The Fabelmans

Steven Spielberg: The Fabelmans (US 2022).

I like The Fabelmans, a film that is both a fresh opening for Steven Spielberg and a continuation to his long-term concerns.

The great revelation of The Fabelmans is of course that for the first time Spielberg is directly and frankly autobiographical, revealing intimate secrets and anxieties about childhood and young age.

The Fabelmans is a family saga. It is about a loving family, and it is about a broken family. It is about the conflict between work duty and family happiness, also between art and love. To sum up: between ambition and love. A great and universal theme is honestly and movingly discussed.

The screenplay is another collaboration between Steven Spielberg and Tony Kushner, resulting to psychological nuance and complexity.

The Fabelmans is one of the films that display Spielberg's cinephilic passions. There are cinephilic references all over Spielberg's oeuvre, but only one film has been dedicated to them: the baroque and extravagant 1941. The Fabelmans is a Bildungsroman about the integration of cinephilia into life.

It begins and ends with cinephilic sequences. The little Sam visits the cinema for the first time and sees Cecil B. DeMille's The Greatest Show On Earth. (In its first lines DeMille declares that it is for "children of all ages").

The film ends in a sequence in which young Sam is unexpectedly introduced to John Ford, played with gruff charisma by none other than David Lynch. Ford gives the young Fabelman a lesson in horizon that he will never forget. The Fabelmans has one of the greatest closing shots in the history of the cinema. In it, Steven Spielberg internalizes the John Ford lesson. *

But cinephilia is also integrated into the family romance. In one of his home movies, Sam unwittingly documents his mother's secret love life. And at high school, Sam, a victim of bullying, grows into a popular hero thanks to his beach party movie.

The Fabelmans is also one of Spielberg's movies relevant to feminism. Let's remember that his theatrical debut film was The Sugarland Express, featuring a strong female lead (Goldie Hawn). The Post is for me a personal favourite because its account of Katharine Graham (Meryl Streep) evokes active women in my own family who were the only women in all male panels. And, as art sometimes does, this film helped me finally truly understand what they had always told.

The protagonists of The Fabelmans are Sam (played by Mateo Zoryan and Gabriel LaBelle) and his mother Mitzi (Michelle Williams). Mitzi is a talented pianist who has given up her career for the family. There is an affinity with Doris Day's character in The Man Who Knew Too Much. She is also being estranged in her marriage with her IT wizard husband (Paul Dano). In The Rain People, Francis Ford Coppola, inspired by his own mother, discussed a similar quandary in the tale of Natalie (Shirley Knight). A family romance like this has been discussed in classic melodramas such as Back Street and All That Heaven Allows, but this is no melodrama. This is a heartfelt family drama seen from the children's viewpoint, the love and the empathy being slowly transferred to the mother who has become trapped in her own family, risking to become a stranger both to herself and all around her. Michelle Williams's touching performance is the heart of the movie.

Sam's own éducation sentimentale proceeds at the high school where he is the only Jew. The Fabelmans is one of Spielberg's most important works about the Jewish experience, following Schindler's List and Munich. It is an achingly personal account of antisemitism and bullying – as verbal abuse, as direct violence, and as a complicating factor in relationships and romance.

Sam's first romantic interest, Monica (Chloe East), is the active one in the relationship, an ardent Jesus lover, interested in Sam because Jesus, too, was a handsome young Jewish man. Her project is to convert Sam, but when Sam proposes to her, she turns him down. Having reached the nadir of his school experience, Sam screens his Ditch Day movie which becomes the zenith. In it, his worst enemy Logan appears as a glorified hero and another bully, Chad, as a miserable loser.

Logan breaks down after the film and cannot make sense of Sam. I was thinking about a favourite book and a favourite chapter of mine: "Confusing your enemy with style" in Quentin Crisp's Doing It With Style. If you have an enemy, be sure that he hears only good things from you. This may sound superficial but is actually a lesson from Jesus Christ, about turning the other cheek. In Logan's case, it works.

* William K. Everson wrote that in William S. Hart's earthbound films the skyline is always high in the frame. With John Ford, the skyline is low, and the action unfolds under a wide open sky.