One of the cinematographic phenomena of the last few years is that we are seeing a good number of renowned filmmakers remembering their childhood or youth through semi-autobiographical reveries. One of the great classics during his lifetime, Steven Spielberg, who with ‘Los Fabelmans’ not only wanted to explore the circumstances of his childhood, but also the meaning of creative urgency, did not want to miss out on this current.
We have seen paternalistic works like that of Alfonso Cuarón and his ‘Roma’, explorations of larger conflicts, with Kenneth Branagh’s fabulous ‘Belfast’, the anecdotal sense of the lost in Paul Thomas Anderson’s ‘Licorize Pizza’, the memory of a historical fact from Richard Linklater’s ‘Apollo 10½: A Space Childhood’ or the clumsy exploration of the seeds of American racism in James Gray’s ‘Armageddon Time’, to name just a few. But few have drawn a self-portrait as naked as Steven Spielberg.
A biopic that builds itself
Although the young protagonist of ‘The Fabelmans’ is called Sammy, the physical similarities between Spielberg and Gabriel LaBelle make the intentions very clear. If the actor of ‘Ready Player One’ was already quite similar to the director, his film avatar now does not hide the man who changed cinema forever by directing ‘Jaws’ at the age of 28. It may seem like an act of self-condescendence, or just a $40 million form of therapy, as he has liked to define the project himself, but no one can say he hasn’t earned it.
Regardless of the affinity with his cinema or not, ‘Los Fabelmans’ is, above all, a series of keys to understand it, but beyond that, to understand why there is a need to make films. Here, Spielberg and Janusz Kaminski establish themselves as creators of something that can only be defined as ultracinema, after perfecting what was presented in ‘West Side Story’. With precision direction and photography that feeds the eyes, they make each frame look almost like painting in motion.
And this embellishment of textures and light makes It is important both what is told and how to do it, because this is not Spielberg’s childhood, but an interactive memory journal of someone painting his memory with the tools he acquires in his life throughout the scenes. In other words, ‘Los Fabelmans’ is a film that feeds back on itself, it is an examination of the different forces that have shaped its cinema, from family drama to how its sensitivity is forged through its environment.
The sense of artistic creation
Spielberg says he discussed the idea for what became the final cut with his mother before she passed away in 2017, and she told him that he had always been recreating her story in the form of a metaphor. Now takes the form of an archetypal rite of passage cinema, which he had already played in very different ways in ‘Empire of the Sun’ or ‘Artificial Intelligence’ and plants it in a realistic way, halfway between the melancholy of ‘Ordinary People’ and some of the nostalgic spark of ‘American Graffiti’ ‘. A classic melodrama, almost anachronistic.
However, the author is not recounting his trauma with his father or his mother’s sadness, but touching all the keys that have left edges in his creative development, revealing to us that talent is as necessary as an internal emotional gear that gives meaning to the simple fact of expressing something. For this, he has been capturing clues and details of his work that are captured in a more or less intuitive way, with more direct associations or just insinuated.
In addition to all the elements of his childhood that shaped him, from his first visit to the cinema and the impact it had, Spielberg invites the viewer to recognize moments that could define his most iconic works, in the form of reverse easter eggs, since these are the moments that would supposedly define his work to come. There are several threads that unite the 33 feature films in his filmography and, quite simply, some are more closely tied to his loved ones than others.
A Rosetta Stone from Spielberg’s imaginary
We can recognize her smaller personal marks, like her characters looking at something close-up, like when Mitzi dances during a camping trip, and larger ones, like the archetypal Spielbergian fathereven the reversal of roles that can be recognized in Roy Neary and his obsession, a reckless idealist seeking the illogical, a personality that best represents his mother, although when he cries in the bathroom in ‘Encounters of the Third Kind’ and his son tells him confront that attitude there is an identical reflection in the film.
The idea of divorce, which takes the protagonist of ‘Catch Me If You Can’ into his own fantasy world, here sheds some light on Spielberg’s attraction to Abagnale’s story, however in ‘The Fabelmans’ he does not become the impulse of his fascination for cinema, but the catalyst to turn it into a form of survival or self-assertion. Meanwhile, we can get cross-references like the red and blue lights under a door when Sammy binge-watches a movie, which is also reminiscent of some moments from his alien epics.
It is impossible not to relate the filming of his horror film with his little sisters to the adventures of ‘Super 8’ (2011), which he produced for JJ Abrams, but it is that in that one he already glimpsed the fascination for the calamity that a scene identical to that of the train in ‘The Greatest Show on Earth’ instilled in him (1952), which will be achieved in ‘The Devil on Wheels’, ‘1941’ or ‘The War of the Worlds’. We can also glimpse the beginning of ‘Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade’ (1989) in the excursion of a teenage Sammy to the Arizona desert, like the boy scout trip of Henry Jones Jr.
The tension between reality and art
It is not the only reference to the tetralogy, although the most unexpected is when his mother impulsively bought a pet monkey, which would inspire the Nazi capuchin of ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’. Seeing Sammy and his friends on their bikes takes us to ‘ET’ or when his mom tries to drive into a tornado to get a closer look with all the children inside, she is at the same time the protagonist of ‘Encounters in the third kind’ as Tom Cruise of ‘The War of the Worlds’, despite the fact that there he takes the opposite direction.
Sammy also makes his World War II film that looks like a rehearsal for ‘Saving Private Ryan’, with the weight of the sacrifice of a protagonist like the one Matt Damon will carry in his final close-up, although sensations of ‘Workhorse’ and a parallel moment to ‘Lincoln’ and the Battle of Petersburg, where Daniel Day Lewis was telling Jared Harris about the horrors of the war they’ve been fighting. Spielberg treats the search for the frame of the trip with his parents as when Cruise looks for the solution in ‘Minority Report’ with classical music and the camera surrounding the protagonist as he makes a startling discovery.
In that rain of memories the tension between the power of the family and art becomes clearer, a justification of his creative inclination worthy of Damien Chazelle which is exemplified here in the incompatible characters of his parents, the industrial work and earthly security of his father in the face of adventure, imagination and the irresponsibility of his mother, who also suffers from depression, probably because she has emasculated her need for expression by become a housewife. Far from blaming her for leading to the fracture of her family, she tries to understand her.
The mythology of the image and the horizon line
Thus, Sammy’s defense position is a form of Spielberg penanceBecause in reality, if he doesn’t take that path, he could bear the bitterest of his mother, perhaps he is the absent father in his own cinema as a result of having taken that path, of having decided to resume his art. There are those who say that the director’s life is not interesting enough to be contained in a film, and this is something that he himself highlights in his speech, because what he tells us has more to do with the great meaning of things. little.
From the influence of a small event in the course of the lives of many. The train that derails, how a small moment becomes an obsession, and how trying to recreate something concrete that changes your reality becomes a profession that changes the reality of many others. ‘The Fabelmans’ turns into something mythological an event as commonplace as family breakdown, just as their movie on the beach —which also rehearses the scenes from “Jaws”— overwhelms the bully of his class by seeing how a movie could remake his identity, with which Sammy/Spielberg demonstrates that cinema transforms the everyday, it has the power to elevate anything above its own truth.
The final scene, a chance meeting with legendary Hollywood director John Ford, played by David Lynch resignifies the lesson that the director gave Spielberg about where the camera should be in front of the horizon, and at that moment in which his wisdom passes over to him, he teaches us how the cinema of the young Jew will end up turning around the classicism of the veteran, which consisted of keeping the shots interesting. Spielberg reinterprets the horizon in a much more subjective way, never putting the objective essence of his films at the center, not even in ‘The Fabelmans’.