Steven Spielberg’s autobiographical coming-of-age story “The Fabelmans” is a film of love, unfolding the relationships that formed him in his childhood and adolescence, and of self-love—the pride of a young achiever who followed his own path to multidimensional success. Foremost, it’s a ripping good yarn, told with personal urgency, that honors the memory of his parents and other elders, and the memories of shared experiences with his siblings and friends. He takes satisfaction in looking back at his origins from the standpoint of where he is now. Insofar as Spielberg made a Holocaust drama with a happy ending, it was foreordained that his autobiographical film would be downright triumphalist. The cherished yet often troubling memories depicted in “The Fabelmans” are of events that took place from 1952 to 1965. Spielberg, who is seventy-five, seems to have carried these around with him throughout his life and career, like a hoard of treasures in the raw, waiting for the moment to make something of them. Now that he has opened the box, it turns out that the stones have been buffeted by the long and bumpy ride into uniform smoothness, with a little polishing from Spielberg and his co-screenwriter, Tony Kushner, and are now being proudly displayed in all their gracious charm.
“The Fabelmans” is the story of young Sammy Fabelman’s life with his family and his peers, the development of his cinematic vocation, and the inextricable connection between these two realms of the personal and the artistic. It begins somewhere in New Jersey, in 1952, when Spielberg’s alter ego is about six (and played by Mateo Zoryon Francis-DeFord). Sammy is taken to the movies, seemingly for the first time, by his parents, Mitzi (Michelle Williams), a talented concert pianist who has put her artistic ambitions aside to raise a family, and Burt (Paul Dano), a gifted electrical engineer; they see Cecil B. DeMille’s melodrama “The Greatest Show on Earth.” Sammy is apprehensive, and his parents coax him in: Burt does so scientifically, explaining the phenomenon of persistence of vision, while Mitzi does so emotionally, calling movies dreams—“happy dreams,” “dreams that you never forget.” Both thrilled and scared by a scene of a wreck involving two trains and a car, Sammy tries to reproduce it with his own electric train set; Mitzi helps Sammy use Burt’s home-movie camera to film the miniature wreck so that he can watch it whenever he wants. Sammy is smitten, and, soon, recruits his younger sisters, Natalie (Alina Brace) and Reggie (Birdie Borria), to act in his do-it-yourself versions of horror movies (wrapping them in toilet paper to play mummies, using ketchup as stage blood).
The action leaps ahead to the early sixties: the family moves to Phoenix, where Burt, who is working on an early version of computer memory, is hired by General Electric. Burt’s colleague and best friend, the fun-loving Bennie Loewy (Seth Rogen)—a constant presence in the Fabelman household and a single man—will be working with him in Phoenix and travels with the family on the cross-country car trip. It’s a charming light-bulb moment when, as the car pulls into the family’s new driveway, the now adolescent Sammy (Gabriel LaBelle) asks Burt to back out and pull in again so that he can film the momentous arrival.
Sammy soon makes a local name for himself as a fiction filmmaker (silent films, with home-movie equipment): first, after seeing John Ford’s “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” (released in 1962), he makes a Western, surprising even his father with his technical ingenuity; and then a Second World War action drama. But Sammy’s most consequential films turn out to be two documentaries. The first is born of an elaborate set piece—one of the two on which Sammy’s life pivots—in which his coming of age involves a crucial coming to consciousness. The family, plus Bennie, are on a camping trip, where Burt teaches the children science and Bennie offers them a lot of laughs. There’s a spectacular moment when Mitzi, wearing a diaphanous gown, breaks into a rapturous, balletic dance that Bennie urges Sammy to film. What Sammy captures on film throughout the trip is a secret that threatens to tear the family apart.
The crux of the drama is Mitzi’s struggle with her sacrifice: having put aside her artistic career for the love of Burt, her children, and a settled mode of family life, she struggles to maintain her composure, her mental health, and her identity. She seems to achieve a workable compromise in Phoenix, where she performs classical music in radio concerts. Then Burt, amid his scientific breakthroughs, is hired by I.B.M., and the family—without Bennie—moves to Northern California. Both Mitzi and Sammy are miserable there—Mitzi, in her marriage, and Sammy, in his new high school, as the target of anti-Semitic bullies. (With Sammy’s second documentary, a record of a high-school rite of passage, he glimpses the mysteries of star power and discovers its worldly uses.)
Along the way to the movie’s ineluctable happy ending, Sammy is the beneficiary of lessons about the sacredness of his calling from Mitzi and other family members, including his elderly great-uncle Boris (Judd Hirsch), a onetime vaudeville performer and silent-film actor. The emblematic lines of dialogue are at the border of slogans: “Family, art: it will tear you in two”; “Guilt is a wasted emotion”; “It’s hard being married to a genius”; “You don’t owe anyone your life”; “We’ll always know each other.” He learns that his parents aren’t a unit, aren’t just dispensers of attention and affection, aren’t just instruments of his desires, but are independent individuals with lives of their own. He learns to admire them, especially his mother, the artist, even if he also recognizes (quite conspicuously) the technical heritage from his father. (Bennie also gets his due—young Sammy comes to recognize the big heart, the emotional connectedness, behind the fun.) What Sammy learns, above all, is never to sacrifice one’s work for family life. Relationships come and go, but what you accomplish is your own, and, without it, you have nothing to offer; you are truncated, frustrated, stifled, damaged, diminished.
Excavating and elaborating his memories, Spielberg tells this story with a free-swinging vigor that he has matched only in “1941”—and that, there, was heightened by an antic facetiousness that’s altogether absent from the warmhearted, good-humored, intensely sincere “Fabelmans.” Spielberg’s familiarly showy visual virtuosity is largely subordinated to his nuanced, glittering, excitingly detailed storytelling here, his fervent attention to the incidentals and the fine points that turn an anecdote into an experience. Supporting characters, such as Sammy’s paternal grandmother (Jeannie Berlin) and his middle sisters Natalie and Reggie, in their teen years (played by Keeley Karsten and Julia Butters), and his high-school girlfriend, Monica (Chloe East), enliven the movie with impulsive and stylish flourishes. (East’s trick with a can of hair spray flaunts brilliant timing.) Spielberg’s actors, here, appear to have significant leeway and make inspired use of it. Rogen bursts into his role with inventive energy, and Williams—despite the somewhat constraining earnestness of the writing for Mitzi’s character—offers piercing moments of expressive power.
Yet, for all its tenderness, empathy, warmth, and verve, “The Fabelmans” has the feel of mythmaking—a feature-length promotional video for an authorized biography of a filmmaker who, if far from self-made, is in any case self-propelled. What’s missing is a sense of history. Spielberg himself certainly doesn’t lack one; many of his most acclaimed films are explicitly political and historical. Most of “The Fabelmans” takes place between 1962 and 1965, consequential years in American life. Yet there’s almost nothing in the film that suggests that the Fabelmans’ lives have any connection to events in the world around them. The civil-rights movement, the Cold War, the John Birch Society, the beginnings of war in Vietnam? The simple fact that young men were eligible to be drafted into military service? Atomic-bomb drills? The Cuban missile crisis? The March on Washington? The assassination of John F. Kennedy? Were there any Black or Hispanic people in Arizona, in California? If so, Spielberg must have found them very shy and quiet. There’s also no sense of the Fabelmans’ own Jewish identity, no family stories of migration, no connection of anti-Semitism to history or to the politics of the time, no notion of the cultural or moral specifics of the family’s religion. What Spielberg offers is a narrative span of time that takes place within the isolation of personal concerns that are wholly detached from the civic ones. It’s the myth of a private life that can even exist in such isolation—America without graffiti.
Part of the foundational mythmaking of “The Fabelmans” is Spielberg’s construction of his own chosen heritage, specifically, of paternity. His real father, Burt, is too cold—too earnest, too rational, too self-effacing. His ubiquitous father-substitute, Bennie, is too hot—too loud, too frivolous, too casual, too much. Sammy is in search of a stand-in father, and he finds one in a chance encounter with the director John Ford (played, with delicious humor, by David Lynch).
Above all, though, Spielberg’s foundational myth is the cinema itself. If I had to define his career while standing on one foot, it would be this: to put the emotional world of prime-time television into the form of classic Hollywood cinema. Spielberg expressly renders unto himself the cultural heritage of classic Hollywood, whether through the in-kind paternity of John Ford, the inspirational effect of Ford’s “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” on teen-age Sammy, or the traumatic impact of DeMille’s 1952 movie on Sammy as a child. Crucially missing, though, is television. There’s not a word or a scene about the seemingly thousands of hours that young Sammy spent watching television before he became the self-conscious high-school auteur. The main presence of television in “The Fabelmans” is as techno-furniture—there’s a whole bunch of early-generation TV sets in the background of the family’s basement, in 1952, because Burt is moonlighting as a repairman. But Spielberg denies the déclassé influence of popular network prime time and children’s television of the nineteen-fifties and early sixties in favor of the venerated tradition of Hollywood’s auteurs. Erasing television from his mythology is, for Spielberg, analogous to the working-class directors Erich Stroheim and Josef Sternberg adding the aristocratic “von” to their names. ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
