Before The Fabelmans even starts Steven Spielberg pops up on screen to address us, like Alfred Hitchcock warning audiences not to reveal the twist in Psycho. But this is no warning. It’s a welcome. The former enfant terrible now grand-père amicable of Hollywood wants to thank us for coming. More particularly, he wants us to know that this is his most personal film.
Spielberg could have put up a title card saying ‘based on a true story’, but that would not be entirely accurate. It’s not true; it’s personal, and he really wants us to understand that. Otherwise it would just be any old tale about a kid with a family growing up making movies. It’s the fact that it’s Spielberg’s own story that makes it interesting. You need to be invested in him, his work and his cultural significance to enjoy this to the full. Spielberg of course realises that, and he wants to guide our perspective. He’s not just a director of actors; he’s a director of audiences too.
The received wisdom is that a film should stand on its own merits. You shouldn’t need prior knowledge to enjoy it to the full. That might be true 90% of the time, but not always. For example, the shocking impact of Henry Fonda as the villainous Frank in Sergio Leone’s Once Upon A Time In The West is (quite intentionally) amplified by his cultural significance as one of the all-time screen ‘good guys’ in every other role he played. And so it is with The Fabelmans. The week before it opened I heard it being reviewed on BBC Radio 5Live (not by Mark Kermode, I hasten to add. He’s long gone.) The reviewers summed it up as ‘Just a nice, gentle film, like a cup of hot chocolate on a Sunday afternoon’. And that, I would suggest, is what happens if you don’t go into it fully Spielberged up.
I was pretty much locked and loaded. The first ‘adult’ film I ever saw was Jaws, and my Dad even recorded an audio interview with me and my sisters when we got home afterwards. Listening to it now, the breathless excitement is contagious. A couple of years later they took me to see Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and I felt a wonder so intense that just recalling it brings tears to the eyes. And so it went on, with smash hits, semi-successes, and even the occasional turkey. Spielberg has always occupied a very special place, where populism and art sit happily together, neither ever dominating the other. His creations have been the soundtrack of my movie-going life.
That’s what make this ‘personal’. Not that it happens to be autobiographical, but that it’s about a person whose creative output has shaped popular culture and the way millions see and enjoy it. How did that come about? I want to know.
In The Fabelmans there’s any number of foreshadowing moments for the films that were to come: train crashes prefiguring Super 8; boys playing soldiers laying the groundwork for Saving Private Ryan; kids on bikes lacking only an alien in the pannier; a solitary mountain looming from a poster on John Ford’s office wall, summoning Sam Fabelman like Devil’s Tower in Close Encounters. I was half-expecting a hair-raising encounter with a goldfish.
Amazingly, this is only the second film that Spielberg has scripted. The first? Close Encounters. That was autobiographical, too, but the personal story on that occasion was told via fiction. Roy’s (Richard Dreyfuss’s) fascination with UFOs was a metaphor for fascination with the magic of cinema. His obsession takes him away from his family, giving him a sense of purpose and a perception of beauty and wonder. The imagery is geared to have maximum impact on the viewer. It’s the same story as The Fabelmans, only with flying saucers instead of second-hand camera equipment.
The Fabelmans does have its fair share of symbolism too. It’s just that it is closer to reality than alien encounters. Watching young Sam Fabelman edit out the evidence of his mother’s near-affair from his own footage is a heart-rending metaphor for the process of coping with family trauma, or just memory, which is selective in the extreme. And it was amazing to see how moments from his own childhood made it into his films. How many Spielberg movies feature arguing families, parents that run off to adventure, children discovering their own secret worlds of wonder? And how much of his passion to tell the story of Oskar Schindler was fuelled by his own suffering at the hands of anti-semitic Aryans at school? (The bullying jocks provide some of The Fabelmans’ most powerful scenes, especially one in which high-school heartthrob Logan struggles to understand why he feels a fraud after Sam has portrayed him as a hero in his end-of-year movie.)
It’s not Steven Spielberg’s greatest film. Making it non-fictional sees to that – in that same way that Moments of Being, Virginia Woolf’s autobiographical collection of memoirs, will never be her most popular work, despite containing some of her best writing and giving us a glimpse of how she saw the world. But if you like Spielberg, if you are grateful for the entertainment, wonder and art he’s given us, then you’ll appreciate this privileged glimpse into his own idea of where it all came from. For many celebrities this would be an exercise in self-indulgence. But in his case, it’s a way to interpret the past so that we can all share it. Thanks, Steven.
NB When I went to the Curzon Westgate to see this film it was misspelled THE FABLEMANS on the marquee outside the cinema. ‘Fabel’ is the German for fable or wonder, and ‘fabelhaft’ means wondrous. A Jewish family with European roots would be called ‘Fabelman’ – and it’s spelt that way for a good reason. I went in full of thoughts about unconscious bias and the pervasive assumption that Jews Don’t Count when it comes to insensitive representation. But then the guy behind the till told me that last week they’d spelt ‘The Crucible’ with an S. Crusible. So it’s not unconnscious anti-semitism. It’s just wrong.