1952, Cincinnati. A frightened child worries regarding attending his first cinema screening. His father reassures him by emphasizing the technical magic of the seventh art, retinal persistence, the illusion of movement, while his mother prefers to evoke the emotional part of films. The trio rushes into a crowded room which projects “Under the biggest marquee in the world” by Cecil B. DeMille and the camera lingers on the face both flabbergasted and amazed of the child in front of an accident scene railway.
Later, following having received a miniature electric train and a super-8 camera, the boy, encouraged by his mother, reproduces the accident at home which he records on film, as if to control, to control his initial fear.
>> To see: the trailer for the film “The Fabelmans” by Steven Spielberg
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In the space of a prodigious inaugural sequence, so to speak a primitive scene, Steven Spielberg poses the essential issue that he will continue to decline throughout his autobiographical fable thought less as a tribute to cinema than a eulogy to Leah and Arnold, his mother and father, whose recent deaths allowed the director to finally tell his youth.
The sequel to “The Fabelmans”, which will end in 1965, takes the Fabelman family to Arizona, then to Northern California, guided by the professional rise of the father, Burt (Paul Dano), an engineer specializing in computer science. While the vocation of amateur filmmaker of the son, Sammy (Gabriel LaBelle), asserts itself, Mitzi (Michelle Williams), the mother, a former pianist who gave up her career for her family, lives very badly these multiple moves and love affair with her husband’s best friend, Bennie (Seth Rogen).
>> See also: The 7:30 p.m. cultural chronicle devoted to Spielberg’s film
Image learning
At the height of his art, with nothing left to prove, Steven Spielberg confronts, with admirable subtlety and finesse, the figures and events that have made him what he has become.
Alter ego of the filmmaker on the screen, Sammy Fabelman thus reveals two major facets of the future author of the biggest Hollywood successes of the 1970s and 1980s: one, known, that of the passionate craftsman who exercises over the public a power of jubilant seduction, here by amateur films mimicking the western or the war film; the other, more secret, that of a teenager who understands the power of the gaze, the revealing and disturbing power of images capable of grasping the profound truth of beings.
This second facet constitutes the heart of “The Fabelmans” which never ceases to shell, without any narcissistic inclination, images resonating with the most famous later works of Spielberg. And it is not by chance that the discovery of the mother’s nascent adultery goes through the viewing of a family film, shot during a bucolic getaway, a film that Sammy will show Mitzi by locking him in a closet for a hidden projection that constitutes the emotional peak of the film, the high point of what connects this son to his mother.
A scene from the film “The Fabelmans” by Steven Spielberg. [Universal Studios]
“The Fabelmans” will continually play on this duality between the comforting image and the disturbing image, the documentary, psychoanalytical part, and the more mythological, fictional part of cinema, a duality that Spielberg will dig throughout his career by modestly concealing the origin of his obsessions. And, it must be remembered all the more following watching “The Fabelmans”, childhood for Spielberg is never synonymous with innocence, it remains fundamentally melancholy, crossed by guilt and the awareness of what has been lost.
The emancipation of a mother
In “The Fabelmans”, actress Michelle Williams plays the role of Mitzi, the mother. [Universal Studios]
If he had been content to describe his hero’s vocation as a filmmaker, “The Fabelmans” would already have been fascinating. By including this apprenticeship in cinema in a broader apprenticeship in life, with Sammy torn by his complex relationships with his mother and father, the film rises to the rank of masterpiece.
There will be several father figures: the real father, of course, who will not be judged even in the face of his incomprehension of the creative act (at most a hobby for him); a passing uncle who teaches Sammy regarding the loneliness of the artist, and the fierce fight between family and art; until this brief encounter, which really happened in Spielberg, with Hollywood’s greatest western filmmaker, John Ford (played by David Lynch), for a lesson in the importance of the horizon in the frame of a picture.
The figure of the mother will be unique, worn by actress Michelle Williams, absolutely prodigious. A somewhat whimsical mother, who gently rebels once morest her status as a housewife by striving to lay out a paper tablecloth and cardboard cutlery for meals, and throw everything in the trash. From this existential pain, this mourning for oneself which pushes Mitzi into a form of depression, the film draws its most poignant scenes, without any recourse to melodrama. Just the gaze of a woman prisoner who calls for help, and which her son is the only one to grasp through the viewfinder of her camera.
“Guilt is a wasted emotion” she will say to Sammy, who will have to accept that the emancipation of his mother goes through a necessary selfishness. And when, towards the end of his 34th feature film, Steven Spielberg, through Sammy, will say to his mother “I forgive you”, knowing that there is nothing to forgive, we should rather hear a “I t ‘love’, the most poignant the filmmaker has filmed since ‘AI’.
Raphael Wolf/aq
“The Fabelmans” by Steven Spielberg, with Gabriel LaBelle, Michelle Williams, Paul Dano, currently on view in French-speaking cinemas.