United States, 2022
Directed by Steven Spielberg
With Gabriel LaBelle (Sammy Fabelman as a teenager), Mateo Zoryan (Sammy Fabelman as a boy), Michelle Williams (Mitzi Fabelman), Paul Dano (Burt Fabelman), Seth Rogen (Bennie Loewy)
Cinema is a gift of life, given out of love.
It was not eagerly sought after: the first scene shows a boy stridently reluctant to go to the movies, with his parents trying their best to convince him he should give it a try. Subtly, their arguments hint at their differences and how they would shape Sammy Fabelman’s relation to both the seventh art and his kin: the father, Burt Fabelman, starts long and enthusiastic description of the technology of projecting movies, emphasizing what a real, safe trick it is, while the mother, Mitzi Fabelman, promises encounters with big (because of the screen size) and great (because of talent) folks and visions of big and great stories.
To their relief, Sammy Fabelman would enjoy the 1952 entertainment shot by Cecil B. DeMille everybody was talking about, “The Greatest Show on Earth”. But it turns out it is mainly because of a spectacular and thrilling stunt, the moment when a car collides with a train and causes the wagons to slide out of the tracks. The impression is so vivid that right away Sammy Fabelman decides he wants a model train for Hanukkah and then that he would reenact the stunt. That is exciting but problematic: the toy gets damaged and Burt Fabelman does not get why his boy is trashing it. But Mitzi Fabelman, sensing that the impressive pictures her son watched explain a lot, comes up with an idea: she takes her husband’s little camera and proposes Sammy to shoot his maniacal reenactment of a rail disaster so he could watch over and over again the mesmerizing stunt and got the same excitement he first felt instead of damaging further the toy.
She meant to tame an excitement that could pour more oil to the already burning problem of anxiety the boy suffers (that has already been spelled out, literally, by the parents, as they talk about the kid’s reaction to the flick, though a sarcastic remark of Sammy about telling a word fully hint that he is aware he has an issue with his emotions). She actually creates a passion that would prove impossible to check and actually life-defining: Sammy would never let go of the camera and shoot skits from various genres, from comedy to horror, with his two sisters as willing actresses.
That is so intense and time-consuming the film would just jump over many years to tell the story of Sammy: he is now a teenager soon to enter high school and a Scout, but he is still holding a camera in his hands – he has grown up but he is more a film fan and would-be filmmaker than ever. The change is simply a matter of scale: the camera is more sophisticated and so are his films, still trying to reenact what he watched in the theaters, but with greater ambitions, like shooting dramatic and complicated stunts from the western genre or a war movie, while his cast comprises now all his pals from his Scout Association. The shorts are so good he becomes a star in his own way and wows his parents – tough if both are proud, Mitzi is more emotionally moved by her son’s artistic activity than Burt who views it as a mere hobby – but after all, she used to be a keen artist of her own, a piano player who could have been a classical concert performer if it were not for the need to look after her children. The mother does not say much about what she hopes for her son but the father clearly indicates he would like his son to look like him – that is, a promising engineer.
A gift of life, even given out of love, can still be poisoned.
The death of her mother is a great shock to Mitzi. To soothe her, Burt would like his son gives her something lively, beautiful, a reflection of how graceful and happy their life can be: a short made up of the various reels shot during an exhilarating camping trip in the wild, an adventure full of fun they had not so long ago, the father, the mother, the son, the tow older sisters who were the first actresses of Sammy, and the youngest one born around the same period, and the greatest friend Burt has, a well-liked fixture of the family life, to the point he is viewed as an uncle, Bennie Loewy. Sammy likes the idea but he is in no hurry to edit the reels as he is to shoot another film: here comes the first truly awkward moment between father and son, the clearest sign the father is no longer willing to accept cinema could mean everything to the son.
But things become really embarrassing when Sammy starts to edit: eagerly surveying frames and details he suddenly finds out the camera recorded attitudes, gazes, gestures implying more than a friendly relation between Bennie Loewy and Mitzi. Making pictures is no longer about fun, pleasure, thrills, imagination: a picture can tell a lot more and reveal unexpected things that enlighten – and hurt.
A crack has appeared: it would grow bigger, creating a tension hard to handle and yet not quite prone to be an irreparable break between mother and son at first and then causing the wunderkind to drop the ambition of making films. Moving out to another place, in California, because Burt got a dream job as a computing engineer and manager at IBM, signal that a whole chapter of the life of Sammy Fabelman is over.
And the new chapter looks bleak: entering a new high school means confronting antisemitic attitudes, jocks acting like bullies, girls causing confusion as romantic aspirations and sheer lust beckon. Cracks also appear between father and mother: for once the couple is not painted in idealistic ways, the nice folks always getting along, in part thanks to the trademark patient, sensitive, benevolent ways of Burt. Mitzi craves for Bennie, she cannot help. And Burt still wants that his son goes to college to pursue the same career as the one he has and is consuming so much of his time that he is more distant and congenial than before.
But change is always possible, a fairy tale can actually takes place: His self-proclaimed girlfriend suggests Sammy could shoot the gathering at the beach over a full day of entertainment and sunbathing that usually celebrated the end of the school term as she is hosted for a family dinner at the Fabelmans’ house: more tension, more arguments, and nevertheless her idea is endorsed, Sammy picks up again his camera. And the passion is back, the film another success – though one of the students, one of Sammy’s tormentors, does not like it, because he feels the images, clearly conveying admiration at his physical skills and beauty, are a lie, making him someone great and heroic that he would never be: the theme of the image revealing much more than it is purported to do comes back haunting Sammy. But he is less troubled this time, far more aware of what pictures mean and far more confident in his talent. And even if his parents get a divorce, his girlfriend walks out of him, and university proves a burden he cannot avoid, he knows what he wants to do now – and would get it, thanks to a CBS manager and an old man named John Ford.
So cinema was a real gift. But in this narrative it is not just the nature of the gift that matters but also who handed it over in the first place. As much as a love letter to cinema, or more precisely the exciting and daunting effort to make films and grasp what they entail and elicit, “The Fabelmans” is a love letter to a mother, or more precisely that special bond linking a son to his mother and both the happiness and the challenges that could come as both navigate their own sentiments and expectations as they gaze at each other and even find more about each other than they would expect. The film’s great idea to examine the art and craft of filmmaking not only as they galvanize a young man but also as they are shaped by and themselves actively shape his relation with his mother: in Sammy’s narrative arc, the cultural education and the emotional intimacy are interlocked in wonderful and damning ways, making his coming-of-age tale a complex, destabilizing but defining, experience.
Mitzi, a vibrant, zesty, and yet brittle character, a complex protagonist driving the film forward and injecting strength as well as sentimentality, a part that was not so easy to play, though Michelle Williams rises effortlessly to the challenge, stands out as a more than a mother – she is explicitly a muse, with even an erotic edge and an impish mood, and never the film displays this more poetically than during her whimsical dance one night during that camping trip that felt like a dream moment but turned out to be a nightmarish turning point, a visually magnificent scene. And that makes her sentimental crisis even more important for Sammy’s fate and her own narrative arc so poignant: at times, the film deals as much about her torn-apart but spirited personality as the ingeniousness and doubts of Sammy, wonderfully played by Gabriel LaBelle.
This elaborate, intricate narrative is handled, indeed, with a splendid cinematography that captures what could have been the light, the atmosphere, the zeitgeist, and just the practical realities of the 1950s and 1960s in Arizona and California. A luminous reconstruction, the film hits the right buttons with the perfect touch: it embraces quiet, simple sentimentality, avoiding getting schmaltzy and displaying a kid’s passion without fawning or fooling. This is first and foremost an effective, endearing yarn spun by a well known and world-ranking storyteller. Director Steven Spielberg would always be a masterful filmmaker keen on telling a good, entertaining story that can seduce a lot of people and enable him to probe the possibilities of a shot and a camera.
This film has its source into his own life and feelings, leading him, by the way, to articulate and to foreground the cultural heritage of one of his lead characters (in this case, Jewishness) in the clearest and most touching manner he ever did. More teasingly, it hints at his old obsession with cinematic stunts and performances – after all, everything started because of a fake train wreck Sammy wanted to happen again. But more simply, it is a mature and masterful double love story that makes a boy grow up into a hopeful young adult, a specific and tense experience that can make crowds dream and that has definitely delivered a genuinely solid and satisfactory display of what cast, crew, screenplay, editing, and just light and shadow (in all the acceptations of the words) can do. Cinema can look like a gift with such a film.