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Old 11-13-2022, 06:04 PM
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70.The Fabelmans (Steven Spielberg); grade: C-
The final shot of Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans stands as the worst image of his career. With it, for the first time, the accusations stick that his films are manipulative and sentimental. The final shot features Spielberg stand-in Sammy Fabelman (Gabriel LaBelle) amblin’ off away from the camera on a studio backlot after a lesson in composition from John Ford (played condescendingly by David Lynch) about the importance of an off-center horizon-line in Western frontier paintings. Janusz Kaminski’s camera jerks self-reflexively to adjust the horizon line in a composition so crowded with studio hangars it loses the horizon line—and movie-meaning. The UWS audience in NYC erupted with laughter (no wonder it’s the Oscar frontrunner). The autobiographical movie (Fabel = Spiel (as in, storyteller); Mans = Berg (as in, Jewish ethnicity) means to connect Spielberg’s single-focused interest in filmmaking with the dissolution of his parents’ marriage. However, the final shot exposes this personal confession as phony on both counts—as a disingenuous means to insidious ends.

Spielberg and co-screenwriter Tony Kushner (Munich, Lincoln, West Side Story (2021)) badly need a dramaturge.

Before he gets the offer from CBS, Sammy/Spielberg bemoans college and, especially, the dorm-mate that makes him go back to his divorced father’s home when he claims that he can’t live with a Barry Goldwater supporter (eliciting more guffaws from the University-indoctrinated audience). However, this undercuts the reality that Spielberg’s movies (Jaws, Raiders of the Lost Ark, E.T., Jurassic Park, Saving Private Ryan, War of the Worlds) appealed to those same Goldwater supporters.

It also pierces the pretension of the preceding section of the film in which Sammy uses his filmmaking prowess to win over some of his aryan tormenters in high school (busting the proscenium to honor gilded athleticism like Leni Riefenstahl). On the first day at a California school, Sammy wonders if he and his sisters have been dropped into “The Land of the Sequoia People”—the film’s best line, which, as Armond White points out, rings more like Spielberg’s bell than Kushner’s gong. Pure Kushner: His sexual envy manifests itself in a fantasy of high school victimization that actually represents Kushner’s own ugly vengeance. This is where the superficially pleasurable movie twists into reverse fascism.

Before marriage troubles drive the parents to move from Arizona to California, a planned move from New Jersey to Arizona triggers a psychotic episode for Sammy’s mother (Michelle Williams’s humiliating ethnic drag act) as she drives her kids straight into a tornado. Spielberg visualizes the loss of control as nested shopping carts careening across an intersection, recalling similar moments in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Poltergeist, Twister, and a train crash in The Greatest Show on Earth—but without the panache, the wit, or the familial resonance. More disturbingly, Spielberg and Kushner never dramatize the degree of danger, the emotional disasters, into which both parents (crazy mother, deluded father) keep driving their children. (Spielberg already told this story better—and definitively—in the misunderstood Catch Me If You Can.) Herein resides the psychological opening for Marxist Kushner’s authoritarian influence.

The pretense that The Fabelmans is a movie about the “the magic of movies” represents an ideological sleight-of-hand.

The sequences dramatizing the formative influence of The Greatest Show on Earth (1952 Oscar-winner) and Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) constitute trite psychoanalytic emphasis on overcoming family trauma. Compare those sequences in The Fabelmans to the single most instructive moment in a popular film regarding how movies make meaning in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. There, Spielberg crosscuts between E.T. watching Ford’s The Quiet Man and a psychically inebriated Elliott recreating the Ford film’s famous kiss at school. Shots of little Sammy holding movie-projected images in his hands (eyes wide like David in A.I.) and of boys careening around a subdivision street corner on their bikes and admiring a pretty girl remind of E.T., but as reduced by Kaminski’s movie-based facsimile of Spielberg’s now-lost sense of childhood wonder.

The sequences of Sammy making movies emphasize shallow extensions of the film’s Oedipal drama:

1. His mother’s megalomaniac flirtation—a primal scene—after playing piano inspires Sammy’s solution to the problem of the unrealistic spectacle of kids playing cowboys with toy guns (no connection to his mother’s lover’s gift for prestidigitation)
2. His anger at his mother implicating him in her guilt provides the basis for Sammy’s direction of an actor in a backyard-shot war movie (no connection to his father’s military service)
3. His confusion over his parents’ menage a trois gets obliquely reflected in Sammy’s montage in a class-trip documentary that emphasizes a high school love triangle, culminating in the film’s dramatization (Spielberg’s career nadir) of the era’s canard about movie-going: the importance of “seeing yourself” in movies known by the buzzword “representation”

Sammy discovers his mother’s secret love for her husband’s best friend when he edits a home movie of a family camping trip. The well-edited sequence testifies to Spielberg’s skill but also to his lack of perspective. Over-obvious signs of intimacy between the two adulterers make for subpar imitations of Blow Up and Blow Out. Unlike Antonioni and De Palma’s existential investigations of images, this sequence reveals nothing about Spielberg’s own aesthetic. Spielberg comes up lacking compared to John Boorman’s association of Camelot ur-mythology to his own mother’s infidelity with his father’s best friend in Hope and Glory and, then, the visionary, radical empathy that inspired Boorman’s need as an artist to plumb the depths of Ophelia imagery in Queen and Country. Genuine self-reflection like Boorman’s is not Spielberg-Kushner’s intention anyway.

The sentimental triumph of the final shot of The Fabelmans means to manipulate Spielberg’s now-partisan audience, by congratulating its faux-sophistication, in order to reconcile itself to national divorce and to the spiritual oblivion of contemporary pop culture.
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