‘The Fabelmans’ is Steven Spielberg’s brilliant anecdote that seals his filmography

Having Steven Spielberg premiere a movie should be considered quite an event if you call yourself a self-respecting movie buff. The author of indisputable classics such as ‘Jaws’, ‘Jurassic Park’, the ‘Indiana Jones’ trilogy, ‘Saving Private Ryan’ or ‘ET, the extra-terrestrial’ (just to name a few of the billions of hundreds that has ) has spent a lifetime proving why he is one of the best directors in history and painstakingly builds an indestructible legacy that has already left dozens of icons in pop culture in the form of phrases, characters, stills or scenes. But… What to do when you’ve got it all? Well, talking about you, of course. That’s what it’s all about, no more, no less. ‘The Fabelmans’, the semi-autobiographical introspection of a formidable Spielberg at the height of his maturity who reflects on the value of broken families and the power of films to alter our reality. So far it has already won the Audience Award for Best Film at the Toronto Film Festival and two Golden Globes for Best Drama and Best Director.

Yes, Spielberg has done it again. And, on this occasion, he has perfected a sub-genre that has been booming in recent years, that of directors who look to their past to verify their present. The list goes on and on: Kenneth Branagh with ‘Belfast’, Paul Thomas Anderson with ‘Licorice Pizza’, Richard Linklater with ‘Apollo 10½: A Space Childhood’, Paolo Sorrentino with ‘It was the hand of God’ or James Gray with ‘ Tempo of Armageddon’. The common denominator of all these fictions is that value of non-fiction, of memory, of retrospective by filmmakers who travel back to their childhood and adolescence to explain their raison d’être and, hopefully, also contextualize the idiosyncrasies of the era. As expected, Spielberg advanced everyone to the left by creating an honest portrait, with no complacency or platitudes, just a love of cinema..

To do this, he had to consider something that seemed extremely difficult. Who would embody two figures as crucial in Spielberg’s life as his own parents? And above all, who would have put himself in Spielberg’s shoes? The director bypasses these obstacles with solvency by aligning the (fictional) Fabelman family. Sammy Fabelman (Gabriel Labelle) is Spielberg’s alter ego, a boy from Arizona who, during the 1950s and 1960s, will be imbued with the majesty of cinema.. His father is Burt Fabelman (Paul Dano), a famous computer engineer, and his mother, Mitzi Fabelman (Michelle Williams), an eccentric artist.

art versus family

The film begins with one of the toughest decisions for parents who care the least about their son or daughter’s film education: the first film. In this case, an excited Sammy, ready to absorb everything like a sponge, is taken to a movie theater by his parents to see “The Greatest Show on Earth”, almost like a premonition of what that child would do in the following decades. Sammy is totally fascinated (with a shot that pays homage to the ‘Cinema Paradiso’, among other things) by the collision of a train with a car and, from that precise moment, his existence changes forever. His career, professional and personal, will be subordinated to two fundamental pillars: love for his family and love for cinema.

Spielberg exhibits a magic that is as unusual in other filmmakers as it is typical in his direction. He captures with precious images those specific moments that represent a before and after, where you are forever fascinated by films and their mystical aura. The director returns to his memories to recall how the seventh art entered his life and forever revolutionized his way of understanding the world. However, it wasn’t until his teens that he rediscovered the medium, seeing the unbeatable ‘The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance’ on the big screen and made the decision to pursue filmmaking. Not just to see them, to direct them. The skepticism of his parents (more of the father than of the mother) corroborates that dichotomous discourse of which Spielberg had laid the foundations from the beginning. While for Burt it’s a hobby, for Sam it’s a job, a dream to realize. His uncle Boris (Judd Hirsch), who used to work in Hollywood, also suddenly shows up to warn him, acting in one of the best scenes in the film: “This industry will swallow you, art will leave you alone”. This maxim about burying one’s life to achieve working excellence, so masterfully explored by Damien Chazelle in ‘Whiplash’, ‘The City of Stars: La La Land’ or the recent ‘Babylon’, is re-proposed here in a less extreme way. Spielberg moves away from Manichaeism to save the obvious chiaroscuro that is the backbone of every family. You won’t find peace in sacrifice for cinema, not even the glory you can achieve will be worth more than a family picnic. However, Spielberg shows it without condescension, accepting that his predilection for films is greater than any other fear or risk. It is what it is because it can’t be anything else, it can’t change it. A declaration of love as pure as it is dangerous, as incorruptible as it is harmful.

This is why ‘Los Fabelmans’ is a declaration of love for cinema, with all that it entails. Between a sentence to which the protagonist is condemned and salvation itself. The cause and consequence of family detachment are found in that same root. Sam’s character finds in the movies the reason to get away from his loved ones and, at the same time, the escape route that gives him the ability to dream, the painkiller with which to take refuge in other worlds and fantasize.. Spielberg applies a serious and adult look at passion understood as an obsession with something, with all the positive and negative it brings.

Spielberg’s Underworld

James Lipton once told Steven Spielberg during an interview that the ships in “Encounters of the Third Kind” communicated using computer-generated musical sounds. The reference tells about itself: the mathematical and calculating part of the father’s computer engineering and the artistic creativity of the mother’s music. Paternal references (or lack thereof) have always been a constant in Spielberg’s cinema. From ‘ET’ to the dynamics between Harrison Ford and Sean Connery in ‘Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade’. Pragmatism against feeling, the need to be useful in a job against the essential to flow, create and break with the pre-establishedO. These underworlds that Spielberg has always had at hand come together in the life of a young Sam (the brilliant Gabriel Labelle). Despite their differences of opinion, the Fabelman family seems idyllic, but an event drives them apart, resulting in Burt and Mitzi’s divorce.

As notorious as the separation of Spielberg’s parents was, the director marvelously portrays the dysfunctionality of a broken family. Moving away from the heartbreaking dramas (which he has), he manages to capture the chaos, the loss of the future and the pain that every member of the family feels in the face of news of this caliber. Spielberg traces a demystification of parents, transforming them into human beings who make mistakes and, precisely for this reason, loving them even more.. Ironically, broken homes can be where the strongest bonds are found. Either way, Spielberg pays homage to his father and mother figures once and for all with “The Fabelmans,” commending their sacrifice and forgiving any flaws he may have discovered during his childhood and adolescence.

With a broken family, constant travel due to his father’s work and an incipient love of cinema, Sam ends up exploding after being bullied. Spielberg’s Judaism gave him serious headaches during his student days, to the point of being discriminated against in high school. The director uses a helping of teen drama (with prom night included) to highlight the deep anti-Semitism he has always suffered; the one that, however, led him to sign the masterpiece that is ‘Schindler’s List’.

‘Los Fabelman’ thus stands as the ideal conclusion of a once-in-a-lifetime journey full of masterpieces. After making several cult films, Spielberg puts the finishing touches to his filmography with a slew of expertly narrated anecdotes. But, even if it would be a perfect and poetic conclusion to his career, we cross our fingers that Spielberg still has some rope left for a while and can thus continue to amaze us as only he can.

Note: 8.

The best: Handling the intimate epic about the origins of a legendary director.

Worse: Divorce drama isn’t nearly as potent as Sam’s infatuation with movies.