Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Steven Spielberg
Starring: Gabriel LaBelle, Michelle Williams, Paul Dano, Seth Rogen, Judd Hirsch, Julia Butters,
Jeannie Berlin
When asked if she would ever write an autobiography, the critic Pauline
Kael's response was that to do so would be redundant as the thousands of
film reviews she had penned essentially constituted a biography. If a
filmmaker is in the privileged and now all too rare position of being
able to make the movies they actually want to make, they'll leave behind
a body of work that will serve as a biography of sorts.
Steven Spielberg is one of the few mainstream filmmakers who
found himself in such an envious position, and his life can be found in
his work. If you want to learn about Spielberg's mother, watch
Close Encounters. If you want to learn about his father, watch E.T. If you want to learn about Spielberg's early life as a young genius,
watch Catch Me if You Can. Ironically, those three movies will tell you more about Steve and his
parents than The Fabelmans, which serves as an auto-biopic of the great director's youth, the
story of how Steven Spielberg became Spielberg.
Young Steven is represented here by Sammy Fabelman, whose parents –
Burt (Paul Dano) the engineer and Mitzi (Michelle Williams) the pianist – represent the two sides of Spielberg the filmmaker, the
innovator who advances his form while never losing sight of humanity (at
least that's the generous view of Spielberg). We meet young Sammy in
1952 as Burt and Mitzi take him to see
The Greatest Show on Earth, his first trip to the cinema. The kid experiences something akin to a
spiritual awakening and is particularly affected by the movie's train
crash scene. Wishing to recreate the spectacle, he talks his Dad into
buying him a train set, which he insists on crashing. Left-brained Burt
can't understand what's up with the kid, but right-brained Mom sees
artistic potential and purchases Sammy his first camera, which he uses
to film his own train crash.
Sammy doesn't just set up the camera and shoot the crash – he employs
multiple camera setups. It's at this early point that we're forced to
call bullshit on Spielberg's recollections of his own prodigious
talents. We're supposed to believe that a kid who just saw his first
movie already understands the concept of editing?
The Fabelmans continues to be something of a masturbatory
ego trip as Sammy enters school and starts to shoot movies that look as
technically impressive as anything coming out of Hollywood at the time.
I'm sure the movies Spielberg shot as a teen were hugely impressive, but
they weren't lit by Janusz Kaminski. If Spielberg is so impressed
by his own early work why didn't he just use the real movies here rather
than hiding them away in a vault, as is the case in real life? Real life
isn't enough for Spielberg; everything must be heightened, exaggerated,
over the top. In his best work, Spielberg made life big, but too often
he tries to make his movies bigger than life. It's okay if your teen
movies were amateurish Steve, you were a kid. They don't have to look
like they were made by Sergio Leone to impress us.
Spielberg was the first filmmaker to popularise the idea of the Special
Edition with his rerelease of Close Encounters. That version of the movie – which added pointless footage of Richard
Dreyfuss aboard the alien craft – was an early indication that Spielberg
either doesn't understand what makes him such a great filmmaker or he
doesn't have faith in his audience to grasp a concept unless he hits us
over the head with it. By taking us inside the alien spaceship,
Spielberg diluted much of the magic of that film's ending, and it's now
widely held that the best version of
Close Encounters isn't the Special Edition or even his
later director's cut, but the original theatrical cut. Back then there
were still people in Hollywood who were bigger than Spielberg, who could
rein in his worst tendencies, but those days are long gone and now every
Spielberg movie is a Special Edition.
With The Fabelmans, Spielberg gives his own life a Special Edition. Spielberg is Han Solo
and everyone else is Greedo, and this time Greedo shoots first. Any
rough edges of Spielberg's youth have been sanded off. We don't really
learn anything about him other than he's a genius (and a great kisser
apparently!). We don't learn much about his parents because they're such
one-note portrayals of the archetypal cold, logical father and the too
beautiful for this world, away with the fairies mother.
The Fabelmans is The Tree of Life for
dummies. With that movie, Terence Malick was honest in his
recollections, or lack thereof, of his childhood and his parents, and as
such his film has a dreamlike quality where no easy answers are given.
Not so here. You get the sense that this is Spielberg rewriting his
youth rather than recollecting it. When he enters a Californian high
school and encounters anti-semitism, none of it rings true. I don't
doubt Spielberg experienced religious bigotry but I very much doubt it
was at the hands of cartoonish jocks who seem to have stepped out of a
1960s comic book (one of them is call Chad, I shit you not!). Is this
Spielberg's recollection of his childhood or of the Spider-Man comics he
read? Is Chad a real-life figure or is he confusing him with Flash
Thompson? Did he really get his first taste of bigotry in California,
after growing up in...Arizona?
Spielberg's critics often argue that his work feels like the product of
someone who has no life experience outside of cinema. That's an idiotic
notion, one easily dispelled by watching most of his movies. And yet
with The Fabelmans Spielberg almost seems to hold his
hands up to such accusations. Sammy discovers his mother is having an
affair with a family friend (Seth Rogen) through a
Blow-Up/Blowout inspired sequence in which he notices her
interactions with her secret lover while cutting together a home movie.
Spielberg appears to be confessing that he pays more attention to the
screen than to the people around him. How could Sammy not have noticed
any of this before? After all, he was the one filming all this.
Things started to really go downhill for Spielberg when he began
collaborating with Tony Kushner, an acclaimed playwright who has
demonstrated no evidence that he understands how movies work.
Spielberg's films have become overwritten, verbose and preachy.
Kushner's clunky words often negate Spielberg's effective images. Here's
an example from The Fabelmans: After that early cinema trip, the family return to their
neighbourhood, where their house lies in darkness at the end of a street
otherwise decked out in garish Christmas lights. This is visual
storytelling, a way of showing us that the Fabelmans are the only Jewish
family on the street – it's what Spielberg has done his whole career.
But that moment doesn't work as it should because prior to it we get a
pointless piece of dialogue between Sammy and his parents that tells us
their house is the only one on the street without Christmas lights
because they're Jewish. Spielberg relies too heavily on Kushner to
elaborate on his film's themes, with characters delivering the sort of
emotional monologues that would have been thrown out of the
Dawson's Creek writer's room for being too on-the-nose.
Just in case we didn't understand the conflict Sammy feels between
following his filmmaking dreams and making his Dad proud,
Judd Hirsch turns up as a gruff family relative, arriving with a
suitcase full of exposition and laying it all out for us. Later, Sammy's
younger sister similarly sums up the family dynamic in a speech no
12-year-old ever would ever come up with. What's going on here?
Spielberg is the last filmmaker that needs to have the concept of "show,
don't tell" explained to him, so why would he allow such anti-cinematic
storytelling in his movie? Does Kushner have some damning evidence on
the director?
Kushner isn't the only detrimental collaborator here. In the past,
Spielberg would select specific cinematographers for specific projects
but ever since 1993's Schindler's List, he's stuck with Janusz Kaminski, a DoP who lights every movie as if
it's a thriller. Once again, Kaminski is an odd fit for
The Fabelmans – why does a 1960s set coming-of-age movie
look like a thriller from 2003? Spielberg's greatest collaborator is of
course the composer John Williams, but too often the director
uses Williams as a hammer. Once again Williams' music tells us how to
feel in every scene, as though Spielberg has no confidence in his own
ability to communicate ideas. But I guess if someone writes you the
themes for Jaws and Indiana Jones it's hard to let them
go.
At two and a half hours, The Fabelmans is tough going, a
lot like watching your rich neighbour's holiday footage if they had
brought a professional cinematographer on holiday. It's worth sticking
it out for a wonderful final scene involving one great filmmaker playing
another, capped off by the sort of visual gag that suggests Spielberg
still knows a thing or two about how to use a camera to provoke a
response from an audience. It sends us out on a high, but it's an ending
the film hasn't remotely earned.
