Thoughts on The Fabelmans

 I once was the most annoying person in the world. I am still in the top five percent most annoying people but I’m way better now. Anyway, during that period I thought Spielberg was just okay. Maybe it was my age and his ubiquity in cinema by the time but I sorta shrugged my shoulders at him. 

Now as an adult I realize he’s just a guy who loves movies and maybe feels a little guilty about how much joy he gets from them. 

Part of what makes Spielberg such a fun director to watch as he gets older is that I think his nature as a filmmaker is changing. He seemed like he always wanted to push this medium ahead with either technological advancements or advancements within genres he was working in. For example, for every scene with a half practical half CG Brontosaurus he’s got a scene where Indy shoots the guy instead of dueling for his honor. I don’t think he gets enough credit for the latter. Now he seems much more interested in showing his love for filmmaking and trying to show an entire new generation of people that filmmaking and cinema is not this sort of bland assembly line that it is now. 

The Fabelmans is of course about the Spielberg family stand-in as seen through the lone son of the family. Gabriel LaBelle is really good here with a certain standout scene that I have not stopped thinking about that I’ll talk about soon.  Paul Dano and Michelle Williams are also incredible and will certainly receive some kind of recognition from The Academy. I love that the movie never shows us just how much fighting happens as those characters take great pains to never fight in front of their kids. This is a very conscious decision on Spielberg’s part as he always wants the movie to be from the PoV of Gabriel LaBelle’s character Sammy. 

Spielberg started writing this in earnest during lockdown and after his father passing. There’s probably lots of reasons for this and since I don’t know the guy I can only hazard a guess why that might be. Throughout the film there’s this underlying sense of guilt coming from the character of Sammy. There always seems to be an invisible barrier between almost everyone he talks to, and in one of the standout scenes of the film his parents are explaining that they’re getting divorced and in a mirror Sammy sees himself filming the scene through his 8mm camera. Even the blocking of the scene shows us that Sammy feels like he’s a world away from the rest of his family. He’s sitting at the base of the stairs while the rest of his siblings sit on the couch in direct eyeline of his parents.

I sometimes feel like people who go into this industry are cursed with being an observer of the world around them. Simply just viewing and experiencing things from a pulled out view. It’s not your own but it’s not anyone else's either. Maybe this is just projection on my end, but this makes me think it’s a lot more common. Of course the meta narrative of that scene, and the movie as a whole honestly, is that he did end up filming the scene. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or not. 

There’s one other scene that hasn’t left me since I’ve seen it. Sammy is given the task of recording Senior Ditch Day at a local beach. It’s the first time he’s picked up a camera in a long time in the film and immediately you see how it changes him. In the hallways of his school his shoulders are rolled forward and his arms always crossed. He looks small and unsure, always looking around every corner wondering where his next beating is coming from, but on the beach with his camera he stands tall and moves efficiently and powerfully. 

People notice him and want to make him happy when he’s like this.

He shows the finished product of this film at his prom. We cut back and forth from two perspectives. We see Sammy’s perspective which is one of mild embarrassment and later melancholy. The other perspective we see is from his ubermensch bully Logan. Logan sees himself leap to spike volleyballs and sprint through the sand to win a race. He sees himself looking longingly and an ex-girlfriend, and his reaction is an overwhelming sense of sadness and disgust at himself. He storms out and finds Sammy sitting dejected at the lockers and just screams in bewilderment at him. 

I’m not going to recount the whole scene because just seeing it written on paper wouldn’t do the scene justice. Logan can’t figure out why on earth Sammy would make him look like a hero in the movie when all he’s done is torment him and Sammy can’t figure it out either. Sammy says the line “I made it look like you could fly” or something along those lines. 

This is approximately the point I lost it.     

There’s no rhyme or reason we give certain people the effort we do. Often it’s for naught and we don’t realize it until it’s far too late and we’ve given them far too much. This scene I’m talking about does have a somewhat happy ending. The two boys seem to understand each other maybe a little better, but it’s not gonna make this guy not anti-Semitic or stop him from cheating on his girlfriend. 

Film is the most empathetic art form humanity has created and sometimes that is not a good thing.

This is a little longer than I usually write, but movies like this are why I love movies and love writing about them even more. There’s a lot I didn’t talk about that I would like to revisit in some capacity. Thanks for reading.