The Fabelmans: Steven Spielberg's masterpiece [critique]

Old Steven remembers young Spielberg. A learning story that looks like a great psychological self-portrait of disturbing violence.

This Sunday, The Fabelmansof Steven Spielbergarrives unencrypted on television. At the beginning of 2023, First fell in love with this very personal work by the filmmaker. While waiting for news from his new UFO filmwe are republishing our long review of this unforgettable work embodied by Gabriel LaBelle, Michelle Williams, Paul Dano, Seth Rogen…

The Fabelmans starts exactly where it ends Babylon : in 1952, in a cinema. We don't play it Let's sing in the rainbut Under the biggest marquee in the worlda fairground blockbuster by Cecil B. De Mille – the man who, well, filmed the fall of Babylon in the heyday of silent films. The kid we're watching in the dark is called Sammy, five years old, and just before the screening started, his parents promised him that he would come out with a big, goofy smile on his face. Now faced with this train which derails in the night, and which lets part of the menagerie contained in its wagons escape, Sammy finds himself frozen, speechless, mute, like a victim who has inexplicably survived an accident. This shock, this initial derailment, he will then spend a large part of his life replaying, reinterpreting and capturing. We know this very well, because Sammy Fabelman, this traumatized child, is actually called Steven Spielberg.

Here is a good note of intention: here, cinema will not be observed as a subject of wonder (the famous “Spielberg Face”) but rather as a disturbance. A poison which also contains, and this is its specificity, its own antidote. So it is by reproducing, over and over again, this original scene of the train accident, using a model and a Super 8 camera, that little Sammy will be able to heal himself from his initial injury. It is therefore in no way a self-portrait of the artist as a young nerd, the trajectory of a pop culture bulimic growing up right during the golden age of pop culture, but on the contrary a strange confession, with what it implies of pride and guilt, on the irrepressible need to create images that move.

It's time to go to bed and Papa Spielb… oops sorry, Papa Fabelman, a gifted engineer, who therefore devotes his life to making things work, is exasperated to see his son recording the same train crash over and over again. Maman Fabelman also has a little difficulty understanding, but for once her husband seems willing to have a little chat with her. She then confides to him that she is starting to really miss her piano practice. “When you play Bach, you open your hand like that, and then you can stretch out an octave and… You create this little world that you control and in which you feel happy and safe and…” Hey, Papa Fabelman is snoring… When his wife comes to leave her glasses near his bedside, she then sees the little train that he has just confiscated from his son and in a pure moment of theatricality (and Spielbergian limpidity) she exclaims, alone and out loud: “That’s why he wants to make them collide: he too is trying to have control over events “. Has the fable(man) already revealed its moral to us?

THE FABELMANS: SPIELBERG CRIED A LOT

Everything is presented to us in just under ten minutes. The Cecil B. De Mille shock, the couple who no longer listen to each other, she who is bored, he who deciphers equations better than his children and little Sammy, who seeks to restore order. The film will follow the little one until he is 16, little sisters will appear, a funny uncle will prophesy his destiny, but he will constantly remain this boy caught between his father and his mother, loving and stupidly possessive (“you are most like me” they keep throwing at him in turns), both poisons and antidotes too. To regain control of events, he will therefore make films, small or medium-sized, ” at home “ and others “with friends”westerns as well as bucolic walks. Always knowing where it could take him: not in Hollywood, but outside of reality, like that day when he crossed the border in front of the Largest Marquee in the World and almost never came back.

Mosaic story of a damaged childhood, The Fabelmans therefore evokes above all the quest for balance. Find a kind of harmony, between mom and dad, reality and fiction, what breaks and what consoles. An equation that Sammy will endeavor to solve using different stratagems (turning on his camera, reselling his camera, bringing out his camera, etc.) but which will all systematically bring him back to his starting point: him and the chaos that surrounds him. A limit will be crossed when his parents announce their divorce to him. There, the young man will see for a single glance in the mirror, his double, impassive, filming the scene. This is, deep down, where he would like to be when his world collapses: in the position of the one who leads. It is a shot of incredible violence, almost out of a horror film, where Spielberg tells both the impasse of the great demiurgic impulses and the way in which they can, if only for a moment, protect from ambient chaos. This notion of control, revealed since the very beginning of the film, leads here to a part of chilling monstrosity: it is the anti “Spielberg Face” that we have just seen.

To finally hang up the wagons of this train that never stops derailing, you will have to agree to let go. Seeing your parents leave each other, falling in love, getting dumped at the prom, getting picked on a few times by the racist high school bully and why not finally understanding it. And above all, as is often the case in life, we will have to rely on the expertise of John Ford. Guest star of the epilogue and author here of a master class as express as it is anthological, he will reveal to the kid that cinema is above all an art of imbalance and that only idiots can place the horizon line in the middle of the frame. And if we really had to find a moral The Fabelmans that would probably be it.

By Steven Spielberg. With Gabriel LaBelle, Michelle Williams, Paul Dano… Duration: 2h31. Trailer:

The Fabelmans: the final cameo told by its screenwriter