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 The first category, on which he originally made his name in Hollywood, consists of character-driven thrill rides like Jaws, Indiana Jones: Raiders of the Lost Ark, Jurassic Park, Saving Private Ryan, A.I.: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 often returning to certain motifs, such as 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 it’s the weaker of the two. The Fabelmans, then, suffers from the same defects as its predecessors—namely, a lack of honesty or, more accurately, wisdom about adult life.
Although I listed multiple recurring themes 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 a limited understanding of adult relationships. Therefore, telling stories through the eyes of those characters risks providing too little information—of leaning on the characters’ ignorance to avoid presenting the complexity that the subject 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 left untold.
We might look to Spielberg’s movies with older protagonists for a different perspective. But, troublingly, those protagonists display barely more maturity than his child ones. Frank Abagnale Jr. from Catch Me If You Can runs away from home and perpetrates a series of crimes after his parents’ split. 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 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 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’ actual divorce?
These patterns all point to one logical conclusion, and if there was any doubt, The Fabelmans now makes it clear: 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.
Let’s examine The Fabelmans, an autobiographical film about Spielberg’s discovery of filmmaking. The film’s central theme presents itself early on, when the mother (Michelle Williams) of protagonist Sammy (Gabriel LaBelle) realizes 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 for 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 surmises.
To be sure, this is 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 insight with us.
As usual, though, he has none to offer. No character in The Fabelmans has any 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 despite not knowing 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 who doesn’t have the faintest idea of why his erratic wife does anything. 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 isn’t good enough. Why did Mitzi and Burt 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 for effective filmmaking. Remembering landmarks like The 400 Blows (1959), they might view Spielberg as the last carrier of the New Wave torch, which Hollywood has come closer and closer to extinguishing with pervasive, disembodied action and chaos.
But Truffaut and his compatriots had the quality 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. It only codifies it.
–Jim Andersen
For more commentary, see my discussion of the visuals of Avatar.