Steven Spielberg (2022)

The plot details may not be precisely autobiographical but all involved in the production must have known The Fabelmans was about Steven Spielberg’s own formative years.  That knowledge and the feelings it evidently generated kill the film.  Everyone seems hypnotised by affectionate reverence for Spielberg:  from Tony Kushner, who shares the screenplay credit with him; through the cast, especially Gabriel LaBelle as Sammy Fabelman, the director’s teenage alter ego; to John Williams, who wrote the score.  The cinematographer, Janusz Kamiński, and the editor, Michael Kahn, are two more distinguished, long-time Spielberg collaborators with their names on the credits yet the film is visually bland and its rhythm slack.  This lack of technical sharpness and the narrative’s plodding progress through two and a half hours are remarkably untypical of Spielberg.  He too is adversely affected by putting what’s essentially his own story on screen.

The Fabelmans begins in New Jersey in 1952, when seven-year-old Sammy (Mateo Zoryan Francis-DeFord) is taken to the movies for the very first time by his parents, Mitzi (Michelle Williams) and Burt (Paul Dano).  The picture is Cecil B DeMille’s The Greatest Show on Earth.  Sammy’s worries about sitting in the dark are soon transformed into dazzled enthusiasm.  Fascinated by a train crash in the film, he wants and gets a model train set as a Hanukkah present from his parents.  He uses it to re-stage the crash scene – then to engineer another pretend crash, which he shoots on an 8mm camera that belongs to his father but which his mother suggests Sammy’s using.  The glazed exaggeration of these early scenes – the child’s apprehension as the lights go down in the cinema, his wonderstruck gaze at the train crash, and so on – firmly establishes the style of The Fabelmans.  Sammy’s parents are chalk and cheese.  The artistic, volatile mother always encourages her son’s creativity.  The benign, solid, rational father sees no future in Sammy’s playing around with a movie camera.  Mitzi and Burt – their names announce their personalities – are also typical of the film.  Although clearly based on Spielberg’s pianist mother Leah and electrical engineer father Arnold, they’re persistently unreal.

When Burt, who works for a big electrical engineering company, is offered a job in Phoenix, Arizona, Mitzi insists that he take it only on condition that her husband’s colleague and best friend, Bennie Loewy (Seth Rogen), a regular visitor to the Fabelmans’ home, is part of the package and moves to Phoenix too.  Sammy is a lot more shocked than the viewer when his footage of a family camping trip reveals his mother and Bennie, unaware of the camera, in an amorous embrace.  Sammy’s equally unaware that he’s recorded the embrace – at any rate, he reacts to it only when, sometime later, he plays the footage back.  Still, it’s just about the only interesting thing he captures on camera.  Now played by Gabriel LaBelle, Sammy has graduated from short films featuring his three younger sisters – Reggie (Julia Butters), Natalie (Keeley Karsten) and Lisa (Sophia Kopera) – to ones involving his pals in a scout troop.  All these efforts are equally dull.

Spielberg is far from the first film-maker to assume, wrongly, that working with material authentically close to their heart is bound to result in an authentic movie.  He’s not the only one to do so even in a 2022 picture, vide Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Bardo and Sam Mendes’s Empire of Light.  Spielberg really was on the receiving end of anti-Semitism at high school and his parents really did divorce when he was in his late teens.  (By the way, I was surprised to learn the divorce didn’t happen earlier:  I’d got hold of the wrong idea that the boy protagonists of ET (1982) and Empire of the Sun (1987), deprived of one or both parents, reflected something of the director’s own boyhood experience.)  But The Fabelmans reduces both traumas to bite-size, standard-issue melodrama, an approach that’s particularly problematic in relation to the anti-Semitic element.

Burt is promoted again and the family moves again – this time sans Bennie – to somewhere in California where they’re nearly the only Jews.  Sammy is abused, verbally and physically, at his new high school; Mitzi and Burt are reasonably horrified when he comes home with a bloody nose and they find how he got it.  A couple of screen minutes later, Sammy is not only dating Monica (Chloe East), a comically devout Christian, but she’s having dinner at the Fabelmans’ and suggesting that Sammy film their high-school class’s forthcoming away-day at a local beach:  there’s not a hint of tension or anxiety on his parents’ part.  When ‘Ditch Day’, as it’s called, arrives and he shoots the beach antics, it’s quite unclear what the other students – most notably the bullies who’ve tormented him – now think about Sammy or about his filming proceedings.  Their anti-Semitism is ignored when it would get in the way but it returns to the foreground on the night of the high school prom, at which Sammy’s film is premiered.

The Ditch Day footage and the immediate aftermath to the prom screening, without escaping the prevailing schmaltzy gloss, may be the most honest part of The Fabelmans in what they acknowledge about Sammy/Spielberg’s film-making priorities.  Sammy’s chief persecutors at school are the tanned, towering Logan Hall (Sam Rechner), and Chad Thomas (Oakes Fegley), who doesn’t appear physically cut out to bully anyone.  Sammy’s beach film exploits their looks:  Logan is presented as an Aryan super-hero and Chad as a worm.  The screening is rapturously received by everyone except these two:  even the kid who’s the butt of Spielberg’s best visual joke – Sammy puts together shots of seagulls flying overhead and a glob of ice cream in a boy’s mouth to make it look like gull droppings – enjoys being the centre of attention.  Logan, though, is confused and Chad enraged.  In a three-way showdown in a school corridor, Chad goes for Sammy and Logan fights him off but what gets said just before that is more striking.  When Logan demands to know why Sammy, whom he’s treated so badly, has glorified him in the film, Sammy says, ‘I wanted you to be nice to me for five minutes, or – I did it to make my movie better! I don’t know why’.  The second reason, easier to believe than the first, also explains why Sammy accepts the invitation to film Ditch Day:  Monica offers him the use of her father’s 16mm Arriflex camera.

Gabriel LaBelle is competent but so cautious:  all the way through, he looks as if he wants reassurance from Spielberg that he’s doing the great man justice.  Michelle Williams, a fine actress, is miscast as eccentric, histrionic Mitzi Fabelman.  Williams isn’t naturally either of those things; her performance shows the strain of trying to be both.  The artificiality of The Fabelmans crystallises in her appearance: the severely styled blonde bob and red lipstick sometimes give Williams’s face an almost cartoon quality.  Despite the simplistic writing of Burt, who can neither express his loving feelings nor work out that his wife’s are for another man, Paul Dano plays him sensitively.  Dano must be wondering what he has to do to earn an Oscar nomination.  After what must have been near misses for There Will Be Blood (2007) and Love and Mercy (2014), he seemed nailed on this year for a Best Supporting Actor nod.  The Fabelmans has got a nomination in that category (and in six others) but it goes, absurdly, to Judd Hirsch for his single-scene turn (and it is a turn) as Sammy’s Uncle Boris, a what-a-character character.  Seth Rogen is wasted as Bennie; so are Jeannie Berlin and Robin Bartlett in their briefer appearances as Burt’s and Mitzi’s mothers.

The film ends in 1965, by which time Mitzi has left Burt for Bennie, taking her three daughters with her, and Sammy, still living with his father, gets a job working on the TV sitcom Hogan’s Heroes.  At CBS studios, he’s granted a brief interview with the legendary John Ford (a cameo from David Lynch).  Between expletives, Ford offers Sammy advice on framing:

‘When the horizon’s at the bottom, it’s interesting.  When the horizon’s at the top, it’s interesting.  When the horizon’s in the middle, it’s boring as shit!!  Now good luck to you – and GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY OFFICE!!’

Sammy thanks Ford politely and walks away through the studio backlot.  In the film’s closing shot, Spielberg frames the horizon to the centre before re-framing it at the bottom.  We’re meant to think:  the rest is movie history – though this viewer instead felt relief at the sight of the closing credits.  At one point in the story, Mitzi gets herself a pet monkey.  Her astonished son asks why.  His mother replies, ‘I needed to laugh’.  Naming the animal for her absent lover doesn’t sound like a good start to making that happen; when Bennie the brown capuchin jumps onto Burt’s shoulder, thoughts of monkeys on backs also spring to mind.  But in fact the simian Bennie, creating mild domestic havoc as he leaps enjoyably around, is responsible for nearly all the few smiles raised in the course of this disappointing film.  He is actually a she, twenty-eight-year-old Crystal, a tufted capuchin, born in Argentina, whose screen career began in George of the Jungle (1997) and who has her own Wikipedia page.  This Hollywood veteran is the one contributor to The Fabelmans not to be overawed by the responsibility of commemorating Steven Spielberg.

1 February 2023