Steven Spielberg ventures into his own family history in The Fabelmans. His late work is told in a classic way, but is still politically very active.
Early successes: young Steven Spielberg (Gabriel LaBelle) on set Foto: Storyteller Distribution Co., LLC.
When the light comes on again, the child is stunned. A train wreck from Cecil B. DeMille’s The Greatest Show on Earth is a traumatic experience for young Sammy Fabelman on his first trip to the cinema in January 1952. Not a trace of the joys of cinema that his parents promised him before the show.
On the return journey through the rainy small town in New Jersey, he stares in silence, in the following nights the car that is swept off the tracks and the derailed wagons catch up with him again and again. Until his parents give in to his urging and give him a toy train for the next Hanukkah.
The train was the necessary prop to recreate the movie scene and film the recreated accident with his father’s 8mm camera. Sammy Fabelman is director Steven Spielberg’s alter ego in his new film, the fictionalized autobiographical The Fabelmans.
From that moment on, Sammy films non-stop, wrapping his sisters in toilet paper to make mummy movies, filming mock surgeries. Spielberg’s film follows family life in New Jersey, growing up with Sammy and his three sisters, Reggie, Natalie and Lisa. Life is determined by the job of his father, Burt Fabelman (Paul Dano), who works as an electrical engineer, repairs radios in his spare time and begins to develop the first computer-like circuits for American electronics companies in the mid-1950s.
“The Fablemans”. Directed by Steven Spielberg. With Gabriel LaBelle, Michelle Williams and others USA 2022, 151 min.
Mitzi Fabelman (Michelle Williams), the mother, gave up her career as a concert pianist when the children were born. The family moves for the first time when the father gets the offer to concentrate on developing computers for a new job in Arizona. At the mother’s insistence, the father also gets his best friend Bennie Loewy (Seth Rogen) a job there.
The parents classically heteronormative
“The Fabelmans” begins as a historical film about a Jewish family in the 1950s, the time when US politics was taking its course, which was dominant until the 1990s. The gender ratios of the parents appear to be classically heteronormative. On the one hand there is the somewhat taciturn but open-minded Burt with his career in the country’s key industry of the future. On the other hand, the loving, understanding Mitzi, who is pausing her self-realization in classical music in favor of a role as a housewife and mother.
Set in the arid landscapes of Arizona, Sammy shoots increasingly ambitious films with his Boy Scout friends. For a Western he blows a ton of dust into a tourist carriage and, inspired by an afternoon screening of John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, devised a technique to flash the film in the shooting scenes.
A family camping trip with “Uncle Bennie” becomes a turning point. Sammy (played by Gabriel LaBelle as a youngster now) films his siblings and mother fooling around on the trip. A little later, Mitzi’s mother dies and Sammy’s father asks him to make a film from the camping trip footage to cheer up the mother.
But as Sammy sifts through the footage, he notices a bond between his mother and his father’s best friend that goes well beyond friendship. Unable to bring up his mother’s relationship with the family friend, Sammy begins to cut it. Only after an argument does Sammy confront his mother about the recordings.
High school as a nightmare
Appropriately, the father received the offer to move to IBM in California a little later. The family moves a second time and is initially accommodated in a rented house while the actual dream house is still being built. For the children of the family, the new high school begins as a nightmare. As the only Jews in the area, they are confronted with everyday anti-Semitism and long to return to life in Arizona. Another film project becomes a lifeline for Sammy: Shortly before he graduates from school, he shoots a trip to the sea for his class.
Spielberg had been planning an autobiographical film since the turn of the millennium, when his sister Anne Spielberg wrote a first draft. 2019 while working on In West Side Story, Spielberg revisited the project with longtime collaborator Tony Kushner. The Fabelmans is a visually dated film that at times echoes classic family melodramas like David Lean’s 1944 This Happy Breed.
Even more than in “West Side Story”, the film gives the impression that Spielberg’s filmmaking has arrived at his late work. More than Spielberg’s other films of the last decade, The Fabelmans demonstrates the power of his approach to imbuing seemingly inconsequential elements that set the story’s ambience with political overtones in the middle of a mainstream film.
