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.