★★

In his elder years, Steven Spielberg, my favorite filmmaker, has outsourced his creative instincts to an inferior.  Now that inferior has both politicized and trivialized his own life story, and Spielberg can only play to its hits like a copycat.

The Fabelmans is perhaps the least affecting film Spielberg has ever made.  So disjointed and undramatic, its only virtue is its ability to momentarily surprise us in spontaneous sequences.  The film offers three of them – all of which share a sense of mischief and wonder stemming from Spielberg’s own fascination with pyrotechnics and the various ways that things (and people) can be thrown from their normal place.

The first of such sequences is at the very beginning.  Young Sammy Fabelman is taken by his parents to a packed theater for Cecil B. DeMille’s 1952 The Greatest Show on Earth.  The scene that affects him is around the middle where the two men robbing a stopped train suddenly see another train coming right at it on the same track, and then fail to stop it.  Little Sammy is, at first, utterly fearful – a moment that recalls the myth about the Lumière Brothers’ 1895 short film Arrival of a Train, and the hysterical reactions by the audience that thought a real train was coming straight for them in their seats.  But that night, the dreams that once used to frighten him now provide him with clarity.  He asks his mother to get him a toy train for Hanukkah that he can film with his dad’s 8mm camera in order to recreate the collision in such a way that would allow that epic sequence to make sense to him.  For each of the eight days of Hanukkah, he receives a new train car – a sequence with brilliant cutting and candle lighting.  Then he films the crash and projects the image onto his hands, watching it with the same wonder you could see from Haley Joel Osment in A.I. Artificial Intelligence and Christian Bale in Empire of the Sun.

The other two sequences are also in the first half.  When Mitzi Fabelman puts the kids into the car and chases after the tornado, the line she repeats with the kids (“everything happens for a reason!“) is the prayer that Sammy doesn’t echo.  He has seen something that is its own divine sign, and he is too awestruck by it to think to pray.  And ten years later, when Sammy and his friends ride to the movies to see The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, his friends gather round him, first to mock him for his shyness with the girls they passed on the way there, and then to do as he tells them for the western he directs after seeing Lee Marvin’s “Stand and deliver!” line.  The next cut is to the same line used in a new movie he makes with everyone.  It is a scene that treats his Boy Scout years as one where he truly felt a sense of community and social purpose, and gives the added bonus of having him impress his father with the way he stimulates shooting guns.

By themselves, these sequences are great.  But they don’t provide a true insight into the character, and they certainly don’t convey the great depth of Spielberg’s emotional expressions.  They would just as well suit a film that was about the various films he saw at certain times and within certain circumstances that affected his life and his imagination, or would lead to friendships he cultivated throughout his career, some of which still play into his movies.  One such omitted picture is Stanley Kubrick’s Doctor Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.  Since half the scenes in this film come from stories Spielberg tells about his life in various interviews (and which in and of themselves, from his own narration, provides much more vivid imagery than this film does), I’ll convey this one.  When Spielberg was in line for the film, his father pulled up to him and gave him a letter that had just arrived from the Selective Service ordering him to report for an army physical.  It was 1964, America was about to send hundreds of thousands of troops to Vietnam, and one of them might have been young Steven Spielberg.  At that time, he had never seen a Stanley Kubrick picture before.  But he insisted on staying to watch the film, went into Strangelove with the coming war on his mind, and came out having entirely forgotten that he might eventually be drafted for it.  Now that I’ve explained it, you might be wondering how a film about a young boy whose imagination springs to life with his discovery and usage of film, whose family’s secrets and eventual separation so profoundly affect him that he can only communicate via camera, and whose politics as an Eisenhower Democrat were both defined and upended by the chaos of the ‘60s, could possibly get by without that in there.  The simple answer is that it doesn’t.

I have no doubt that Spielberg is telling the truth when he says that anti-Semitism was introduced to him by his peers in California after moving there from Arizona, and that it engendered feelings of isolation that would later be compounded by the separation of his parents.  But screenwriter Tony Kushner makes the experience resentful rather than teachable.  By this point in time in the film, Spielberg is clearly so lost in his own memories that he has no ideas left for how its visual language can express the social and ecumenical characteristics of Sammy Fabelman and his family that make them both ordinary for the era and extraordinary for the artistic depths of which he learned he was capable at a young age.  His family filmography – represented by great works such as Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T. the Extra Terrestrial, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, A.I., and Catch Me If You Can have already covered these subjects.  Spielberg has moved emotional mountains for 40 years with his universally felt expressions.  Now he has turned the subject of his interests directly to himself and The Fabelmans makes you feel like this is happening at the wrong time in his career.

What’s ironic is that Spielberg has returned in the worst possible way to a version of himself that he articulated in Wim Wenders’s Room 666.  If you don’t know that documentary, just listen to this.  Now remember that this was the early summer of 1982, just before the release of E.T.  40 years before he made The Fabelmans, Spielberg specifically rebuked the artistically soulless studio model of the era.

“There seems to be an attitude among people who run the studios . . . that if a film can’t at least reach third base, let alone home, then we don’t really know if we want to make this picture.  And that’s the danger.  The danger is not from the filmmakers; the danger’s not from the producers or the writers.  It’s from the people who are in control of the money who essentially say, ‘I want my money back, and I want those returns multiplied by the powers of ten!  So I’m not really interested in sitting here and seeing a movie about your personal life, your grandfather, what it was like to grow up in American school, what it was like to masturbate for the first time at 13, whatever.  I want a picture that’s going to please everybody!’  In other words, I think Hollywood wants the ideal movie with something in it for everyone, and, of course, that’s impossible.”

It was a different kind of irony back in 1982.  Spielberg had no idea that he had just created (from a budget of almost nothing) what would be the single most popular film of his entire career, an emotional epic that would be universally regarded as a crucial touchstone of every American childhood from that point onwards.  He had done “the impossible,” and it was only the beginning.  He would do it again and again with The Color Purple, Hook, Schindler’s List, Saving Private Ryan, and every other film previously mentioned.

The experience of watching The Fabelmans reveals that Spielberg has learned the wrong lessons from himself.  Did he really think that he was just tricking the studios every time when he made his most personally affecting low-budget pictures?  That is simply not possible.  The point is not that the studios he was rebuking in 1982 were correct in dismissing dramatic stories that don’t offer guaranteed returns.  Rather, the point was that the emotional connections that have made Spielberg the most popular filmmaker of all of our lifetimes can come from almost anywhere and anything.

Spielberg may not have ever made a film about a young boy’s first masturbatory experience.  But what he understood then was that there is always a way to tell a story and make it interesting – not just by making ordinary things pop and flash, but unearthing the common humanity of the characters and daring to make even their most questionable thoughts and actions relatable to everyone.  No one watching The Sugarland Express would seriously condone kidnapping a police officer, holding him hostage at gunpoint, and leading the Texas Rangers on a chase across the state.  But you can’t watch that film without being drawn to the couple and compelled to cheer them on precisely for their most rebellious instincts.  This was the power of Spielberg, even at its raw, unrefined state.  The Fabelmans contains Paul Dano’s greatest career performance ever, but no emotional heft.  Aside from the few great scenes previously mentioned, the dramatic pull of the film is a lame dog whistle against its own audience.

Instead of taking a hypothetical story about masturbation and making it relatable, Spielberg and Kushner have taken a relatable tale and made it masturbatory.

– Vivek