(IMAGE: Universal Studios)
Universal Studios. 2022. Drama. 151 minutes.
THE FABELMANS is Steven Spielberg’s cagey autobiography–his portrait of the cinema artist as an awkward young man. It’s a fun, handsomely mounted piece of work that gains in importance from its adjunct status to one of the great pop culture careers of all time.
Because of the overt surface resonances to Spielberg’s life story, it would be easy to call THE FABELMANS Spielberg’s most personal film–easy, as well as incorrect. With his amazing blockbuster successes, Spielberg has often been reduced to a kind of cinematic theme park manager by critics and analysts. But he’s actually been embedding highly autobiographical statements within all the high concept, effects-driven razzamatazz from the start, and the personal stuff hides in plain sight.
I mean, have you actually watched CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND recently? Because that is the first film Spielberg had full creative control over, and it is one weird movie. It gets lumped with STAR WARS in blockbuster pop cult history because they basically came out on top of each other; they both have iconic John Williams scores; and together they formed the tip of a spear Hollywood immediately impaled itself on, by which big budget effects became the central preoccupation of American production capital.
But CLOSE ENCOUNTERS couldn’t be more different from STAR WARS in most respects. Its “first contact” scenario is real science fiction for one thing–no less an authority than Ray Bradbury called it the best science fiction film ever made. STAR WARS? There’s no science in it at all–just fiction. STAR WARS is also not predictive because it’s set “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away;” and it’s not even FLASH GORDON-grade space opera, because the metaphysical overlay of the Force brings magic into it, dropping the movie into the realm of fantasy cinema, where it adjoins Disney’s THE SWORD IN THE STONE and LORD OF THE RINGS somewhere on the timeline.
In case you’ve forgotten: the parallel storyline in CLOSE ENCOUNTERS is what FABELMANS is supposed to be: a searing examination of a family falling apart, highlighting the pain of divorce and what it does to children in ways THE FABELMANS doesn’t even consider. In CLOSE ENCOUNTERS, Roy and Ronnie Neary argue in front of the kids, they disregard each other’s feelings and concerns, and Ronnie, who is justifiably convinced her seeming madman of a husband is a danger to the children, takes off with her brood in a speeding station wagon–not with quiet pleas for understanding and an orderly transition, but with her bathrobe-clad husband clinging to the windshield of the family car.
The central parental couple in THE FABELMANS confronts things by repressing them. Paul Dano’s Burt functions in almost no other mode but repression, and Spielberg has made a fortuitous casting choice, because Dano consistently embodies that old cliche about still waters–his wounds, expressed through posture and hesitation, obviously run deep.
As Mitzi Fabelman, Michelle Williams has been asked to play in a kind of Auntie Mame brass register, because she’s the family artist. It works more often than not, but not in some of the big confessional scenes that are supposed to win Williams her Oscar, because we keep waiting for Mitzi to roll her eyes or stick out her tongue or one of the other mannerisms meant by Spielberg and his co-writer Tony Kushner to show she’s a free spirit who can’t be contained.
By contrast, Richard Dreyfuss’ Roy is in the grip of a compulsion–about alien encounters in the CLOSE ENCOUNTERS narrative, but in the real world it might be a mid-life yearning for adventure, or even a fixation on another woman, whom the movie suggests might be the single mom played by Melinda Dillon on the extraterrestrial sidelines. Here’s how the dynamic of breakage plays out in the Neary marriage, and what it does to the children, in a scene more painful than anything THE FABELMANS even attempts:
What’s powerful about that scene is how it remembers that children are essentially hostages in dramas scripted by adults. If their world ends because their mom and dad are at odds, they’re unlikely even to get a vote. It’s significant to note that Sammy Fabelman’s amateur attempt at feature filmmaking is quite directly a war movie Spielberg made as a teenager called “Escape to Nowhere.” Left out of the Fabelman narrative entirely is teenage Spielberg’s feature length 8mm UFO narrative FIRELIGHT–an at times shot-for-shot 1964 test run for what came to be called CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND.
In the end, Roy Neary rather disturbingly leaves his kids and his family behind him without a thought so he can go spacefaring, which is just the kind of lie (“My dad? Oh he’s on a secret mission to outer space…”) a sci-fi obsessed teenager like Steven Spielberg might have told himself to make it tolerable that one of his parents had gone. Spielberg calls Roy leaving his kids the creative choice he most regrets in CLOSE ENCOUNTERS, but it’s echoed in THE FABELMANS when Mitzi tells teenage Sammy that you don’t owe anybody your happiness–a dark interpretation of parental responsibility, although in neither film is it played that way.
THE FABELMANS is also a creation myth for Spielberg the filmmaker, whose creative vocation is plausibly depicted as a kind of therapy for all the things in life the child of a broken home can’t control. There’s a sophisticated and double-edged ruefulness in the way Sammy’s growing addiction to Super 8 moviemaking plays out, culminating in one of the most expressive shots ever from this visual master.
It comes in the scene where the Fabelmans tell their kids that mom and dad are going to separate. As the other children beg their parents not to wreck everything, Sammy catches his own reflection in a full-length mirror hanging on the wall behind them. Instead of seeing himself as he is–bewildered, guilt-ridden, confused–Sammy imagines himself filming the scene with his 8mm camera, dissociated by art from the central tragedy of his own life.
It’s a searing image of what makes Sammy run, but I prefer another Spielberg movie, where he made the same statement with more depth and detail, perhaps because he was standing behind the mask of another life. It’s my favorite Spielberg movie in fact, partly because it’s his frothiest, but mostly because it’s so deeply bio-imaged with the reality of his personal pain. That movie is the twenty year old “comedy” CATCH ME IF YOU CAN, ostensibly a biography of the serial con artist Frank Abagnale, a prodigy like Spielberg, who allegedly ran cons worth millions of dollars by posing as a Pan Am pilot, a doctor, and even a Secret Service agent–all before the age of 25.
In Spielberg’s retelling, Frank becomes a kind of compulsive storyteller, with each identity launching a fresh narrative, just the way creating a new movie does. He’s driven not by greed, but by the same thing driving Sammy Fabelman: the death of his parents’ marriage, which Frank Abagnale seems to think he can repair, using his narrative imagination and the cunning financial byproducts of his burgeoning wit and skill. Frank learns something important but in slow motion, as his lonely dad shrinks into a bittersweet old man and then dies unattended to, and as his mother moves on with another man, the way Spielberg’s own mom did in real life. The lesson is this: that some things just aren’t fixable, and that eventually, every Sammy grows too weary to run.
FABELMANS pays lip service to this idea in a quickie dialogue scene, where Sammy tells his high school girlfriend his parents’ marriage is over, and the girl tells him directly that you can’t fix everything. But it’s a rhetorical idea in THE FABELMANS; in CATCH ME IF YOU CAN, a movie where the central character doesn’t just feel like a fraud but actually is one, the brokenness of living is a knife in the heart that draws blood.
So, should you see THE FABELMANS? Of course you should. It isn’t Spielberg’s most powerful statement about his art, and it isn’t his most personal statement about his life. But it is that rarest thing is the cinema of family dysfunction: a genuine act of forgiveness.
The Spielberg who made this movie has gone on to a storied career. He has left a marriage and then found lasting happiness the second time around. He has raised children, and not without occasionally humiliating public consequences. He has been venerated and chastened a hundred times. Unlike the distraught inner child who so vividly expressed his pain through the puppet shows of CLOSE ENCOUNTERS and CATCH ME IF YOU CAN, Spielberg can look at his own life directly now, and he has become a man who sees all sides.
FABELMANS is a gentle film about existential pain. If it fails to display this filmmaker’s passion in quite the same way his past work does, it demonstrates more than a little about what it means to become wise.
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