'The Fabelmans' Movie Review: Fab

The Fabelmans

The Fabelmans

Director: Steven Spielberg

Actors: Gabriel LaBelle, Michelle Williams

Rating: 4/5

The Fabelmans is a family film - or at any rate, about a family named the Fabelmans. But it is essentially film history. The life of few filmmakers, barring Steven Spielberg - with such astounding, continuing impact on both cinema as personal art, and collective mania - is likely to elicit a response that's nothing short of: How did he happen? He is a walking, talking, living movie history; isn't he?

So, yes, this is a memoir alright. Delightfully wrapped inside a ‘Spielberg movie'. And I don't mean this in a way of how all art is autobiographical.

Here, Spielberg, 77, at the evening of his career - though it's impossible that the indefatigable director will ever walk into the sunset - looks back at his life, with such warmth, candour and humour, that it could not have been easy to seamlessly translate on screen.

As I've come to realise, more often than not, the actual hero behind stories of all the supposed greats/giants is usually the parents, or at least one of them. Spielberg, behind the camera, looking at himself as super-young Sam (Gabriel LaBelle), mostly shines the spotlight on his beautifully bohemian mother (Michelle Williams), seemingly stuck in a sorted but joyless marriage.

Or actually that's not what it is. She's who she is. It's equally impossible for children to judge parents, who've given them so much love and care, besides life itself. Spielberg (co-writing with Tony Kushner) basically offers his childhood story, of the separation of his mom and dad, for no fault of either, as is - sans comment.

Yet, like we're all lead characters of our own lives, the story of the Fabelmans is entirely the perspective of Sam, the eldest son. The film opens with the screening of The Greatest Show on Earth (1952), that the Fabelmans take their child to. That's the boy's first time in a cinema.
He's obviously struck. And while that'd be true for all our first visits to a theatre, and the magic that followed, turning us into film buffs, forever - the penny that dropped for li'l Sam was how he could recreate what he saw, at home.

His mother, more artistically inclined, could spot her boy's interest, plus genius. His gentle father (Paul Dano) was an engineering guru of sorts, and may have preferred a similar professional direction for his child.

Up until this point, isn't it amazing how similar the world's greatest director's memoir resonates with any other desi's! Indeed, the Fabelmans, as the mother puts it, are split between an interest in science, and the arts. It's the oldest dilemma of India's education system too, where children get demarcated into three separate streams.

Still, nothing merges arts, commerce, and science, as cinema does. In Sam, you can trust that he will deep dive into practicing and understanding movie craft. Once that is adequately mastered, expression, story-telling, world-view, can more easily follow.

How else does one explain a director with the wand to blow up the big screen with sci-fi (ET), thriller (Jaws), adventure (Indiana Jones), war (Saving Private Ryan), pulling off The Post (on journalism), for a quickie on a break, or casually slipping in, say, Schindler's List (on the holocaust), while still working on Jurassic Park!

The latter movie, by the way, seriously cracked open Indian market for Hollywood, making Spielberg, our local mainstream. Another reason his early life interests us. Besides the inherently emotional quality/draw of the film itself.

As Spielberg tells director SS Rajamouli in an interview on The Fabelmans, he felt naked shooting it - often stepping out of the set, to cry alone. It's bizarre how, as a rich, smart boy in sunny California, he had to face anti-Semitic jabs/jibes on campus.

Looks like no matter where you go, humans are simply determined to segregate and discriminate. It's just Hindu-Muslim, somewhere else; upper-lower caste elsewhere still. The natural crap never stops. The world is what it is.

Beyond laudable how Spielberg used tools of cinema to show us as he saw it, but more than thrilled us to bits, over decades. That he was similarly entertaining his family, friends, and classmates, with his camera, ever since a child, isn't what makes The Fabelmans special.

It does make it a little different from other fictionalised autobiographical movies of filmmakers, say, Fellini's 8 1/2, Tornatore's Cinema Paradiso, Crowe's Almost Famous, Cuaron's Roma…The storytelling sense I got from those fantastic films was along the lines of something that begins with, "Once upon a time…"

Brilliantly enacted, anecdotally funny, The Fabelmans has the feel of something that goes: And you know, this one time, Uncle Boris (Judd Hirsch), from the circus, came over, to leave behind a precious life-lesson - that it's brave to stick your neck inside a lion's mouth, but art to figure how to get out of it! And that art often is at friction with family.

Oh, must tell you about a moment, when this famous director (John Ford, played by David Lynch), showed up, and said… The rest is history. Through a film I could so repeat.