“Movies are dreams, doll, that you never forget,” says Mrs. Fabelman (Michelle Williams). She’s circling the nature of them, which the critic Andre Bazin described when he called cinema “an image that is a reality of nature, namely, a hallucination that is also a fact.” He suggested that a filmmaker’s job is a process of preservation rather than creation. And Spielberg has always strived for empowerment through this process, using fictional realities to make childhood dreams real even when using impressions of history to communicate them. Yet in his later work, he has increasingly relied on keeping ideas of fantasy and reality separate (The BFG and Bridge of Spies could stand for the two sides of his perception of life, which were the same when he made E.T.). This distinction reveals a director who no longer uses film to search for truth but to justify it. With The Fabelmans, he may hope to rescue his canon from this contradiction, using his childhood as a spotlight.
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In Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Roy Neary defied the charade of his family life for his boyhood fantasies (John Williams even added the Pinocchio theme to the ship’s landing to validate the feeling). When E.T. accidentally gave Elliott the feeling that John Wayne had when Maureen O’Hara tried to go out into the storm in A Quiet Man, he rescued him from the hardship of his life with a love that he couldn’t define any more (or any less) than the love that’s in the movies. These are stories of re-empowerment, of Spielberg taking his anxieties as a Northerner in Arizona and California, as a Jewish man in America, and as a film director in a world of engineers, and giving it back to the lovely stuff he saw on the screen (and the boy who saw it there). By translating the worldview that has defined all 34 of his films to some degree into a literal corollary for his life, the 75-year-old director uses The Fabelmans to reinspect his cinema of re-empowerment with more than just dreams. He’s finally adapted its motive too.
“Movies are dreams, doll, that you never forget,” says Mrs. Fabelman (Michelle Williams). She’s circling the nature of them, which the critic Andre Bazin described when he called cinema “an image that is a reality of nature, namely, a hallucination that is also a fact.” He suggested that a filmmaker’s job is a process of preservation rather than creation. And Spielberg has always strived for empowerment through this process, using fictional realities to make childhood dreams real even when using impressions of history to communicate them. Yet in his later work, he has increasingly relied on keeping ideas of fantasy and reality separate (The BFG and Bridge of Spies could stand for the two sides of his perception of life, which were the same when he made E.T.). This distinction reveals a director who no longer uses film to search for truth but to justify it. With The Fabelmans, he may hope to rescue his canon from this contradiction, using his childhood as a spotlight.
The Fabelmans describes the magic of the cinema from the perspective of both dreams and logic without defending either point of view. Mr. Fabelman (Paul Dano) opens the film describing the movies in terms of their optic relevance as passionately as Mrs. Fabelman describes their feeling. The irony of this film as a work of magic is that the boy whose eyes widened in belief as the train wrecked in The Greatest Show on Earth wouldn’t be as moved by The Fabelmans as by E.T., which to him would have been a spiritual imperative. But as a work of logic, the screenplay by Spielberg and Tony Kushner admirably negotiates Spielberg’s lifetime using biopic beats that don’t resolve predictably. What kind of dream does it hope to make from these details? Mrs. Fabelman responds to a tornado by packing the kids into the car and speeding toward it; maybe Spielberg hoped the film would be like that. He’s been driving away from the storm for too long.
In contrast to the mom’s crazed support, Mr. Fabelman coos to his son to give up filmmaking for “something real, not imaginary. Something someone can actually use.” He’s the dad that Roy Neary never wanted to be, in a movie that seems like the kind of film that Mr. Fabelman would appreciate in comparison to many Spielberg films. And like Roy, Sam feels torn between his family and his dreams, a dichotomy established with manly certainty by his brusque Uncle Boris (Judd Hirsch), who pulls baked chicken apart with his hands and relates everything to his years as a lion tamer. In a rare act of restraint, Spielberg lets the audience wonder how right he is as he dissects the artist’s view of life with brutal self-reliance in his big bedroom monologue. As he speaks, the truth seems to shoot from his arms. It’s hard not to think of the director himself and how many times he has chosen his films over his reality. Not only did Roy leave his family for the stars, but Spielberg left his wife for his star during the filmmaking of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Even after 50 years, he has never divorced his movies.
Cinema may be an impractical illusion in The Fabelmans, but Sam (Gabriel LaBelle) soon learns how even a factual hallucination can shape people’s worldviews. He uncovers a dirty family secret through editing (if cinematography is the means to find life, Spielberg sets up editing as the means to find truth). In a video tribute to a school bully, played by Sam Rechner with a strategic sense of superiority (he’s someone a eugenics engineer would call a promising young man), Sam preserves his tormentor in a godlike image that he can never live up to. He doesn’t even realize he’s punishing him because he hadn’t noticed that there was a difference between the way things are and the way they are filmed, which has always been Spielberg’s great gift. The bully forces Sam to promise never to tell anyone he doubted his own tribute (if true, Spielberg kept the promise for almost 60 years). The Fabelmans is an illusion like that. It convinces the viewer to think of it as an impression of something real that reality can never live up to. This makes it unique in Spielberg’s filmography, which has more often encouraged the opposite reaction – to accept the realness of the illusion itself (as Elliott told the kid being sarcastic about E.T., “This is reality, Greg!”). The difference seems semantic, but it’s why Sam Fabelman (not “Sammy”), despite being based in reality, can never quite become Spielberg, and more – he also never seems quite as real as Elliott.
The result is a childhood rolled out with thematic importance but without the mythic experience of a childhood story. The film struggles for a point of view at times, in scenes between Mr. and Mrs. Fabelman that Spielberg luxuriously fills in without a clear point of view for himself. His dad’s repressed anxieties and his mom’s gaze, which even when happy has the frantic self-preservation of a trapped rabbit, are both objects that the film toys with becoming subjects. Spielberg and Kushner may have imagined the film as Sam’s adventure, but it splits its time in a way that Cinema Paradiso and The Tree of Life did not, to the point that Spielberg seems tempted to tell his parents’ story, as the characters his memories may now be more accountable to. While Sam impartially wanders through the events of his life, almost a daydreamer, Dano portrays his dad as a doubting soul locked up in the okayness he’s been told to treat like a state of honor. Against him, an achingly well-cast Seth Rogen plays Uncle Benny as the dad they all kind of prefer (he’s not competent enough to pressure them). Mr. Fabelman’s core trauma is that he may agree with them, in his state of hopeful quiet (it’s the same that Chief Brody escaped to become the hero of Jaws). A scene near the end involving a photograph and a shot with a very high horizon must have been panegyric for Spielberg, looking down the camera lens into that frozen time, realizing far later how much his dad deserved.
So who exactly does The Fabelmans re-empower? It could be interpreted as a story of female repression, as the mom gets so walled off from her ambitions by her husband’s worship and her own ideas of social pressure that the normally warm suburban mother trope goes oddly cool (her ethereal dance in the headlights is a Fellini moment). It could be a story of the myth of male power, as the whole state of their family gets dragged around by what the husband is willing to do “for” them, despite coming out of it with none of the things that really mattered to him (Spielberg converts Dano’s energy, normally exploited as unnerving, into a last emotional resort, a kind of sad bliss). The film was marketed to empower Sam by telling his story, but we never quite get to know him. His whole identity as someone greater than a par coming-of-ager relies on the unspoken promise that he will eventually become the Spielberg who made Jaws and Raiders of the Lost Ark (films like 1941 and Ready Player One are parts of his history that don’t belong in that promise). But unlike the young Alfredo in Cinema Paradiso, who never stops being director Giuseppe Tornatore yet never needs to be him, Sam seems too sanitized to justify his story as history.
Instead of the young boys and men that have always stood in for Sam, The Fabelmans gives the power back to Spielberg for the first time. He reserves the right to be Sam as much or as little as needed to work out these feelings. He’s never allowed himself to be this vulnerable (he may have taken this stoic creativity after John Ford, here played by David Lynch in the only way John Ford could be played – without giving a shit about it). The secret to this version of his re-empowerment narrative is in the film’s most intense moment. It’s not the enlightening confrontation in the hallway with the bully. It’s not even the editing scene, where Sam discovers his mother’s sin with breathless disbelief. The moment is during the film’s most heated discussion, which is over the family’s separation. The mom expresses her needs; the dad re-expresses the mom’s needs. The girls scream for control of their lives. And as Sam watches, he sees himself in the mirror, filming them. He already has the control he needs, to preserve anxiety rather than resolve it, as directors do. He was already filming The Fabelmans without realizing it.
Sam’s mom notices that he recreates the train crash from The Greatest Show on Earth because he wants to control his fear of it. Throughout the film, Sam uses moviemaking to process the feelings he gets from his life rather than sanitize or explain them. It’s what Spielberg has been doing for decades. The protagonist of his first film, Duel, fled down the highway from the faceless masculinity he failed to see in himself, like Sam standing under the shoulders of his Aryan classmates. Indiana Jones was cursed to use his whip in the Temple of Doom like Sam uses his camera – to thrash things into a form of control. Frank Abagnale Jr. cycled through a boy’s dream jobs while trying to con the universe out of forcing him to grow up in Catch Me if You Can. In Saving Private Ryan, Spielberg viewed war through the belief that a son separated from his parents is the greatest treasure in the world. Given the task of making a version of Peter Pan, Spielberg maneuvered it into a story about a father remembering why only boys can fly. He must have been thinking of his dad’s assessment of filmmaking during the interactions between Harrison Ford and Sean Connery in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. He may have been thinking of his mother dancing in headlights when David dreams of her icon in A.I. Despite at times living a sitcom life, he may have thought of himself like Jamie Graham in Empire of the Sun, imprisoned in a world where motherlands and fatherlands fight over children’s futures. If his films are a code, The Fabelmans is the key.
Uncle Boris said that making yourself happy comes at the cost of the happiness of others. In the place of Sam, Spielberg has been catching bugs in the amber of the camera lens, hoping that wasn’t true. Recently he said, “Your life is going to come spilling out onto celluloid whether you like it not … but in the sense of The Fabelmans, it wasn’t about metaphor. It was about memory.” For the first time, the viewer of a Spielberg film can wonder if Spielberg himself has been made happy by all his myth and magic. That bully instinctively knew the power of movies to alter and preserve ideas of truth when he saw himself running across the beach in Sam’s movie like a god – the best version of himself was imprisoned there, which made it seem impossible to make it real. Similarly, Spielberg put a sanitary version of his reality in a stasis chamber with this film, which preserves it without making it more real. Ironically, the film that explains his greatness is not itself one of his great films. But as in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence, one of the movies that Spielberg’s memory of Sam accepts as a touchstone, The Fabelmans is constantly on the cusp between myth and fact, questioning which has more value. Only Spielberg knows which side of the line he prefers, or how much that matters. But at 75, he can make one claim more strongly than any other – he now has 34 reasons why Uncle Boris was wrong.
Bibliography
Bazin, André. What is Cinema? Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967.
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All images are screenshots from the film’s trailers.
