Do you remember the first time you realized that cinema was going to be much more than just entertainment in your life? In my case it was on a small television in which a VHS showed a wrinkled Bette Davis feeding her sister a dead bird: ‘What happened to Baby Jane?’ It was a before and after in my existence, just like ‘The Greatest Show on Earth’ was for Steven Spielberg. And the best director alive wants to teach us at 76 years old that he has not lost the illusion for the wonder of moving images is, frankly, beautiful. Although along the way a movie about depression and sadness in the hopeful America of the 60s has come out.
cinema is a dream
Nobody moves the camera like Steven Spielberg. He already demonstrated in ‘West Side Story’ that over the years he has gained insight and technique, but in ‘The Fabelmans’ he has surpassed himself, using the imaginary of cinema (darkness, the fascination of the public, the falseness of the image to, paradoxically, make it more real) to create anthological shots, as if honor the art of creating stories It was the most important task you have ever been given.
But actually, ‘The Fabelmans’ is not “a love letter to the cinema”, As so many have said, getting rid of the joker in the most simplistic way possible: it is an audiovisual essay on the art of making movies, and how life always becomes more magical when passing through the lens of a camera. Spielberg’s dedication to the audiovisual does not come only from a taste, but from a necessity: Sammy knows that his life has no meaning without a camera in his hands. Not because it’s the only thing he knows how to do, but because it’s like breathing: if he doesn’t make movies, he’s not alive.
One of the best shots that exemplify how to unconsciously dedicate your life to movies is at the beginning, when a Sammy who thinks he wants toy trains begins to think in film shots, putting his eyes at the level of the train and letting it happen: it is that moment in which, without knowing it, you become a creator. It is a small moment that will mark the rest of the film: Sammy, a lookalike of Spielberg himself, discover creation through inspiration and shows the viewer wanting to be him that the only way to learn is by trying a thousand times.
What the eye does not see
Making movies manages to calm Sammy’s need to create, yes, but it also gives him the greatest regrets when he discovers that the lens inexorably records everything within its reach, even the forbidden. The importance of the framing and the background of each plane opens before the protagonist in the most painful way possible. When “the magic” of the cinema becomes a ruthless evil spell.
There are still those who describe Spielberg as cheesy or sweetenedfollowing a tendency to not know how to read the audiovisual language and not wanting to see that in ‘The Fabelmans’ he completely breaks with any magical claim to offer a sad and depressive biography full of broken characters that are not magically fixed when seeing a screen. Every smile hides a pain, a missed opportunity, an unfinished future. The director has not searched his past to bring out the sweetest moments, but rather to analyze his relationship with cinema, which, like his family, does not matter if it makes him happy or unhappy: it simply forms an intrinsic part of the.
The bitterness that overflows the script does not hide moments of humor, true affection and adolescent blunders: it is in these little gags of family routine where can review a childhood marked by the divorce of his parents (which he already explored in ‘ET’), his Judaism and bullying in high school, marking a meta-cinematic conversation that serves both as a psychologist’s couch and as a fabulous contextual framework. Contrary to other autobiographies of directors where they are the center of the world (‘It was the hand of God’, ‘Almost famous’, ‘Bardo’), Spielberg refuses to make up with nostalgia the troubles of life, and the result could not be more mature, professional and typical of him. Recognizable from the first to the last plane.
Fábel(man) goes west
It is normal for directors who are already combing gray hair long for that time when cinema was democratizing, a vehicle for telling all kinds of stories and the number one entertainment for the public. Now, that same public turns its back on the stories that films tell about themselves, whether they are called ‘The Fabelmans’ or its spidical reverse, ‘Babylon’, with the excuse that “cinema is fascinated by cinema itself, And that’s not interesting.” Understandable, but wrong. It’s kind of sad that at a time when we most need to be reminded of the (not necessarily positive) power of storytelling, we close ourselves in band before the possibility of hearing them from the mouths of the best storytellers of the place.
Some people have a hard time admitting it, perhaps due to his old nickname of “King Midas”, but Steven Spielberg is the best audiovisual narrator of our era. What he does with the camera is absolutely prodigious: his framing and movements, including the already famous visual joke of his last shot, manage to mask his few mistakes, like the fact that there are some characters he doesn’t know what to do with (for example, the sisters from Sammy). ‘Los Fabelmans’ is a story of discovery and fascination, yes, but also of sadness, depression, unrequited love, pain and kisses from Judas.
But above all, is a story about the power that a camera can have in our hands or an image projected in a movie theater. A power not necessarily positive, but transformative. Because a good movie changes you, even imperceptiblyit makes you think, it leaves you behind, it will be part of you for the rest of your days.
And ‘Los Fabelman’ achieves it in style while being at the same time one of the most classic (and, let’s say, elegant) tapes that has gone through the screens in recent years, in a conversation between the director and his childhood that could not be more stimulating, beautiful and sad. Don’t be fooled: Steven Spielberg does not need to film a love letter to the cinema because all of him is, in essence, pure cinema.