The Fabelmans

dir: Steven Spielberg

2022

It’s kinda funny that the most successful director of all time has been kvetching and nervy about making a film about his own life for over two decades.

Most directors might incorporate autobiographical elements into their screenplays, especially someone who’s made as many films as Spielberg, thus obviating the need to maybe have to do their own biopics, but, really, there probably isn’t anyone that should have to talk Senor Spielbergo out of anything.

Both Spielberg, and Spielbergo, his non-union Mexican equivalent, have done enough for both cinema in general and the film industry specifically. He should get the chance to shine whatever light he wants on his own origin story. It’s only fair.

It doesn’t necessarily make it that interesting for viewers. For all his achievements, his life story isn’t interesting, perhaps not as interesting as his achievements. It’s, like, the average stuff of life, told with Technicolor brightness and bland, shiny perfection.

But he’s a person, he grew up, he experienced stuff. He had parents. He has sisters. Things happened.

He, being Sammy (Gabriel LaBelle) in this version, became obsessed with cinema after watching a train crash when his parents took him to see The Greatest Show on Earth. As a nervous, fearful child, recording a toy train crashing over and over again allowed him to feel in control for the first time in his life.

How do I know this? Because Sammy’s mum Mitzi (Michelle Williams) specifically sets it out for us, telling her husband (Paul Dano) that it must be the case like the dime store psychologist that she is.

Sammy is off and away, obsessed with movies and movie-making now, to the detriment of any other human relationships around him, but other people aren’t as film obsessed. They’re more fixated on life and love and … that’s about it.

The dad is completely dismissive of his son’s hobby, as he calls it, and it becomes, at least for me, a hilarious illustration of certain parents and their expectations, and how they can never be satisfied.

In real life his dad was called Arnold, but in the flick he’s called Burt Fabelman. You can imagine in life that even later on once his son conquered the world of cinema, if he ever introduced himself to people, and they would ask if he was related to Steven Spielberg, and he replied in the affirmative, you can imagine people going berserk with praise.

And then you can imagine Burt / Arnold muttering, “yeah, but still he’s no doctor.”

Burt is a stoic, serious man, for a serious world. He’s seen the future, and it’s computers. He’s going to change the world one valve or microchip at a time. Yet his wife, a classical pianist and thwarted artist, is his diametric emotional and intellectual opposite.

He has exactly one friend, called Bennie (Seth Rogen), who insists the kids call him Uncle Bennie, which they are disinclined to do at first, and who is always around. He is always fucking around.

I wonder if Sammy, who films obsessively during a family camping trip, trying to control everything with his camera, will capture anything that freaks him out and changes everyone’s world?

The family moves, and moves again, and moves again, and Bennie follows the first couple of times. Sammy gets older, and more morose, especially once he gets to California, where the Fabelmans are shrunken Hebrews in the land of the tall goyim.

Did I mention that the Fabelmans are Jewish? Their ethnic identity means far more to them than the religious aspect, though they only really seem to become outsiders once they get to California.

It’s here where anti-Semitism, at school, rears its ugly head. Also, this seems to coincide with Sammy’s increasing love for the goyim and their blonde, Aryan ways. Though he is verbally abused by one jerk, it’s the school captain guy who really attracts his interest in ways that are too complex for me to really tease apart, and not something Spielberg is able to articulate in anything other than the movies that he makes to express his admiration.

It really is the strangest thing that after being punched in the nose and threatened with further violence, Sammy makes a film about this guy Logan (Sam Rechner), borrowing from Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia, that makes him look every bit the blonde god that he must be. An audience of teens watching it completely get what Sammy was trying to do, but Logan sees it as something else. Something very much else, even as it affirms to the clods that he’s way better than the rest of them, and convinces his ex-girlfriend to come back to him despite his infidelity.

But he tells Sammy that Sammy has somehow taken something from him, possibly his soul. And that he’s never to do this again.

To which Sammy replies “unless I one day make a movie about it”.

This is a flick in which Spielbergo entirely thinks we’re in on the joke along with him. We’re watching young Sammy knowing that he will become one of the only directors almost everyone around the world knows by name (and not just by his mawkish, overly sentimental style), and he’s also the one back in the past that knows it too. Everyone else, though, is oblivious to his genius, to the way in which his movies will change the world, even as they are wowed by every single thing he does.

Other than his strange, almost homoerotic tension with Logan, there’s the strange pair of girls that are delighted by his exoticness, in being Jewish, despite their being fervent Christians. One of those girls fixates on him, but she’s fixated on her mythical blonde, blue-eyed Jesus as well, and she tries to somehow weirdly combine the two. She loves kissing Sammy, but she also loves loudly yelling at Jesus to enter her body. She is definitely the aggressor, but I honestly couldn’t tell if she was trying to seduce him for seduction’s sake, or whether she was putting out in order to convert him from Judaism to Christianity. Still, he doesn’t care as long as he gets to kiss the shikseh, and feel like maybe he can get by in WASP society.

And don’t even get me started on the terrifying Judd Hirsch cameo as old Uncle Boris, straight from the old country, serving up the heaviest Yiddish accent you’ve ever heard. I felt like I was so shocked I was going to drop my kugel into my gefilte fish, or vice versa.

It’s…a lot, but apparently all these strange vignettes are drawn from his actual life.

I have to believe that Spielberg remembers his own childhood, and remembers his parents well. He waited until they died before making the flick, so he at least had some semblance of shame.

I’m not implying his parents have anything to be ashamed about, but I can see why he wouldn’t have wanted them (especially his mum) to see themselves depicted like this onscreen.

Michelle Williams is a fine actor and has put in lots of great performances, but I thought her acting and the character as depicted here of Mitzi was terrible, is terrible. In between having her wildly swing between moods and screech that her artistic ambitions have been stifled her whole life, she does insane shit like buying a monkey or standing on a chair and screaming “I’ve finally decided to go to therapy” out of context in the midst of other people having an argument. She is a manic pixie dream girl mother, and it feels so incongruous and unlikely.

Relentlessly, painfully upbeat, when she discovers her son’s loathing of her for her perceived infidelity, she hits him but intensely regrets it, and it haunts her all her days.

Look, I like Seth Rogen well enough, but we never get to understand why Mitzi abandons her family in order to be with her one true love, who just happens to not be her husband. I can understand why she doesn’t want Burt. He’s cold, dull, and an overbearing bully, but he is depicted as an almost everyman, ever-disappointed ultra dad that could have stood in for anyone’s dad in the late 50s early 60s.

The films ends with an incredible anecdote that, again, doesn’t really connect with the rest of the flick, but is a great short movie in and of itself. An older Sammy is trying to get work in television, on the way to making his bones in the film industry, and thanks to a random meeting, is let in to the office of a legendary director, being John Ford(!) (David Lynch, David fucking Lynch). Sporting an eyepatch and glasses, he only yells commands at poor Sammy, who trembles in terror, and gives him a quick lesson in composition, as in where the horizon should be.

Before he screams at him to get the fuck out of his office. I laughed at that, but then even more at the very last shot, which has the cinematographer hastily move the camera to end on a visual gag in alignment with that anecdote.

That’s the flick it is. A few details from Spielberg’s life strung together that explains almost nothing about the man or about what has made him personally tick for these last 75 years, but it’s amusing enough because he’s letting us in on the joke, and showcasing his parents without making them look too bad.

I hope he enjoyed making it, and watching it. There probably isn’t that much there for anyone else here, but at least he’s happy with what he made.

7 times the Fabelmans are as American as guns and congestive heart failure out of 10

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“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. You are the biggest jerk I've ever met in my entire life. I have a monkey at home that's smarter than you! You dumb anti-Semitic asshole! I made you look like you could fly.” - The Fabelmans