Steven Spielberg has always been a great director of things. When he burst on the scene with his first feature Sugarland Express, critics remarked on how brilliantly he directed cars, engineering an elaborate choreography of destruction for them. Spielberg's 1941, possibly his masterpiece, is one of the most radical films ever made -- it's entirely about things, animating objects like airplanes and Ferris wheels into an elaborate and spectacular ballet: in 1941, the people are mere cartoons, but the things swoon and waltz as if alive. In The Fabelmans, Spielberg's 2022 autobiographical film, the best scenes involve his orchestration of inanimate objects: during a tornado, a fleet of untended shopping carts flees like a herd of gazelles down an empty street while the storm wags its tail in the skies, boards set to lever dust in the air and strings of firecrackers ingeniously simulate gunfire in a combat scene directed by the teenage hero, the protagonist's mother has long scarlet fingernails that click on the keys of the baby grand piano that she plays, in a love scene, the hero's mother rocks back and forth on a sapling that her boyfriend flexes and, then, releases as he plays with her. The characters in the movie are adequately acted and have fulsome, somewhat sentimental speeches and dialogue, but it's the things that Spielberg invests with its ingenious trademark energy.
In New Jersey, a Jewish family attends a movie-show at a grand palace of a theater; they are seeing The Greatest Show on Earth, the circus spectacle directed by Cecil B. DeMille -- I think it's 1952. Sammy, the protagonist (and surrogate for Spielberg) is an anxious child and the spectacular trainwreck in the movie terrifies him. His mother, an attractive blonde with something indefinably wrong with her, spells out her concern to her husband, Sammy's brilliant engineer father: "It's bad for his A-N-X-I-E-T-I-E-S". As a Hanukkah gift, Sammy's parents give him an electric train-set. With his trains, little Sammy obsessively re-stages the train crash in the movie. (Later, he films it with an 8 millimeter camera.) This sequence may remind viewers of Orson Welles' remark that a movie studio "was the best train set you could ever give to a boy." When a tornado appears in the sky over their home, Sammy's mother, who seems to be manic-depressive, loads the kids into the car and drives them out into the tempest to see the storm. But she realizes that in her exuberance she has put her children at risk, and left her sober, practical husband at home with the baby -- so, she crashes hard into melodramatic despair. In these early scenes, we learn that the mother, Mitzi, is apparently in love with her father's best friend, called "Uncle Bernie." Sammy becomes increasingly enamored with making films and starts to direct his siblings in little 8 or ten minute productions. When Mitzi's mother dies, there is a bed-side scene in which Spielberg very delicately and subtly suggests that Sammy sees everything, notes all the details of the hospital room and the dying woman and, if given the opportunity, would make a movie about the woman's death. The dead grandmother's brother, Uncle Boris, shows up. Boris (played by Judd Hirsch) is a stylized figure, a stock Jewish vaudevillian so broadly played that the ethnic stereotype would perceived as offensive if not perpetrated by Spielberg, who is, of course, Jewish himself. Conflict has arisen between Sammy and his practical father who regards making movies as a mere, expensive hobby. But Uncle Boris understands that Sammy is an artist at heart, like his mother who dances and plays the piano, and he pinches the boy's face painfully to remind him that he should follow his artistic aspirations even if he has to defy his father -- all of this stuff is very conventional. In fact, it dates back to Tonio Kroeger, the great novella by Thomas Mann written around the turn of the 20th century. Sammy's father is a cool, remote scientist; his mother is a warm, emotive artist. From this clash of parental dispositions, the great artist is formed. (I think Mann's father was a north German bourgeois merchant; his mother was a "Brazilian - Portuguese - Creole" as her son described her -- the mixture of temperaments Mann thought spawned his artistry). With the encouragement of Uncle Boris, who grieves for his sister by "tearing his clothing and sleeping on the floor" (he tells Sammy to imitate him), the youth continues to pursue his dreams of becoming a filmmaker. Up to this point, The Fabelmans suggest that art originates in fear and trauma and that the paradigm for movie-making is a train-wreck -- notions that seem plausible in the context of the film.
Burt, the father, is ambitious and the family moves to Phoenix. Mitzi demands that Burt find a job there in the company for Uncle Bernie since she can't bear to be apart from her lover. In Phoenix, the family is happy. But Mitzi's moods are fickle and she becomes melancholy and her husband, Burt, asks Sammy to film her during a camping trip -- this sequence features some of Spielberg's trademark imagery: in a translucent nightgown, Mitzi dances in the light cast from beams of their car's headlamps. The amber light exposes her body under the gown to the dismay of Mitzi's scandalized daughters but she seems beautiful and ethereal. Later, while cutting the film from the camping trip, Sammy discovers images of in the background of his shots in which Bernie is holding hands with Mitzi and, even, embracing her. Sammy cuts these images out of the camping film, but makes a reel of the excluded footage which he shows to Mitzi. She wails at the imagery and decries herself as a failure as a wife and mother. Perhaps, to escape from the burgeoning relationship between Bernie and Mitzi, Burt moves the family to somewhere in northern California -- he's now the director of a division of IBM. Of course, Bernie is left behind this time. The family rents a gloomy old house while waiting for their new home to be built. At school, Sammy is taunted by anti-Semitic students and, even, beaten up by a handsome young man, a sort of Aryan God named Logan. (The kids call Sammy "Bagelman" and hang a bagel in his locker showing a "jew-hole.") On this subject, Spielberg has little subtlety -- the anti-Semitic kids are vicious and demand that Sammy apologize for killing Jesus. But a girl takes an interest in him and brings him home. She turns out to be Jesus-freak of the most florid kind, but is also very horny. (The scenes in the girl's bedroom with her kitsch Jesus-paraphernalia are border-line offensive and, certainly, caricature Christianity in a harsh and primitive way, but, in fairness to Spielberg, the stereotypes are no more garish and cartoon-like than the scenes with the Yiddish-spouting Uncle Boris, also an absurd cliche.) Sammy is commissioned to make a film about Senior Ditch Day, a school tradition in which seniors skip classes to party on Santa Cruz beach. Sammy attends Prom with the Jesus-freak to whom he proposes marriage. She breaks up with him. It was only a senior-year romance, as far as she is concerned and she plans to attend college next year without the encumbrance of a boy-friend. Sammy's "Ditch Day" movie is screened. It looks like jokey version of Leni Riefenstahl's Olympia, the camera admiring the beautiful bodies and faces of the classically Aryan boys including Logan engaged in brawny tests of strength. The film wins Sammy great acclaim and the students now chant "Bagel-man! Bagel-man!" in his honor. Logan is appalled by how he has been portrayed as a sort of Greek god in the film. In an interesting excursus on acting, Logan is strangely distressed -- "you made me into a golden thing," Logan says, and laments the fact that he could never live up to the glamor and beauty portrayed on screen. Disingenuously, Sammy says that "the camera sees what is sees" -- that is, continuing the theme that the movie camera doesn't create reality but merely discovers it. The scenes with the handsome Logan are the most fascinating in the movie and they rhyme with an earlier sequence in which Sammy is shooting a battle scene for an Eagle Scout merit badge; in that scene, the fabulously photogenic leading man, who looks like Logan, is an idiot -- Sammy tells him his motivations and how to act and the kid is so smitten that after the director calls "Cut!", he stays in character and wanders off from the battle-scene, staggering into the desert with "thousand-yard stare." Both of these sequences comment, I think, on the idea of acting and the movie star -- the camera adores movie stars and makes them into something divine and beyond human possibility, creating a beauty that is also an affliction. Just as all seems to be going well with Sammy and, on the day the family moves into their spacious new home, Mitzi and Burt announce that they are getting divorced. This leads to a painful confrontation in which the children denounce their parents as selfish and inconsiderate -- in Spielberg's work, the revelation that a husband and wife with children are divorcing is his version of "the primal scene." After the divorce, Sammy moves to LA with Burt. There he tries to break into the film industry -- he doesn't go to college as his father wishes. Burt is now resigned to Sammy pursuing a career in movies. After many rejections, Sammy gets an invitation to work as an assistant to an assistant's assistant. When he goes to accept the job, the boss at the studio invites him to meet John Ford. (Ford is Sammy's hero.) As the camera surveys posters of Ford's classic films, the soundtrack plays "Lorena", the old Civil War song that is the theme of The Searchers. (Earlier in the movie there's a shot that invokes the famous scene when Ward Bond sees Ethan in The Searchers in a tentative embrace with Martha, his brother's wife -- Bond shrugs very slightly and, then, takes a long draw on his cup of coffee; Spielberg imitates the shot in which Burt sees his wife flirting with Bernie but decides to ignore what he has observed.) John Ford storms into the office with blood inexplicably on his face. Ford is a nasty curmudgeon, possibly drunk, but he gives Sammy some advice about camera angles before telling him to "get the fuck out of my office." (Ford is played by David Lynch in his last role on-screen -- he looks haggard and half-dead in the film.) Sammy goes out into the alley at the studio where the camera obligingly tilts to follow Ford's advice.
The movie is crammed with oedipal overtones between Sammy and his mother and suggests that the filmmaker's career has been animated by his desire to please his mother and cast her in the best possible light while, I think, acknowledging her mental illness. Spielberg maintains that the movie camera (and editing) are devices for revealing truths about the world that might otherwise be concealed. There is an interesting scene in which Sammy and his Boy Scout friends catch live scorpions for a laboratory -- they sell them for 50 cents a piece and use the money to make movies. I think Spielberg is casting a jaundiced eye on the way that big-budget Hollywood movies have to be funded. The film is written by Spielberg with Tony Kushner. Kushner's contributions seems sentimental to me and misguided in several scenes. The movie has some shrewd things to say about films although its propositions are debatable. Of course, the picture is directed with Spielberg's characteristic aplomb and contains some genuinely moving scenes, although it is too long (for which I blame Kushner) and episodic and, further, begs the question of whether we would be interested in any of this stuff if the protagonist of the movie didn't happen to be a slightly fictionalized version of Steven Spielberg.
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