The Fabelmans (2022)
Directed by Steven Spielberg
Growing up in post-World War II era Arizona, young Sammy Fabelman aspires to become a filmmaker as he reaches adolescence, but soon discovers a shattering family secret and explores how the power of films can help him see the truth.
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It’s all true to Spielberg’s life, including three younger sisters, his childhood film projects referenced by name, and his early fear of movies, as seen when Sammy’s parents carefully explain how the pictures work before blowing his mind with The Greatest Show on Earth (1952).
And it all started with a fateful night out in 1952 to see “The Greatest Show on Earth,” the first time in a movie theater for wide-eyed 6-year-old Sammy (Mateo Zoryon Francis-DeFord).
The Fabelmans begins with young Sammy becoming inspired by a trip to the theater to see Cecil B. DeMille’s The Greatest Show on Earth .
Some of those experiences — including seeing Cecile B. DeMille’s “The Greatest Show on Earth” as a boy and getting some simple but crucial advice from a filmmaking idol as a young man — are dramatized in “The Fabelmans,” a largely but not wholly autobiographical coming-of-age tale that wrestles with themes such as family, control and isolation.
When Burt and Mitzi take Sammy to “The Greatest Show on Earth,” he’s terrified at first (“Dreams are scary”); his father patiently explains the concept of persistence of vision, literally breaking an otherwise mysterious medium down to its physiological elements.
Before long 10 years have passed and the older teen Sammy (played by Gabriel LaBelle) is making all sorts of films, using his friends including Westerns inspired after seeing 1962’s John Ford classic The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (Branagh did an homage to that one as well in Belfast), and World War II epics among others.
We then jump in time to a teenage Sammy, who moves with his family to Arizona and casts all his Boy Scout pals in a makeshift Western inspired by John Ford’s “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.”
Fast forward 10 years, and Sam (now played by an excellent Gabriel LaBelle) is inspired to make a Western after seeing John Ford’s “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.”
The subsequent, increasingly ambitious projects that Sam takes on—including a mummy picture, a western inspired in part by John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance , and then a WWII epic titled Escape to Nowhere —all suggest the formation of the kind of showmanship and instinct for popular entertainment that would go on to solidify Spielberg’s legend.
He makes juvenile movies starring his sisters, and moves into short features starring his Boy Scout chums—a western inspired by “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” and a war picture called “Escape to Nowhere” (both of which reflect titles actually made by Spielberg).
(If you had “a Blow-Up reference” on your Spielberg bingo card, mark it now.)
Starting with a passage reminiscent of “Blow-Up,” Sammy discovers things he had never imagined, another in a concatenation of primal scenes.
The fact that Sammy grows aware of Mitzi’s close bond with the family friend by looking through his home movies, studying them frame by frame in Blow-Up style, is a devastating concept—Sammy’s solace and voice, his camera, is now a tool for wounding revelation.
The whole thing is masterful; it’s like the showcase set pieces of Blow-Up or Blow Out , if Antonioni or De Palma had decided to depict the murder of a marriage rather than a shadowy assassination.
It’s Spielberg’s version of Blow-Up and we learn a hard truth as its revealed to Sammy.
For cinephiles, the moment will recall Brian De Palma’s “Blow Out,” but for Sammy it’s the end of innocence.
It reminded me, sans murder, of Brian DePalma’s “Blow Out.”
The whole thing is masterful; it’s like the showcase set pieces of Blow-Up or Blow Out , if Antonioni or De Palma had decided to depict the murder of a marriage rather than a shadowy assassination.
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She gathers her children in the family car and drives toward chaos—a tornado swirling in the distance, recalling the final scene from the Coen brothers’ A Serious Man (2009)—and leaves Burt behind with their new baby.
On one level, it’s a direct allusion to similar scenes of chaos on the New Jersey streets in War of the Worlds (the key difference being that Tom Cruise is driving away from the danger rather than towards it), but on another, it also recalls the Coen Brothers’ A Serious Man, which ends on a tornado being a kind of expression of God’s continual heaping of misery onto the characters.
The last big-ticket American movie to put these cultural concerns so front and center was the Coen brothers’ A Serious Man , which Spielberg evokes—perhaps accidentally—in an early scene involving a tornado that hints at the Fabelmans’ stormy fortunes.
The movie echoes Giuseppe Tornatore’s Cinema Paradiso, although Spielberg’s approach isn’t as openly poetic.
Even the sequences that involve filmmaking once again don’t seem to lend to any notable future; though it clearly nods to “Cinema Paradiso,” sans the comparably potent revelations, Sammy’s formative years of experimenting with putting together motion pictures aren’t emblematic of any recognizable works.
The former happily overcomes the latter – and not incidentally, should be catnip to award voters, in the way something like “Cinema Paradiso” was – but the dynamic does somewhat counter the movie’s nostalgic pleasures.
The Fabelmans is not merely about any movie-mad kid, but an autobiographical reminiscence by Spielberg himself, and thus it falls into a fairly narrow subgenre of movies in which the filmmaker’s own childhood is very specifically explored—akin to Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous, with its one-in-a-million set of coming-of-age exploits, rather than François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, which mined the director’s childhood but can stand as a universal depiction of youthful unhappiness.
More similar to Woody Allen’s autobiographical “Radio Days” than it is to European art films such as “The 400 Blows” and “Amarcord” (the more highbrow models other directors typically point to when re-creating their childhoods), “The Fabelmans” invites audiences into the home and headspace of the world’s most beloved living director, an oddly sanitized zone where even the trauma — which includes anti-Semitism, financial disadvantage and divorce — seems to go better with fresh-buttered popcorn.
It's isn't nearly as powerful as Ordinary People, Boyhood, Tokyo Sonata or The 400 Blows, but at least it's not as schmaltzy as Belfast.
Don’t come to The Fabelmans expecting to see how Spielberg created Jaws or what inspired Close Encounters of the Third Kind (although we kind of wish we had seen a little of Sammy making his/Spielberg’s 8mm UFO epic “Firelight,“ made when he was just 17 years old).
The first, when a storm rages in the quaint suburban neighborhood of Spielberg’s childhood, is a direct reference to Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977).
Spielberg has made a wide variety of films, but many of his movies—especially the ones having to do with outer-space creatures, such as 1977’s “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” 1982’s “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial” and 2005’s “War of the Worlds” remake—have a few themes in common, such as people dealing with fractured families and/or families in conflict because one person in the family is determined to pursue a particular goal against tremendous odds.
The very fact that Spielberg’s childhood has been a known subtext in so many of his works, from Close Encounters of the Third Kind to Catch Me If You Can, inspires us to make those comparisons.
The divorce of Spielberg's parents has been a theme in many of his movies, from the breakdown of the Close Encounters of the Third Kind family and the single mother in E.T., to Indiana Jones's daddy issues and the real-life Frank Abagnale in Catch Me If You Can.
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But there is a late-blooming raison d’être here: reminding us that Spielberg’s great works (from E.T. to A.I. to Munich) have always evoked lonesome alienation when they wanted.
His group of friends/co-conspirators enters the frame on bicycles, reminding us of “E.T.”
Spielberg once said his original concept for E.T. “didn’t include an extraterrestrial.
For the children, but especially Sammy, it is a harsh confrontation with antisemitism combined with the fish-out-of-water existence that so many out-of-sync teenagers face when confronted with a rich kid/jock atmosphere that they are no more prepared to face than an alien from “ET.” Mitzi, whose hold on daily life was already fragile, now feels she’s without an anchor and she begins to withdraw further.
The divorce of Spielberg's parents has been a theme in many of his movies, from the breakdown of the Close Encounters of the Third Kind family and the single mother in E.T., to Indiana Jones's daddy issues and the real-life Frank Abagnale in Catch Me If You Can.
Moments dealing with initial romantic inclinations, like in E.T. (1982) or the boy scouts which conjure the opening of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) are only a couple of the nods to Spielberg’s own creative conjurings, but in essence, besides the cinematic prowess of Kaminski (and playful nods to what constitutes an interesting horizon line), there’s little to differentiate the tone of The Fabelmans from a myriad of other memoir-inclined narratives (think last year’s The Tender Bar , for instance).
At its height, Speilberg channels a sense of Douglas Sirk’s soapy melodramas, such as All That Heaven Allows (read review) or There’s Always Tomorrow (1956), where Jane Wyman and Barbara Stanwyck play mothers whose children disastrously intervene in their love lives.