Spielberg Looks Back: Through a Motion Picture Glass Clearly

I’ve been busy. The past couple of weeks, I’ve been working on an article/essay about Anna May Wong in light of the issuing of a U.S. quarter in her honor. If the piece doesn’t run, I’ll publish it here most likely.

However, that isn’t to say that I haven’t been to the movies.

There have been some very good to remarkable/stunning films out in the past couple of weeks and I want to do some kind of justice to them.

Where to begin?

Oh, let’s start with a film that isn’t so thematically distinct from “Armageddon Time” in terms of being a reflection on coming of age from the kid’s point of view. The difference here is that where “Armageddon Time” - like “The Fabelmans” - revolves around a young dreamer who would become a filmmaker, the filmmaker at the center of “The Fabelmans” is Steven Spielberg. (No slight to James Gray, by the way, but Big Steve is, after all, Big Steve.)

The first element that hit me about Spielberg’s latest is what was wasn’t there. This has to be on of his more clear-eyed and less sentimental films and I was surprised. I was very surprised because the trailer seemed to be pointing us in the direction of the shmaltzy Spielberg. 

There is, of course, some sentiment, but I’d rather characterize it as adult nostalgia and not necessarily viewed with rose-colored lenses. If “The Fabelmans” shares DNA with another of his films, I feel it’s more of a piece with “Empire of the Sun”, his adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s semi-autobiographical novel and what I consider Spielberg’s first real “grown-up” film. Like the earlier film, “The Fabelmans” is straightforward in viewing its protagonist as a child whose safe haven is cinema; a haven that would become in due course, a medium for dealing with the conflicts in his world as much as a form of expression that would eventually flower into greatness. 

That last bit is not in the film. We follow the fledgling Sam Fabelman from a filmic child prodigy to a masterful teenager who pays homage and partial debt off to John Ford (who shows up later in the film). 

I really don’t know how much of this is fiction and how much is autobiographical fact, but I am familiar enough with Spielberg’s biography to spot the points of departure and while this film has been touted as a form of self-analysis, it speaks or should speak to everyone who has a complicated relationship with their art and the demands it makes on the artist and those in his circle. 

As a little kid, Sammy (played by Mateo Zoryan who conveys an intelligence beyond the single digit years) discovers the power of film to exorcise the demons that haunt him after a family outing to see Cecil B. DeMille’s “The Greatest Show on Earth”. No doubt, the family thought that it would be a light little flick about the circus and - spoiler - it is so much more. And it ain’t light. The train crash left its mark on Sammy and to both counter and control its hold on his imagination, Sammy recreates it with a small 8mm home movie camera with his mother’s help. 

Two things enter the foreground with that re-enactment. One is Mitzi Fabelman’s support of Sammy’s talents and dreams and the second is the foreshadowing of the eventual rift between Mitzi and her husband Burt. The restraint Spielberg employs is more than admirable; you don’t really sense anything of what is to come, but after a little reflection, it becomes obvious where the conflict is going to go.

Michelle Williams is a force of nature as Mitzi and she’s so fine an actor that what would be idiotic bombast in lesser hands reads as genuine pathos and eventually, the tragedy of dreams unrealized and channelled into areas domestic and status as, if not second place, relegated to second place in the pecking order of fifties America’s family life. Paul Dano as Burt may never have been better; he manages to be perplexed, if not out of his depth emotionally, but maintains a slow burn of not being listened to throughout the film. Both of them turn in nuanced, heart-wrenching performances, refreshingly free of melodrama but not bereft of wit and an ironclad grasp of the ironies of what the world has imposed on them. All of this is owing to Kushner’s script. 

From “Munich” to “Lincoln” to “West Side Story”, Kushner has provided Spielberg with fleshed out characters in stories that could easily overwhelm the human aspects of everyone in those films. There is a part of me that thinks of Kushner as John Lennon to Spielberg’s McCartney and I really don’t know that that’s so (or fair), but Kushner remains one of our greatest playwrights and if nothing else, knows how people relate to one another. He also knows a good turn of phrase that doesn’t sound like it was positioned in a script just to be recognized as such. People talk to each other like human beings. Odd, that.

As Sammy grows into Sam as a teenager, we are introduced in the same measure to the trials of encountering the onset of adolescence and its attendant issues and confusions. He approaches filmmaking with greater assurance and at the same time, discovers his mother’s infidelity through assembling a short film about a family vacation. It’s a nod to Antonioni, for sure, but it also encapsulates what cinema means to Spielberg.

Film can uncover truths, even particularly devastating ones, and Sam’s reaction to this is to bottle up what he sees and push the evidence both on celluloid and in his heart, down deep. Not deep enough, since his anger at his mother erupts often enough to make her miserable. When he does finally confront her, and show her what he knows, the release isn’t cathartic. Spielberg doesn’t let anyone off the hook and it’s clear that Burt and Mitzi are done.

In the meantime, as though to continue complicating Sam’s life, is the knowledge that Mitzi’s affair was carried on with his dad’s best friend Bennie. Seth Rogan is practically unrecognizable but never better as both the best friend, supportive uncle, and well, discreet lover. 

Burt hired Bennie when he was an engineer/manager at GE in Arizona but once offered a job at IBM’s Bay Area offices in California, necessitating a move, has to make it clear to Mitzi that Bennie can’t come on the move with them; there is no place for Bennie on the team and he’d frankly be out of his element. Mitzi’s unhappiness and sadness at the separation is obvious and underscored with an increasing neurosis; but again, nothing that is brought to some operatic pitch. 

If there is a slight weak spot and really, this is only a quibble on my part, it’s that she is given the task of actually stating the various themes throughout the film; the dichotomy of scientists versus artists in the family (and how Sammy is on her side; already letting us know of where this going), her defense of Sam to her husband and support of his filmmaking; and her isolation from the wider world and unhappiness of being separated from Bennie are stated in varying degrees of obviousness. But such is the strength of Williams’ performance that it all feels organic.

Of course, adolescence is no one’s idea of a good time and Sam deals with bullying and antisemitism at his new school and his resentment at his father boils over to a just-below fever pitch. By this point, Sam is played by Gabriel LaBelle, and he frankly holds his own beyond expectation. It’s not just a winning performance; he captures the confusion of a kid in a rapidly changing world (both in terms of family dynamic and expectations and what confronts him on a daily basis in school among his contemporaries). I don’t know how autobiographical it is, but his relationship with a conservative Christian girl who gets him to verbally accept Jesus into his heart is played relatively straight because, frankly, the humor of the scenario does the work. Chloe East plays Monica with a combination of goodwill, hots for her Jewish boy, and the awareness that their relationship is only for the duration of the school year until graduation. Is she oblivious to his feelings? No, I think she knows how he feels, but she also knows that graduation is where it ends. 

I’d also be remiss if I didn’t mention Judd Hirsch showing up on the scene as Uncle Boris after Mitzi’s mother dies. It comes within a gnat’s eyebrow of ham; but Hirsch is too skilled to let Boris descend into the maudlin or the buffoon. As Mitzi’s brother, he adds another dimension to the dreams she left behind and while I’m thinking about it, he does get saddled with a line that does kind of border on the obvious: “Family, art. It will tear you in two!” Out of context, it reads as so stage-y and too on the nose; in the context of the character, it sounds perfectly natural (I’ve known my share of Uncle Borises, God bless ‘em.)

We don’t get nearly enough time with Sam’s sisters, and that makes sense; teenagers, particularly boys, rarely pay attention to relationships outside their own limited purview. If it doesn’t immediately affect him, the kid isn’t going to pay too much attention and once those teen years descend, the horizon contracts to just what’s before you that interests you and everything else? Well, what else is there except me? Which is why, when Sam’s sister Reggie calls him out for his anger at his mother and his self-involvement, it is a well-timed course correction for our hero. 

Until Reggie asserts herself and steps in, we get that the siblings all get along reasonably well but his sister, the second oldest after him, comes into sharp focus with Julia Butters’ brief time on screen (after her turn in “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood…”, it’s pleasure to see her stealing another scene). The sequence where Sam asks Reggie to watch the footage of a high school outing at the beach with him is a moment of gentle stillness and depth. It’s not a showy turn by either actor or Spielberg; it’s just honest.

In fact, there isn’t a lot of showiness anywhere in the movie, really. There are some great set-ups and the great (and I do mean “great”) Janusz Kaminski frames each segment as masterfully as anything he’s done (and considering he’s been Spielberg’s cinematographer as choice since “Schindler’s List”, this is saying something but it’s kinda to be expected, right?) Between Spielberg and Kaminski, Sam’s point of view is never lost; we are inside Sam’s confusion, his emotional turmoil, and his triumphs; indeed, he wins over (sort of), one of his bullies by casting the kid in a ridiculously heroic light (had Spielberg seen Riefenstahl’s “Triumph of the Will” by this time?) 

Sam Rechner’s Logan is a jerk, to be sure, but he’s given enough by Spielberg and Kushner to come across as a not-entirely-an-idiot. He’s reflective or self aware enough that he recognizes that he’s not the guy Sam Fabelman made him out to be on film. That’s something. “Real life isn’t like the movies, Fabelman”, he tells Sam. He’s not wrong; but Sam is about to go on and figure out what life and the movies mean. 

Sam Fabelman apparently moves with his dad to Los Angeles and pretty much explains to his father that he doesn’t want to go to college. He’s tried, it’s really not for him and while he recognizes his dad’s going to be disappointed, can he see his way to understand that? And here’s where Dano delivers (again). It’s a small moment of a father telling his son that regardless of his choices, he believes in him. He knows Sam will be okay because he knows the kid works hard and though he doesn’t say as much, you get the idea that Burt understands what the medium means to his son. 

There are two other pivotal scenes in the film that anchor the middle movement and clinch the end. Bennie is at a pawn shop where Sam is selling off his camera and by this point, Sam knows of Bennie and Mitzi’s affair and has had enough. His camera captured a truth that wrecked him; a truth that is wrecking the family (though they don’t know it yet). Bennie tells Sam that giving up his filmmaking, his art, will break her heart. I really wanted, by the way, for there to be a better resolution for Bennie, but it would have been fake if there were one. That said, Sam while refusing Bennie’s gift, makes him take the $35 Sam got for his old camera. As Bennie drives away, Sam discovers the money back in his pockets. This could have been played - like much else in the film - for sap, but it pays off in establishing how much Sam’s gift meant to the people in his life.

Even his father. At no point during the film do we see Burt Fabelman embrace Sam’s filmmaking as anything more than a hobby. Not until the end, and even then, you sense a grudging acceptance more than the barest enthusiastic support. Which brings us to Sam getting an interview at a studio as an assistant with a studio executive who asks him straight up in light of Sam’s stated desire to be a movie director, why he wants to take a PA job on a TV show. Sam says he’s fine with starting at the bottom. Then the exec walks him over to an office. It’s a slow, unforced reveal of David Lynch playing John Ford (yeah, yeah, I just about laughed a bit too loud when Lynch shows up) and it’s beautifully played as Ford asks Fabelman about art. He has him look at two paintings from the old West (both are Remingtons, if memory serves) and asks Sam to describe what he sees.

Sam starts to describe the placement of the figures in the canvas, that they’re looking for something, and Ford interrupts him to ask him about where the horizon is in one, then the other.

“When the horizon is that top, it’s interesting. When it’s on the bottom, it’s interesting. When it’s in the middle, it’s boring. Got it?” To which Sam replies, “yes, sir”. Ford doesn’t look at Sam (like he would). 

“Good luck to you. Now get the fuck out of my office.” 

I really hope that happened. 

We close on Sam pretty much skipping like Pinocchio down an alleyway among the studios buildings and even then, I was impressed that I didn’t feel some manipulated sense of giddy optimism; I walked away with a feeling of the immense amount of work that faced this kid who would (perhaps) grow up to be Steven Spielberg (or Sam Fabelman who would go onto be a major director…or not? This is autobiographical fiction, so is it fair to impose a conclusion on story that ends at the beginning?)