As I see it, Steven Spielberg over his long career has made films that fall roughly into two categories. The first category, on which he originally made his name in Hollywood, consists of character-driven thrill rides like Jaws, Indiana Jones: Raiders of the Lost Ark, Jurassic Park, Saving Private Ryan, A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, and Minority Report.
The second category consists of more personal, grounded films. Those films often return to certain motifs, including quiet, bullied kids (E.T. the Extra Terrestrial, The BFG, Ready Player One); broken homes (E.T., Ready Player One, Catch Me If You Can, War of the Worlds); and Jewish heritage (Schindler’s List, Munich). Spielberg’s latest film, The Fabelmans, is the culmination of this second tradition.
But this tradition is the weaker of the two. So while The Fabelmans appropriately summarizes and concludes it, the film suffers from the same defects as its predecessors—namely, a lack of honesty or, more accurately, wisdom about adult life.
Although I listed three thematic preoccupations of Spielberg’s more intimate films, one of them occupies a particularly central place: the broken home. Spielbergian protagonists often display yearning for family unity or at least the pained confusion of a child whose parents have split. And Spielberg deserves praise for consistently portraying these emotions with love and warmth.
The problem, though, is that young people have an inherently limited understanding of adult relationships. They only grasp so much. Therefore, telling stories through the eyes of those characters risks providing too little content—of leaning on the characters’ ignorance to avoid presenting the complexity that the subject matter demands. For example: why have the parents split up in E.T.? We don’t know, because the kids don’t know. A story is thus left untold.
We might look to Spielberg’s movies with older protagonists for a different perspective. But, troublingly, in those films, his protagonists display barely more maturity than his child characters do. For example, Frank Abagnale Jr. from Catch Me If You Can runs away from home and perpetrates a series of crimes after his parents’ split, which is only briefly covered early in the movie. The family’s dissolution appears to drive his lawless behavior, as he now dreads normal life and feels he has no home to return to.
Frank is 21 years old. Divorce of one’s parents surely hurts at any age, but when will Frank learn that adults are complicated, flawed people, too? When will he learn that he can now start his own adult life without needing the protection of his family?
It seems relevant that Spielberg, to my knowledge, has never made a movie about divorce from the perspective of one of the parents. (The closest may be War of the Worlds, the ending of which suggests, without plausible explanation, that the couple in question will reunite.) This despite Spielberg having been divorced himself, back in 1989. Why, given this lived experience, does he return only to the material of his parents’ divorce?
These patterns all point to one logical conclusion, and if there was any doubt, The Fabelmans now makes that conclusion explicit: that Spielberg lacks sufficient understanding of divorce and, indeed, adult relationships in general to properly portray these subjects on film. On this topic, he remains the confused, vulnerable boy who recurs in his movies. He therefore can only make movies convincingly from this perspective.
Let’s examine The Fabelmans, an autobiographical film about Spielberg’s discovery of and increasing interest in filmmaking. The film’s central artistic theme presents itself early on, when the mother (Michelle Williams) of protagonist Sammy (Gabriel LaBelle) surmises that her son’s fascination with filmmaking stems from a desire to “control” a frightening subject, thereby mastering it and alleviating the fear. As his parents grow apart, Sammy indeed turns further toward filmmaking, presumably to gain a sense of control over his increasingly chaotic family life.
And of course, by making such a movie that explores his parents’ relationship, Spielberg himself has attempted to master the subject in the very manner his mother in the film elucidates.
To be sure, this represents interesting and honest introspection from Spielberg. But desperation to control one’s surroundings doesn’t serve as an effective foundation for art. Spielberg is 75 years old, and, at the risk of insensitivity, he should have mastered this subject long ago. He should be providing us with further understanding of what makes marriage so difficult, why couples break up, and why kids react the way they do when a split does occur. He should be sharing his learned insight with us.
But as usual, he has none to offer. Not one character in The Fabelmans has anything resembling understanding of what has happened to the family. Sammy’s mother, Mitzi, gives a blubbering speech about how she knows she has to leave the family, even though she can’t explain why. Sammy’s sister believes the issue is that the man his mother loves, Benny (Seth Rogan), “makes her laugh.” Sammy’s dad, Burt (Paul Dano), is a nerdy engineer and doesn’t have the faintest idea of why his erratic wife does anything she does. Sammy himself, supposedly the insightful observer, can only peek through old camping footage and discover his mom holding hands with Benny in the background.
This simply isn’t good enough. Why does Mitzi lack feelings for Burt? Why did they get married in the first place, and what changed? What was the tipping point, and why? What is the nature of Mitzi’s feelings for Benny? How have the responsibilities of raising children affected the Fabelmans’ marriage? How has their parenting been altered by Mitzi’s feelings for Benny?
In short: what happened?
Confusion is a limited aesthetic. It traps the audience in the dark, preventing nuanced reflection. If Spielberg has more wisdom on the subject of family separation than the bewildered Sammy (who has none), he keeps it to himself. And he has kept it to himself for his entire career.
My negative view of Spielberg’s more personal filmmaking puts me at odds with the critical community. Critics tend to prefer his most intimate films, in particular E.T. and Schindler’s List. I don’t like those movies very much, and I believe that general audiences tend to agree with me in prizing instead Jaws, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Jurassic Park as his most memorable outputs. (Some day, I hope they’ll join me in cherishing A.I., too.)
Perhaps critics have mistaken personal filmmaking with effective filmmaking. Looking back toward landmarks like The 400 Blows (1959), they may see Spielberg as the carrier of a French New Wave torch, which the Hollywood studio system has come closer and closer to extinguishing via the ever-increasing pressure to pack movies with disembodied action and chaos.
But Truffaut and his compatriots had the quality that Spielberg has always lacked: they knew what they were talking about. Acknowledging his impotence, as Spielberg has done with The Fabelmans, doesn’t rectify the deficiency. Rather, it only codifies it.
Filmmaking can be both personal and insightful. Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird (2017), for example, covers similar ground to The Fabelmans through a more discerning lens. A lens that reveals what we don’t ordinarily see. A lens that shows us: what happened? That’s what makes personal movies truly enjoyable. And it’s what makes Steven Spielberg, although a great director of blockbuster fun, a limited director of artistic, intimate films.
–Jim Andersen
For more commentary, see my discussion of the visuals of Avatar.