Cinema vanité

Spielberg comes of age in The Fabelmans

[The Oscars are on Sunday and I’m on the home stretch of my annual review of the Best Picture nominees! So far I’ve done Everything Everywhere All At Once, Avatar: The Way of Water, All Quiet on the Western Front, Women Talking, Elvis, The Banshees of Inisherin, Tar, Triangle of Sadness, and now this…]

OK, guys I got ‘em all down except for the Tom Cruise movie, and I’ll get to that before I write my Oscar predictions on Sunday afternoon. I’ll send you a note when that’s ready and you can check my score during the show.

It’s been, and remains, a busy week, so it’s a lucky thing for me that there isn’t much to say about The Fabelmans. I’ve enjoyed a lot of Spielberg movies without ever becoming a fan. I note with interest critics now seem to go easier on him than they used to — I remember when, after his fun run of big adventure movies finished, only hack reviewers and Armond White were taking him seriously. White, having gone nuts, now attacks Spielberg for having hooked up with Tony Kushner and gone full libtard, though I think Kushner gave Spielberg some ballast that keeps his otherwise insubstantial movies from floating away.  (Spielberg’s no dummy and knows the great old-timers like Ford and Wilder stuck with writers when they knew they were good.)

Kushner is on board for The Fabelmans, too, a coming-of-age story clearly based on Spielberg’s own life, but one of the film’s only surprises is that Kushner’s influence is so little felt, except in a few conversations that are a bit heavy for the story. Spielberg seems to think his striving as a young film nut and child of divorce is sufficient grounding for a two hour plus movie. It never drags, but at intervals I questioned the necessity.

Our boychik is Sam. We see him first as a six-year-old, mesmerized and slightly traumatized at a showing of The Greatest Show on Earth, so enamored of the train crash scene that he repeatedly and destructively recreates it with his model train. Mom, intuiting something about the boy we already know because he’s Steven fucking Spielberg, lets him use Dad’s home movie camera to film the H&O wreck so he never has to wreck it again. The boy, to Mom’s delight and Dad’s chagrin, goes movie-mad; he drapes his sisters in toilet paper to remake a mummy picture and gets his buddies to play cowboys and Indians for the camera. Eventually he’s doing bigger things with bigger cameras, and in some ways his filmmaking directly affects his life — it causes him to really observe, for example, his family and their friends through patient study of home movie footage (sort of Harry Caul: The Prequel!); in high school his heroic filming of the school bully makes the bully break down and even be friendly to him. Then, on to Hollywood!

Sam’s film jones is a lot of the movie, and frankly, given the relatively privileged middle class milieu and the pre-ordained success story we know comes after the credits, I was not exactly on the edge of my seat, and I was even a little offended that Spielberg and Kushner, who probably felt the same way, cooked up a conflict whereby, when the kids parents’ marriage goes on the rocks, the kid decides to forsake filmmaking — until his apparently first girlfriend turns out to have a father with some really primo equipment… well, let me just say that a highly amusing David Lynch cameo as John Ford happens at the end, but I would have advised Spielberg to instead have, in the girlfriend’s place, Ford appear as a ghost to Sam and tell him to quit mooning and go out there and make some goddamn movies.

More interesting than Sam are his parents: Genius engineer father Burt — amiable if a bit watery, excited by ideas but keenly aware of his limitations — and ex-artist mother Mitzi, who put away her career but never her affinities; vivid, demonstrative, prone to sudden singing and dancing, slightly tempestuous but never unkind.  As written these two are a bit stagey and undercooked, but the actors make a little more of them. Dad hardly raises his voice, and expresses his bigger feelings by subterfuge, as with his recollection of a dream he “can’t believe” he dreamed where he attacked a friend who he knows betrayed him or, as he cheerfully puts it, “hauled off and socked him right in the nose.” One imagines with dread, say, Michael Shannon saying this, but round-faced Paul Dano actually looks and sounds like the kind of fellow whose resolve to not rock the boat runs so deep that he can get through a lifetime of this without going nuts (though he does show deep wells of softer feelings such as regret).

Mom clearly has issues. When (spoiler, sort of) the family moves from Arizona to California at least partly to keep her relationship with a family friend from going too far, she brings a completely untrained monkey into the house and names it after him. If Mom evinces none of the more dramatic neuroses that women in this position usually get in movies, it’s mainly because Michelle Williams insists on her dignity. Her need for that is spelled out, disappointingly, in a Kushnereque speech near the end of the picture (“without him I’m turning into someone I don’t know, and none of you will know me anymore,” omigod), but by then Williams has already shown it by her conscious and careful sublimation that allows her to have a personality with just some inappropriate parts left blank — except when she justifiably gets really mad.

Good effort, but I am very willing to believe Spielberg simply couldn’t own up to the mess his parents were — or that they weren’t a mess and he had to gin it up. Sam isn’t much, either, though I really liked Gabriel LaBelle, who not only has Spielberg’s nebbishy manner (a charismatic, camera-ready version, of course) but even his vocal patterns. Judd Hirsch pops in for a celebrated cameo as a mysterious uncle with a lot to say about art, life, and family, and let’s just say Hirsch deserves the kudos just for keeping me from throwing up. There are some nice scenes and moments throughout —  the death of Mitzi’s mom, with Sam noticing the vein in her neck ceasing to pulse; Burt’s mournful marriage reverie, with his shadow on the wall behind like a ghost; Sam getting worked up describing a character’s trauma to the seemingly clueless young dude who has to play him and the dude actually getting it by osmosis. But by and large, A Song to Remember it ain’t.