The Fabelmans: The Fable of Spielberg by Spielberg

The Fabelmans reminds me of an essential truth about famous artists: their personal lives are often quite pedestrian.

A nod to 8 1/2 and Cinema Paradiso, with a hint of Blow-Up, The Fabelmans––a rare Steven Spielberg box office flop––is a bit sneaky.  Early on, it appears to fall into the Hallmark-ey trap of most feel-good Spielberg crowd-pleasers. Then about halfway through this semi-autobiographical coming-of-age hagiography––that only a dependable Hollywood money-maker would be allowed to helm––Spielberg side winds into a theme that deserves deeper exploration: the hidden truths that a camera reveals.  

In editing a family camping trip film at the urging of his father Burt, young filmmaker Sammy Fabelman unwittingly discovers that his concert pianist mom Mitzi is having an affair with Benny, his computer “genius” father’s best friend and constant family companion.  Whether the kindly Burt wants his son to uncover that hard truth through the lens of his everpresent camera is a knotty question Spielberg leaves hanging. Your answer depends on whether you view Burt as a cuckolded schlemiel or a wise and detached observer.

Regardless, Spielberg spends the rest of the film trying to justify Mitzi’s betrayal. But Mitzi’s advice to “follow your heart” is just another childish nostrum that, in truth, often ends up wrecking families and communities.

Subsequently, Sammy’s camera uncovers the clandestine, and, in 1964, verboten love between two high school jocks, who bullied Sam with anti-Semitic pranks and slurs.  In a remarkable scene that reveals the painful ambiguity of being gay in 1964, the tall model-perfect jock expresses to Sammy how uncomfortable he is with the idealized (read: homoerotic) version of himself that the young director, wittingly or not, has depicted in his film about an innocent class “outing” to the beach. The maturing wunderkind has veined a subconscious truth: the happy high school experience he didn’t have is now attainable through the myth-making power of movies.  The jock is upset that he cannot live up to Sammy’s ideal.  Sam the Fabulist is just fine with it.

The Fabelmans remind me of an essential truth about great artists: their personal lives are often quite pedestrian.  As a Bavarian art director lectured me once, “You have to be normal in your life to be wild in your art.”  As someone who believes that one’s life is one’s art, I rejected that premise on face!  That does not make it any less true.  

If you have ever listened to Steven Spielberg talk, a lecture by Paul Tsongas sounds captivating by comparison.  When Kerouac wrote, “The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars…” he was not drawing a sketch of a future Steven Spielberg.

But that doesn’t stop Spielberg from falling for this era’s historicist obsession with biography and back story. No surprise that the childhood traumas that Spielberg unlocks in The Fabelmans are pretty tame compared to what many Americans experienced growing up in the 60s. Sammy doesn’t even take a hit when a joint is proffered to him. But hand it to Spielberg for mining the minor traumas he did experience to forge a wildly successful career. In The Fabelmans, you can see how its themes, however benign, infected Spielberg’s diverse oeuvre of enduring classics: Catch Me if You Can, Duel, Munich, Saving Private Ryan, and, of course, his masterwork, Schindler’s List.

While sweet and tender, The Fabelmans is not in that company. It could have been a late-career capstone project––about the nature of film qua film and how the dogged pursuit of “art” can cost one family and happiness––but that would require someone else’s life story.  Unlike Martin Scorsese’s very personal late-career meditation on aging, faith, and family, The Irishman, whose three-+ hour length is riveting every single frame, Spielberg’s homage to Spielberg runs about 25 minutes too long.  As with Schindler’s List’s gratuitous coda, the John Ford ending and the Uncle Boris interlude here feel glommed on.

But even the unnecessary bits are still beautifully shot, which is the key takeaway of The Fabelmans: film is a marriage of Appolonian craft and Dynosynian art.  If unlike Scorsese, the all-too-Pollyanna Spielberg sometimes lacks Mitzi’s art, he never fails to deliver his father’s expertly engineered craft.