, from the time he sees his first movie and like so many
kids, falls in love with the art; unlike most, of course, he ends up devoting
his life to making movies and ultimately, as we all know, becoming the most
successful director in the history of cinema, a fact that makes this film so
surprisingly disappointing.
The film’s progress resembles the
usual pattern of such works, taking young Sammy (Mateo Zoryan) from childhood
through adolescence and finally to his first moment in an actual Hollywood
backlot. Some of the most entertaining
parts of that progress naturally involve Sammy’s essentially self-taught
education in filmmaking. Regarding his
interest as a hobby, his father Burt (Paul Dano) buys him his first camera, one
of those Super-8s known to every beginner; Sammy moves on from that device to
ever more sophisticated equipment. He
displays both his growing competence and his ingenuity when he makes some
dramatic action films employing his Boy Scout troop, with special effects
involving toy guns, dirt bombs, firecrackers, and more important, infusing some
of them with emotional content.
Perhaps the most important work he
accomplishes, however, creates the odd connection between his passion for the
art and the family dynamic that really forms the central subject of the
movie. Since Sammy’s obsession with the
camera occupies so much of his time, in addition to his action films he also
makes home movies. While editing one of
those films of a family campout, he notices on the background of a clip some
romantic interaction between his mother Mitzi (Michelle Williams) and the
family’s best friend and courtesy “uncle,” Bennie (Seth Rogen), which in effect
upsets his whole world.
That glimpse of the scene, a kind of
low-rent, amateur version of some brilliant moments in the works of
Michelangelo Antonioni and Brian De Palma, really changes the meaning of the
film, possibly without the director fully realizing it. The
Fabelmans then becomes something like a study of Mitzi’s life and
character, fully revealed in the process of Sammy’s filmmaking, an attractive,
supportive mother, an unfulfilled pianist whose music nobody in the family
takes seriously, a woman who yearns for another kind of life. At that campout, with no particular urging,
Mitzi performs a not particularly graceful interpretive dance with a vaguely, perhaps
innocently, even rather sadly erotic appeal.
The dance, the not quite translucent nightgown revealing her body, the
rather clumsy movements combine to create the most genuinely touching moment in
the entire film.
The connection that his footage
reveals establishes a hostility in Sammy that puzzles his mother until he
finally runs the snippet of film through his projector for her, showing her
walking into the woods with Bennie, sharing an embrace. It also underlines the Oedipal strain in
Spielberg’s films, touched on lightly in E.
T. The Extra-Terrestrial and overpoweringly present in A. I. Artificial Intelligence. The
relationship with his mother, which finally fizzles (his parents eventually
divorce), really constitutes the emotional center of the picture.
As Sammy, now played by Gabriel
LaBelle, grows older and his filmmaking develops along with his personal progress,
he understandably uses it as a way to impress his high school classmates, who
mostly seem hostile and anti-Semitic.
His California high school, incidentally, looks just like all the other
Hollywood institutions of secondary education, stocked with blond, fit,
attractive WASPs, all of them looking much older than teenagers. When he finally comes of age—the director
skips over a lot of years and events—he somehow manages to find a toehold in
the film industry, which leads to one of the best moments in all of The Fabelmans. He gets the chance to meet John Ford, played
by David Lynch of all people, and learns his first real lesson about the
business and the art of bigtime cinema.
The film ends on that entertaining and wholly delightful note, with
Hollywood and grand success in the young man’s future.
