«Your father was a computer engineer. Your musical mother,” James Lipton, host of the talk show, tells her. Inside the Actors’ Studio to Steven Spielberg in a 1999 broadcast. “When the spaceship [de Encuentros cercanos del tercer tipo] land, how do they communicate? The director’s immediate response is just a smile. “I’d love to tell you that was planned,” he replies, suddenly realizing that he had inadvertently played his parents in that film. But he hadn’t noticed until this moment. You’re right”.
In that film, just its third theatrically released, the spaceship and humanity communicate through computer-generated music. Once you notice it, the metaphor is so obvious that it’s hard to believe you didn’t notice it before. But that kind of knack for cinematic metaphor could only come from someone who realized the power of the moving image at an early age.
The movie The Fabelmans it’s just about all these things. Of a married couple (she a musician, he an engineer) who understand each other in the same way that humanity could understand aliens: through translation. Neither of them really speaks the other’s language, but they do their best to translate until that effort ends up widening the silences between them.
The Fabelmans movie review
It is also about a boy, their son, Sammy, whom one day they take to see The greatest show in the world (1952) and the sequence in which a train derails in a captivating spectacle of destruction changes his life forever. From that moment on, recreating that feeling will become the young man’s obsession.
Later in his life, as a teenager, young Sammy Fabelman (played with effortless innocence and honest tenderness by Gabriel LaBelle) will continue to explore and nurture his natural talent. That talent, as his grandfather (Judd Hirsch) points out, could end up alienating him from everyone and even from those closest to him: “it’s the artist’s curse,” he warns her. However, Sammy will soon find that cinema is capable of not only moving, but also revealing truths, hiding flaws, exalting lies and showing us not only who we are, but also who we could be.
Sammy Fabelman, like his real-life counterpart, discovers very early that the key to cinema lies in editing: what is left in and what is left out of the film.
When we go to the cinema […] we do not want to escape from life, but to find it”, writes Robert McKee in his classic work on screenwriting historyin which he makes, I believe, the argument that Spielberg has embodied in each and every one of his films: cinema, even the most commercial, is not an escape from life, but a way of «exercising our emotions to enjoy, learn and add depth to our days.”
The Fabelmans movie review
The movie The Fabelmans – whose screenplay was written with his frequent collaborator, Tony Kushner – ran the risk of being a solipsistic feast of self-aggrandizement. But Kushner and Spielberg, in his first writing credit since Artificial intelligence (yet another of his father-son films), they avoid recounting all the stories and legends that popular culture already knows about “the greatest director of all time.” We never see him give directions to star Joan Crawford at 19. There are no obvious allusions to classic dialogue from her films. There is not a moment where someone, for example, comes out of a closet wearing a funny wig, nor is there a single whip in sight. There’s just that famous episode where young Steven met John Ford (charmingly played here by David Lynch) and the movie tips he gave him.
What there is, as always in his films, is a careful and intentional use of audiovisual language. His placements are thoughtful and revealing, as the father (Paul Dano) struggles to teach the kids proper campfire technique, while Benny (the family friend played by Seth Rogen) plays with mom Mitzi in the background. (Michelle Williams, spectacular as always). The two of them, by the way, do speak the same language: that of emotion and not of reason.
At 76, Spielberg already understands his parents better, but the film does not intend to explain them to us or show us his points of view. He knows that understanding them better doesn’t mean being able to tell his story, and he keeps the film’s focus firmly on his film double.
Sammy Fabelman is not who Steven Spielberg used to be, but he is who Steven Spielberg felt he was.
J. Ivan Morales Writer, film director and editorial director at his friendly neighbor film publication, Cine PREMIERE. He will never give up hope for a second season of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip and Firefly.