Portrait of the Director as a Young Man: Spielberg's "The Fabelmans"

 The Fabelmans
directed by Steven Spielberg

starring Michelle Williams, Gabriel LaBelle, Paul Dano, Judd Hirsch, Seth Rogen

It seems that every artist has some family trauma in their origin story, and in The Fabelmans, director Steven Spielberg has shared some of the forces that shaped him into one of the most successful and admired filmmakers of our time. At this point in his career, Spielberg is a titan of Hollywood moviemaking, who created the concept of a blockbuster and whose many films are considered classics of American cinema: Jaws, E.T. The Extraterrestrial, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, The Color Purple, Schindler's List, Saving Private Ryan and many more. 

At this point, a new Steven Spielberg movie is not just a movie, but an event. And so it is with his new semi-autobiographical film The Fabelmans,  a coming-of-age family drama co-written with the phenomenal Tony Kushner, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and screenwriter. But I wish I hadn't known it was about Spielberg, by Spielberg. The setup somehow created high expectations and I was disappointed. I kept waiting for something to happen.  In this portrait of the artist as a young man, I would like to have seen even more of his art. 

It's not as if nothing happens. The Fabelmans starts at the movies, which is where it should. Young Sammy's inciting incident is set in the 1950s at a local cinema in New Jersey, where Sammy's parents take turns explaining the concept of the moviegoing experience to the boy in diametrically different ways. Here we see instantly that he's got an artistic mother and a scientific father. I couldn't help thinking how lucky this kid was to have smart, articulate parents who could explain both the mechanics and the magic of film in such detail and were patient enough to do so. (Some of us were raised by you'll-like-it-or-else / we-can-go-home-right-now/ I-don't-have-time-to-explain-it-to-you / how-the-hell-should-I-know-how-movies-work parents). 

While watching, Sammy becomes fascinated by a train wreck scene in big top drama The Greatest Show On Earth. When Sammy asks for and receives a Lionel train set for Hanukkah, he is helped by his mother Mitzi to film the life-like train crashing into a toy car and a toy house with his father's camera so he can watch it over and over. It's explained by Mitzi as the boy's attempt to control his fear by restaging this horrific accident. 

As Sammy grows up and his passion for filmmaking increases, we begin to notice the tiny cracks beginning to fracture his parents' seemingly perfect marriage. His father Burt, played by Paul Dano in his usual inscrutable manner, is a well-meaning but serious man, a brilliant pioneer of 1960s computer technology. His jokester co-worker and best friend Bennie (Seth Rogen) is constantly at the house, talking science with Burt but also lightening the mood for the rest of the Fabelmans and becoming a surrogate uncle to the kids. Sammy's mother Mitzi (Michelle Williams) is a frustrated concert pianist with a mercurial and fun-loving nature who adores Sammy and his three younger sisters, though their existence derailed her once-promising music career. It's clear that while she admires and respects Burt, she feels increasingly perplexed by his genius and isolated from him as he pursues his highly technical career. 

"In this family, it's always the artists versus the scientists," she tells Sammy.

It's now the 1960s, and teenaged Sammy has started making his own movies with his sisters and friends, and is getting quite good at it. Meanwhile, he's frustrated by his father's view of his increasingly sophisticated Super 8 moviemaking as a frivolous and expensive hobby. But when Burt senses Mitzi's fragile mental state after her mother dies, Burt asks his son to put aside plans to shoot another WWII-themed film with his boy scout troop and instead cheer up his mother with an edited film of their recent family camping trip. It's a case of a picture speaking a thousand words when Sammy views the footage and discovers evidence that his mother's friendship with "Uncle" Bennie is more intimate than it should be. Disillusioned, Sammy has to cope with the fact that the adults in his life all have moral failings. 

Burt moves the family to Northern California, leaving Bennie behind, and things unravel quickly. Sammy struggles as his mother begins to crumble emotionally; the house they are renting is a horror; he's bullied as one of the only Jewish kids in the school; and he remains at odds with his father over his career path. One bright spot is when he makes a film of his high school's annual "Ditch Day," which is ultimately a triumph when shown at the prom. But Sammy also uses the framing and imagery in the film to exalt some of the classmates who have tormented him the most, to their shame. 

The best part of the entire film, as far as I'm concerned, is a scene performed in his underwear by the incomparable 86-year-old Judd Hirsch. Portraying Boris, Mitzi's long-missing uncle who worked in 

silent films and the circus and shows up unexpectedly right after his sister has died, Hirsch is a revelation. After dinner, preparing for bed in Sammy's room, Boris lectures his great nephew as only an eccentric elder with nothing to lose can. Recognizing Sammy's talent and his drive to make movies as the same obsession with art that he himself and the piano-paying Mitzi possess, Uncle Boris tells Sammy that art and relationships will always be at odds throughout his life. When he grabs Sammy by the cheeks during the lecture, the baffled teen pulls away and complains that the old man almost pulled his face off. "That's to remind you how much it hurts," is his response. In his five minutes on screen, Uncle Boris delivers the essential dilemma of every filmmaker, writer, musician, painter, and craftsperson alive.  

The Fabelmans is a slow and subtle examination of family dynamics, of the growing pains of one specific artist from a middle-class Jewish family where the loving parents eventually divorce. It's not a particularly unique, remarkable, or amazing story. But as a Spielberg film The Fabelmans does have some remarkably recognizable Spielbergian elements, such as the suburban sprawl we've seen in E.T. and Close Encounters, the ability to draw natural performances out of kids, the golden haze of his cinematography (by the brilliant Janusz Kamiński, a frequent Spielberg collaborator and Oscar winner for Saving Private Ryan and Schindler's List) and some outstanding performances, particularly by the incandescent Michelle Williams as Mitzi and relative newcomer Gabrielle LaBelle as Sammy. 

What we have just seen is how a young man's feet have been set on a career path that we will all become very familiar with later. It's a movie about how one young filmmaker first became fascinated by the movies, began to notice the fine details of life through a camera lens, and ultimately learned the power of film to alter perceptions. The movie shows us what happens as Sammy gets better equipment and goes on to create stronger and more elaborate movies, but it's not as good at showing the why or the how of his filmmaking. I guess if it did, we'd all know how to be Spielbergs.

The Existential Crisis of A Cartoon Cat (And How Puss in Boots Makes Us Care)

 Puss in Boots 2: The Last Wish
directed by Joel Crawford

with the voices of Antonio Banderas, Salma Hayek Pinault, Harvey Guillén, Florence Pugh (Goldilocks), Olivia Colman (Mama Bear), Ray Winstone (Papa Bear), Samson Kayo (Baby Bear), John Mulaney (Jack Horner), Wagner Moura (Big Bad Wolf), Da'Vine Joy Randolph (Mama Luna), and Anthony Mendez (doctor)

With only one life to live, how should we choose to live it? What should our legacy be? As we get older, how do we face down the fact that we can no longer do the things we used to, not only physically but emotionally? What -- and who -- makes life truly worth living? Is fame and the adulation of the many worth more than the love of a few in anonymity? Do we run from death, or face it head on? And even as we know that death is a certainty, can we still find joy in the time we have left? 

That sounds like a lot, and it is for an animated movie (I love animated movies, btw). But somehow the DreamWorks romp sequel Puss in Boots 2: The Last Wish is both thought-provoking and rib-tickling. 

Animated movies have become so sophisticated over the last two decades that they seem better suited to adults than to children. That has certainly been true of the Shrek film series, which took sacred fairy tale characters and reimagined them as hilariously twisted adults with modern-day lifestyles and neuroses in a storybook setting that anybody who has cracked open a once-upon-a-time tale as a kid can easily recognize. In the brand-new animated feature Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, the very adult issues of aging and mortality take center stage, and while this seems like a dark way to go, the writers still manage to create a delightful film with uplifting messages for kids and adults alike. 

One of the most engaging characters spun off from the Shrek franchise, Puss in Boots is the charmingly arrogant, devil-may-care, sword-wielding Spanish adventurer and bandit in feline form who starred in his own successful animated spinoff, 2011's Puss in Boots. That film introduced his origin story as a former orphan who got pulled into a complicated magic beans heist by his stepbrother Humpty Dumpty, an adventure with ever-increasing risks, a cast of twisted nursery rhyme characters, several double-crosses, and a few surprises, including flirtation with slinky cat burglar and nemesis Kitty Softpaws. 

After eleven years, Puss is back. As the film begins, he's older, but not necessarily wiser. Self-satisfied as a swashbuckling, guitar-strumming, milk-guzzling celebrity, Puss likes to party hard, boasting that he laughs in the face of death and has never been cut by a blade. When his revels awaken a township's sleeping giant, he defeats it with panache, only to be fatally flattened himself. Revived by the village vet-doctor-dentist-barber, Puss is informed that he, in fact, died. Puss laughs it off until the doc gives him and the audience a quick run-through of the many previous ways he's kicked the bucket -- some nobly, some carelessly, all hilarious -- and delivers the shocking news that he's down to the last of his nine lives and should probably retire. 

This is a rude awakening for the formerly fearless feline, who skulks off to a watering hole to drink away his problems only to have a spaghetti western-style run-in with his own personal Grim Reaper, the Big Bad Wolf (Wagner Maura). When he ends up uncharacteristically losing the fight, he scampers away with his life flashing before his eyes. Kids will instantly recognize the threat of a red-eyed, fang-toothed wolfen villain out to flatten the hero; they will no doubt experience the very real fear that a life-or-death situation invokes -- even for as dauntless as hero as Puss In Boots. 

But for adults, Puss's dilemma is much more existential. With his hooded cloak and twin scythes, the Big Bad Wolf is Death himself. Regardless of the vivid animation and fast flying jokes, the film finds Puss considering all of the questions about the meaning of life that every one of us eventually considers sooner or later: What should a life consist of?  And what happens when it starts drawing to a close? 

We watch in dismay as Puss's fear of the Big Bad Wolf causes him to literally bury his famous persona and hide out with crazy cat lady Mama Luna (Da'Vine Joy Randolph), eventually growing fat, grizzled, and depressed, while bedeviled by an endlessly cheerful chihuahua (Harvey Guillén). Only when he discovers that there is a magic fallen star that can restore his eight previous lives -- and that he must get to it before the merciless kingpin Jack Horner, greedy hoodlums-for-hire Goldilocks and the Three Bears, and even sexy rival Kitty Softpaws -- is Puss goaded back into action. And so his fantastical quest for the star -- and past glory -- begins. 

In storybook land, as in life, there are no quick fixes and the path to the fallen star is littered with stumbling blocks. The film gets more frenetic in its second half as all the characters vie for the magical map to the star for their own wishes and plunge into the Dark Forest, a fantastical land that is equally beautiful, nightmarish, and confusing to the viewer. Along the way, Puss must confront his ego, his past, his allegiances, and ultimately Death itself to regain his humanity (felinity?). 

Puss is voiced once more by the amazing Antonio Banderas, who in his zesty baritone Zorro accent balances Puss's arrogance and humor with a real sense of thoughtfulness and sensitivity. He is contrite as he confesses his failings to Kitty Softpaws, voiced once more by Salma Hayek Pinault (his co-star in 1995's Desperado and in 2002's Frida), humble as he learns to care for the blithe therapy dog wannabe he's named Perrito, and defiant as he faces down the Big Bad Wolf with a renewed measure of courage.

The relentlessly upbeat character of Perrito touched me. A tiny dog with a big heart, Perrito is the just-keep-swimming Dora of the story, the seemingly dizzy character who spouts the most wisdom. Perrito turns his experience as a nameless unloved pup who's been continuously abandoned, abused, and even thrown into a river to drown into a tale of not merely survival but celebration. Somehow I couldn't help thinking of all the children who are abused or thrown away by careless parents or guardians, children lost in the foster care system or living on the streets, teens abandoned by their families because of their sexuality. Only some of these children reach adulthood with their sense of humor and joie de vivre intact, who make their families where they find them, and take pleasure in the simple things. This is Perrito, who is determined to make friends of these cats and keep them, no matter how they malign him, and to help them find the Fallen Star with no designs on it himself. As such, Perrito is good for goodness' sake. And as we sail into the holiday season, we need a reminder of the merits of cheerfulness, generosity, and kindness. 

I find much of the humor around Puss in his display of distinctly cat-like behaviors, even as he is portrayed as this larger-than-life figure. In The Last Wish we get a heaping helping: Puss heartily ordering a drink at a saloon, only to take tiny laps at it with his kitty tongue; his animated ginger fur slowly standing on end in fright; burying his boots and hat with backwards motions recognizable from any litter box session; and he and Kitty's stiffening tails, humped backs and snarling fangs as they face off for a catfight. And of course, his ability to turn his green cat eyes into giant limpid pools of unbearable cuteness is a trick that never gets old.

Puss in Boots: The Last Wish is a solid entry in DreamWorks animated collection and likely to be a hit with both kids and adults with its vivid characterizations, intense action sequences, crack voice work, and many lessons about life, death, family and friendship. And with Puss and friends wrapping up the flick with a voyage to the land of Far Far Away, where Shrek and Fiona dwell, we may be hearing more about Puss's final life adventures very soon. 

Meanwhile, I'll be watching this movie again.