Still the player one
Steven Spielberg is one of those few great filmmakers, along with Michael Mann and David Lynch, who has not lost over time a bit of the liveliness and passion of his direction. If the spectacular and virtuoso Ready Player One, Pentagon Papers et West Side Story were brilliant witnesses, The Fabelmans is no exception to the rule. Aerial filming, fluid musical transitions, rhythmic editing and clever ellipses provide rhythm a story and a production of still impressive clarity on the part of the filmmaker.
Like almost any Steven Spielberg film, The Fabelmans welcomes its spectator with obviousness and crazy discreet virtuositymaking his story lively and thought-provoking entertainment. A show full of amusing dialogues and delightful comic situations which recall the humorous talent of the filmmaker. This is evidenced by a gallery of very funny, colorful characters like the passionate great uncle and the very (very) religious girlfriend.
Protagonists who do not only serve as comic relief since behind their extravagance systematically hides a tenderness and a lovely sensitivity. Even the characters of Chad and Logan prove to be more sensitive and nuanced than their simple hunky bully archetype might suggest. The Fabelmans is therefore funny, tender and constantly stimulating entertainment, also embodied by a particularly lively cast.
Despite its 75 years and its almost 40 feature films, Steven Spielberg still maintains the requirement to highlight young actors who have not yet, or are only just beginning, to establish themselves in Hollywood. This is particularly the case of Sam Rechner who gives a nice density to his archetypal role of Logan, Chloe East who is both funny and touching as Monica Sherwood, and of course Gabriel LaBelle who shines as Sam as a teenager and young adult.
All these lovely people breathe great energy into The Fabelmanswhich is also enhanced by the development of teen movie codes, with great bursts of discovery of love, happy groups of friends and bad high school bosses. The screenplay by Steven Spielberg and Tony Kushner takes on the seemingly classic structure of the teenage film, but by executing it with skill and sincerity which makes it difficult to resist the pleasure of writing and directing that is The Fabelmans.
Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood
A work of art which, however, is never gratuitous, Steven Spielberg once again managing to virtuosically combine an organic staging with a beautiful and touching theoretical gesture. Indeed, through elegant play of shadows, superb jets of light and mischievous superimpositions, The Fabelmans comes to pay a nice plastic homage to cinema.
The use of this entire lexical field of the projected image makes this declaration of love all the more touching and delicatein addition to being technically virtuoso and perfectly visually stimulating. A tenderness well embodied by a handful of sensitive and poetic images, like that of a child amazed/terrified facing his first cinema screen, or that of the light of a projector which overflows from the hands of a character until through the crack of a closed door.
Throughout the first part of the story, Steven Spielberg puts his creativity at the service of his protagonist’s discovery of cinema. A gesture full of tenderness and delicacy which is particularly embodied when the filmmaker depicts his character in the process of handling film on your editing tapes or getting excited about filming anything and everything.
Sam’s resourcefulness and creativity also echo that of Spielberg himself, who was one of the few directors to have (re)invented various film techniques to better serve his stories and his staging. By filming with energy and passion the beginnings of a young film buff who makes his first works by cutting holes in film or covering his actors with toilet paper, Steven Spielberg returns to the sources of his own art and pays a moving tribute to cinematic craftsmanship.
The filmmaker who terrified us with just a car, an actor and a truck in Dueland which made the whole world squalophobic without almost ever showing the shark of the Jawsreminds us that all it takes is a camera and a little ingenuity to truly create. The sincerity and passion of Steven Spielberg then contaminate The Fabelmans of a truly touching delicacy and sensitivity.
The Dark Side of the Moon
However, the film never falls into a form of mawkishness or hyperbolic admiration. The joy and exhilaration of Sam’s discovery of cinema will even be confronted with the violence of the world, between the anti-Semitism of Californian high school students, the fragility of the parental couple and the difficulty of imposing the seventh art as a true passion. The Fabelmans then deploy a very pretty form of bitterness which contrasts with the candor and incandescence of its first part.
This melancholy particularly affects the parents of the Fabelman family, brilliantly played by Michelle Williams and Paul Dano, who both deliver a score of very beautiful fragility and ambiguity. Throughout the film, Sam will be introduced to the darkness of the world, most of the time through the cinematographic medium itself. This is particularly the case when he discovers his mother’s intimate secret while editing a family vacation film.
After admitting that cinema can recreate a lived or imagined image, Sam understands that the camera can also reveal the truth within reality itself. A discovery which proves terrifying for the protagonist who immediately becomes aware of the importance of the images he creates. From the rejoicing of the beginnings, The Fabelmans then moves on to a very beautiful concern centered on the dangerousness of the images that we capture/can capture.
This is evidenced by the last movement of the film where Sam films the character of Logan, the handsome high school kid who has been harassing him since his arrival in California, as an impressive Herculean hero. Sam conceals, intentionally or not, the character’s darkness and anti-Semitism behind the veneer of sporting performance and body worship.
Throughout this final arc of the film, Steven Spielberg thus completes the initiation of his protagonist by reminding us that if we can reproduce reality with a camera and find the truth in the image, cinema can also manipulate and alter the world around us in order to create your own truth. The Fabelmans then finds himself haunted by the responsibility for the images that we film and by the way of filming them. We discover a Steven Spielberg as if terrified by what it is possible to do with an image, doubling the film with a very beautiful lucidity and a certain harshness.
Despite everything, the arc of the high school film concludes with a real alteration of reality, reminding us that the fabricated images of the big screen can still have a positive impact on the real world. If a great and beautiful anxiety runs through the latest film directed by Steven Spielberg, it is also a deep and beautiful hope in the image and in the seventh art that emerges from it.
