the fabelmans

This is a guest review by Joe Frankel, who is a filmmaker, teacher and founder of Imaginary Courtyard content agency in Toronto.  He is also one half of the writing team that co-created the animated comedy series STEVE GUTTENBERG: FRENCHMAN (currently in development at SSS Entertainment).  The other half is Bill. (EDITOR'S NOTE​: That's me!)

The Fabelmans: A Spielberg movie about Spielberg… and movies
Steven Spielberg was the youngest director to ever be offered a contract at a major studio, but unlike the other 1970s movie brats he’s typically lumped in with (Coppola, De Palma, Scorsese, Lucas) he was an autodidact.  Not only did he not go to film school, he was rejected from film school despite his peerless and preternatural ability to tell stories with a movie camera.  Since this is my first guest blog on Pop (very excited) I will confess, for anyone who doesn’t already know, that I think Spielberg is the single greatest director of all time.  When I was 13, I cut school to see the first showing of Jurassic Park at my local multiplex.  That same year my dad took me to see Schindler’s List and something exploded in my brain -- an ah-ha moment that I couldn’t fully make sense of.  I knew I wanted to make movies.  I had already known that prior to seeing those two films, but what I couldn’t figure out was how two such entirely different movies could have been directed by the same person – and released in the same year to boot.  As I followed the rabbit hole deeper, I realized there was more to the story.  It turned out that Spielberg had in fact directed (or in the case of Back To The Future, The Goonies, Harry and the Hendersons and Who Framed Roger Rabbit, produced) most of the defining movies of my childhood including: Jaws, the Indiana Jones trilogy and E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial – and when I lined up our respective biographies I further discovered that we had a lot in common – but a lot of people will feel that way watching Steven Spielberg’s semi-autobiographical movie, The Fabelmans.

One of the most pleasurable aspects of watching the movie is seeing yourself in it as you get immersed in the family story of Sammy (Spielberg’s alter-ego played mostly by brilliant newcomer Gabriel LaBelle), his mother Mitzi (a gifted and artistically frustrated pianist played to the nines by Michelle Williams), his father Burt (a sweet but emotionally stunted computer programmer played by Paul Dano) and his uncle Benny (the man his mother ultimately left his father for, played winningly by Seth Rogen changing gears).  The supporting players who round out the family could be ripped from your own home movies, but what’s especially thrilling about The Fabelmans is knowing where it’s going – because this isn’t just an ordinary family story.  This is the story of how the most successful filmmaker in movie history became the most successful filmmaker in movie history… and knowing that makes watching it uniquely fascinating.
 
On one level, because it has been billed as “semi-autobiographical,” it plays like a beguiling mystery that challenges anyone with even a passing interest in Spielberg to guess which of the (sometimes mundane, often remarkable) episodes in the loosely-structured script (co-written by Spielberg and Tony Kushner) are actually real.  The movie is loaded with throwaway anecdotal moments that feel strange but true.  Like the moment when Mitzi takes Sammy and his sisters out in a storm to chase (rather than flee) an active tornado, while dodging electrical explosions and a row of shopping carts rolling innocuously down the street.  Or the scene where Mitzi performs an impromptu piano solo for the whole family that is undermined by the sound of her long, manicured nails tapping on the keys.  Or the time when Burt comes home and learns that Mitzi has purchased a pet monkey to inject some welcome chaos into their lives.  These are the kinds of indelible details that stick in the memory and have come to define a Spielberg movie – only this time we know they are his actual memories. In contrast to such familiarly succinct visual shorthand, Mitzi is that elusive rarity in a Spielberg film: a vital, nuanced female character.  The fact that she’s inspired by Spielberg’s own mother goes a long way towards connecting the dots regarding why he’s struggled in the past to make sense of his female characters.  If the movie is to be believed, his young life was dominated by a mother who was a confidante and kindred spirit, but also a destabilizing presence – and according to Spielberg and Kushner all of the major events in the film are true.

The Fabelmans is therefore one of the most nakedly confessional projects ever produced by a Hollywood filmmaker.  One that takes a surprisingly tart and unvarnished view of the single most traumatic event in young Steven Spielberg’s life: the divorce of his parents.  Spielberg has flirted with telling versions of this story before.  Broken families have been a staple of even his most lightweight films for most of his 50+ year career and here he lays out several of his most painful and personal experiences directly for mass-consumption.  But what’s even more remarkable about The Fabelmans than its confessional aspects is how palpably it evokes the wonder of cinema during this moment -- a cultural moment when movies and the shared experience of watching them in a darkened theatre risk becoming obsolete.  It marks what is arguably the first time in Spielberg’s entire career when he’s actively working against the zeitgeist… and yet the movie is a guaranteed crowd-pleaser.
 
The audience that I first saw it with at TIFF in September voted to give it the People’s Choice award and you don’t have to be a filmmaker or cinephile to relate to Spielberg’s story or how it felt to be him as a young, budding director because he brings the experience to life with all of the brilliance and emotional clarity of… well… a Steven Spielberg film.  The movie transcends the kind of clichéd reverence that typically informs these kinds of stories.  There is an infectious, boyish exuberance to Sammy’s movie love as he co-opts his friends in the boy scouts to help him make his own homegrown westerns and unlike the protagonists of other more straight-faced love letters to the cinema like Truffaut’s Day For Night, Tornatore’s Cinema Paradiso or Scorsese’s Hugo, Sammy/Spielberg doesn’t fall in love with movies overnight.  The first movie he sees in a theatre (specifically the train crash in Cecil B. DeMille’s The Greatest Show on Earth) traumatizes him and he proceeds to smash up his toy trains and film them in order to recreate what he saw and conquer his fears.
 
The movie makes further use of the specifics of Spielberg’s life to show us with a surprising lack of sentiment how filmmaking became not just a vocation but also a means of escaping and gaining control over the pervasive tensions in his life.  In this sense, Sammy’s relationship to cinema is sometimes surprisingly ambivalent.  Filmmaking provides him with an outlet, but it also often backfires in his face.  It’s while he’s stitching together the home movie footage from a family camping trip (in a stunning sequence that plays like Blow Out meets The Ice Storm), that Sammy discovers his mother and his uncle Benny are having an affair – the footage reveals this to him.  In another bravura sequence at Sammy’s high school prom, Sammy screens a mythical “ditch day video” that wins a standing ovation from his graduating class and transforms the antisemitic bully who has made his life miserable into a bona fide Hollywood-esque sports hero.
   
Sammy doesn’t always understand what drives him, but Spielberg and Kushner do and there’s real depth in how they unpack his psyche.  You can’t help but admire the power of movies through his eyes and by the time the final scene rolls around (which is the stuff of dreams and yet all allegedly true save for a few minor embellishments) you will be delighted to witness the lecture young Sammy receives at the hands of a legendary filmmaker regarding how to frame an “interesting” shot.  (The crusty old-school filmmaker in question is portrayed by yet another legendary and unlikely filmmaker who is arguably the finest choice of any living person who could have been cast in the role.)  Feeding off of this, the final shot of the movie is the rare instance in all of Spielberg’s films where he consciously tips his hand to direct your attention to him, as the director.  It will send you out of the theatre smiling and wanting to curl up in bed with a movie camera the way Sammy does in deference to all of those legendary baseball players who slept with gloves under their pillows.  At least, that’s how I felt.