The Fabelmans - Film Review

Post

Subscribe

Can a true artist demand absolute truth, but know love in equal measure? With close friend and collaborator, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tony Kushner, Steven Spielberg's The Fabelmans fictionalises his own youth in film. Through a cinematic world of beauty and ugliness, pleasure and pain, The Fabelmans is not only a portrait of Spielberg, the artist as a young man, and a homage to the power of art to mirror our own truth, but also an examination of the dichotomy the true artist faces.

The fictional Jewish-American family's journey from New Jersey to Phoenix, Arizona and ultimately to California mirrors Spielberg's own life journey, with all its family dinners, camping trips, laughter and tears. Kushner hit upon the theatrical term fabel to form the basis of the fictional family's name. Fabel specifically emphasises personal textual interpretation by a playwright or director, in this case, informed by the family's collective experiences. Conflicts and delights from Spielberg's formative years harvested from his memories by Kushner over countless hours across shooting other projects become the truths distilled and elevated into art via Spielberg's lens.

"Dad, can you stop calling this a hobby," teenaged Sammy Fabelman (20 year-old Canadian Gabriel LaBelle, in a breakout role) asks his father, Burt Fabelman (Paul Dano, in an earnest but multi-layered performance). Growing up in post-World War II era Arizona, Sammy makes it clear he wants to become a filmmaker. Burt - a bona fide dawn-of-the-computer-age boffin for whom science explains everything – initially disapproves of how much time Sammy spends using his movie camera. Dano's Burt softens his attitude after Sammy recruits his scout troop to make Escape to Nowhere, an impressive war film, in which he elicits a great scene from the older boy playing the surviving soldier from a brutal battlefield.



After Sammy's maternal grandmother Laura Schildkraut (Robyn Bartlett) dies, his mother Mitzi Fabelman (Michelle Williams, a luminous characterisation of range and depth) mourns her deeply. Burt prevails on Sammy to make a film of their family camping trip to help Mitzi come to terms with her loss and hopefully rediscover her old self. Mitzi's Yiddish retired lion tamer Uncle Boris (Judd Hirsch, in a memorable cameo) arrives unannounced to visit, as Laura was his sister. He becomes aware of Sammy's calling and warns him prophetically: "Art will tear you apart."



LaBelle's Sammy evolves with assurance during the family's symbolic shift west, then with vulnerability when art really does start tearing him apart. Ever since Sammy could remember, Burt and his best friend Bennie Loewy (Seth Rogen, in his most sensitive and nuanced performance to date) have been inseparable at work and at home. Bennie moves with the family from New Jersey to Arizona, to continue the sunrise technological work alongside his friend. But when Burt is called to California, Bennie can't follow him as a professional sidekick and sounding board. And thereby develops the problem, at first brought to light by Sammy's family holiday film.



Mitzi might have been a concert pianist but gives it away for marriage but Sammy's uncovered truth has devastating consequences for the family. Knowing her secret is at the core of Sammy's formative experiences, Mitzi tells him to follow his heart, advice that echoes throughout the film's third act. Troubled by unexpected adult insight, Sammy shuns his camera until he gains a renewed appreciation as a high school senior of the power of filmmaking to create a narrative or illuminate the truth.



Mitzi remains true to her heart in making a decision that causes the family so much devastation. Stifled creatively by contemporary expectation that she maintain a perfect wife and mother profile, the artist in Mitzi continually rises to the surface, whether playing Bach on the piano or dancing by the family camp firelight. In this radiant performance that already carries Best Actress Oscar buzz, Williams develops a fine balance in characterisation between Mitzi's artistry and her love for Sammy and daughters Reggie (Julia Butters), Natalie (Keeley Karsten), and Lisa (Sophia Kopera).



The Fabelmans marks a return by Spielberg to where his life's work began: as a six-year-old boy having fallen in love with the world of celluloid after seeing Cecil B. DeMille's The Greatest Show on Earth in a Philadelphia cinema. One of the most magical moments in The Fabelmans is the image of six-year-old Sammy (an endearing cameo by Santa Barbara youngster Mateo Zoran Francis-DeFord) staring in fascination at 8mm film projected in his darkened closet onto the palms of his hands, a metaphor for Sammy's developing fascination for making images.



Spielberg recalls unchartered emotional waters in reliving seminal moments of his formative years. If art searches out truth, the resultant technical and artistic mastery of this filmic adaptation raises the bar on the notion of Cinéma Verité. The Fabelmans has been polished to an Oscar-worthy glow abetted by long-time, multiple-Academy-award-winning Spielberg associates John Williams (music), Michael Kahn (editor) and Janusz Kaminiski (director of photography).



The Fabelmans is a coming-of-age journey into the heart, a generous ride through the lives of a family that runs just on two-and-a-half hours, without a single wasted frame. And we see close-up the way mid-twentieth-century movie frames were cut and spliced together to create the filmmaker's art. There is insight into how raw film footage is edited, polished and set to a soundtrack to portray unforgettable characters and a compelling narrative.

As a bonus, we are treated to a late scene, in which a famous director declaims on the positioning of the horizon line in any given image. This is not only a lesson in practical cinematography, and an allegory for life as a winner or an also-ran, but also an inspiration for the young artist already torn apart a couple of times. But Sammy is prepared now and in the right place - Hollywood - to seek his destiny without fear. But as in any life, the journey is every bit as important as the destination.

The Fabelmans is a beautiful movie in every imaginable way.

*



#cinema
#film_reviews
#movie_reviews
%wneverywhere