Hollywood likes to make movies about Hollywood. Several of the great directors (including
Spielberg’s friends and collaborators Truffaut and George Lucas) have made autobiographical films inspired by their own childhood and adolescence. In ‘The Fabelmans‘ (2022), Steven Spielberg combines the two genres and the result can only be a film that pleases the public as well as the members of the Academy. In fact, it’s the film that will have to be beaten in several important categories in this year’s Academy Awards competition. But I don’t think it was an easy film for Spielberg. It’s not easy to make a film where the main characters are your parents and yourself at the ages of childhood and adolescence. Anyone who has read a biography of Spielberg will recognize the characters, years and dates of the main events depicted in the film as belonging to the first 19 years of Spielberg‘s life. Without being a masterpiece and even if it brings back to the screen some of the strengths and weaknesses of the director’s previous films, ‘The Fabelmans‘ is a film full of emotion and above all of love for cinema and fascination for the power of the image.
The opening and closing scenes of ‘The Fabelmans‘ are probably either fiction or much improved history (the screenplay is written by Spielberg in collaboration with Tony Kushner). In the first scene, a six-year-old boy is taken by his parents to the cinema for the first time. He is a bit afraid of the ‘big people on the screen’. Father explaines to him scientifically how moving images are formed. Mother tells him about emotions. He will see a film by Cecil B. DeMille in which a spectacular catastrophe occurs – the collision between two trains and an automobile caught in the middle between them. The impression is strong: fear and fascination. In the final scene of ‘The Fabelmans‘ the same character, now a 19-year-old who wants nothing else in life than to make films, has the privilege of chatting for a few minutes with ‘the greatest director who ever lived’, John Ford ( played brilliantly by David Lynch). In a few sentences he gives him a lesson that sums up the art of the visual and that also symbolizes a passing of the baton between generations and eras of American cinema. Between these two scenes we are dealing with the story of the childhood and adolescence of a boy who becomes fascinated by the camera and who gradually learns not only the secrets of its handling but also the power that the one who films and edits acquires – the power to tell stories , to create characters and embellish real characters, to envelop his viewers in dreams and nightmares, to document the truth or hide it by cutting at the editing table.
What we have in the two and a half hours between these two scenes is the story of an American family after World War II. Father, mother, four children of whom Sam Fabelman is the oldest and only boy. It looks like a model family, but in reality it is an unhappy family in its own way ((C) Tolstoy). Mother, father and Sam are three strong characters with aspirations in different directions who cannot be all three happy at the same time. The father is presented as a brilliant scientist, one of those whose vision and technical talent ushered in the era of numerical computers. He is an extremely good man but absorbed in work. He supports his family and their ever-increasing standard of living, but to succeed everything must be sacrificed to his career – including marriage and family life. Mother had been a talented pianist, but the obligations of supporting a household with three or four children had forced her to give up her career as a professional musician. Finally, Sam becomes more and more overwhelmed by his passion for cinema, encouraged, sometimes secretly by his mother, while his father continues for a long time to consider it just a hobby. The camera was for Sam a moral support, a refuge, a way to express his feelings and to ward off the blows caused by the conflicts of the outside world: the changes of residence increasingly westward in the United States to California, following the father’s career, the anti-Semitic violence he suffers from some of his new colleagues, and especially the breakup of his parents’ marriage.
We have in this film an updated version of that Spielberg of the films where he focuses on the characters with their dramas and melodramas and does not resort to spectacular effects. The casting is, as always, excellent, emphasizing the ability to create emotion. Paul Dano as the father is amazing, one of the best fleshed out characters I’ve seen in movies lately. Michelle Williams sometimes thickens and repeats features of the mother’s character, but she, too, I think, will not avoid at least an Academy Award nomination. Seth Rogen (almost unrecognizable) and Judd Hirsch pencil two key supporting roles. Gabriel LaBelle, whom I think I’m seeing for the first time, is cast in the lead role of Sam,. He is surrounded by a group of young and talented actors who play the hero’s classmates, friends, sisters and girlfriend, all in their childhood and teenage years. Spielberg is, as always, excellent in casting and directing child, adolescent or young actors. There are some aspects that are covered in less depth – such as the Jewishness of the hero and his family. Perhaps Spielberg will address this theme in one of his future films. ‘The Fabelmans‘ will remain in the memory of the viewers as a story of love and fascination between a teenager and the camera. A director is born before our eyes. The last frame, a la Chaplin or The Wizard of Oz, is actually just the beginning.