DIRECTOR FALLS THROUGH LAYERS

FANS GIVEN PICTURE OF DIRECTOR’S COMPELLING PRIVATE MOTIVATIONS

By PETER THOMAS BUSCH

The child in the childhood is still finding joy inside Hollywood as the celebrated filmmaker.

Michelle Williams as Mitzi costars with Paul Dano as Burt in the dramatization about the coming of age of film director Steven Spielberg.

Spielberg and Tony Kushner cowrite the semi-autobiographical script about how the accomplished filmmaker came to love filmmaking in The Fabelmans (2022).

Gabrielle LaBelle as Sammy eventually comes to play the young Spielberg as the narrative winds a way through three directors from the first family trip to the movie theater in New Jersey to several 8 mm home movies and play action films to the 16 mm film for High School Prom.

Director Spielberg shows the storyboard within a storyboard as Sammy utilizes a 6 month supply of the family’s toilet paper for his two sister’s mummy costumes.

Sammy also teaches himself a number of special effects tricks as his home movies become real dramatizations and the dramatizations begin to resemble art. 

The film tells the story about growing up and learning about being human, but the director has also chosen to explain the origins of those little details that also shine through in the successful adult career he has established for himself in filmmaking.

For example, the director films the child learning the emotions that he will later accent in his celebrated film art.

The distinct characters in each family member are shown in detail. And Spielberg can be seen inside them as part of the inherited details of personality. The director is inside them and them inside him. 

The parents have components of the filmmaking talent required of a director, such as Williams playing the filmmaker’s mother, Mitzi, who is a concert pianist and who also has a flare for the theatrical. Mitzi even takes the young children on a short trip around the neighborhood to storm chase as an impromptu tornado approaches the family home.

Dano as the director’s father, Burt, is an electrical engineer that has the intuitive knowledge of how things work, or at least to try to figure out how things work, which would be required on a movie set, recreating storyboards and blowing up scenes. Burt also spends some intimate moments nurturing his children, which the director seems to mimic with his hired talent on the movie set.

Spielberg also creates a bit of movie magic with original scene transitions such as father and son driving down the highway talking about the movie he is making until the son becomes the son at an older age still in the car with his father talking about a movie he is making except the son is now old enough to do the driving and the movie in production is more sophisticated.

A camera shot from behind Mitzi playing the concert piano becomes a scene transition with the reflection of her face on the front of the piano before the camera breaks away from the moment into another series of scenes.

Everything remains subtle and sublime along a linear narrative as childhood memories often are recalled. Spielberg stays away from flashbacks and psychodrama dream sequences, but he fills the screen instead with the transitions of an 8 year old boy, played by Mateo Zoryan, to the young teenager, played by LaBelle.

Everything is complicated but presented and understood with that certain simplicity that correlates with the age of the film’s protagonist.

The director also does a close up of an old analogue phone as a sign leading into the mind of his mother’s grieving subconscious, but he does not clutter the scenes with arthouse directing. Instead, the camera work is somewhat sublimely from the perspective of a child genius with the tone and atmosphere carrying the slight hint of a ‘60s network television show.

Spielberg remains concerned with the aesthetics in front of the camera lens with many scenes being framed as portrait paintings or landscape art. Even the scenes about the making of the first backyard movies are framed. But the director does not overpower the movie with movie magic and cheap parlor tricks.

A bit of chic is shown by casting director David Lynch as director John Ford, whom Sammy meets as a young adult director on the first day on the job at a film production studio.

And an intertextual reference is made to Indiana Jones: The Last Crusade, from the young Indiana Jones coming across treasure hunters while on a boy scout trip into the arid landscape, to Sammy and his boy scout friends hunting for scorpions.

The 2hr 31m runtime zips by with a bit of wry humor of an adult looking back at life as a child, and many trademark poignant moments between family and friends as the filmmaker’s young life narrative begins to resemble the winding dipping rolling rollercoaster often found at a California amusement park.

Cinematographer Janusz Kaminski adds to this approach with picture perfect portrait close ups so that people can see and feel the actors working through the thoughts and emotions of the characters. This lighting assists the viewer in seeing those elements of Sammy’s parents, family and friends that are part of Spielberg and his film art, in a self-referential, intertextual kind of way.

Kaminski though avoids shrinking the characters and sets to that of dolls in a dollhouse like so many coming of age, made for television films appear to be during that era of storytelling.

Life can be as much of a struggle for the child as for the parents with the death of the maternal grandmother setting everyone off in different directions until the plot begins to reverse and deconstruct as life too often does.

With the death of one family member is the surprise arrival of another family member. Judd Hirsch plays Uncle Boris who comes to pay his respects and grieve a bit with close family.

Boris cannot go back home though without leaving behind a bit of elderly advice.

Hirsch also plays Jewish political activist Simon Weisenthal in the Hunters (2021-2022) and he is well known for his long run as Alex on the television comedy series, Taxi (1978-1983). People may also remember Hirsch as John Nash’s professor in A Beautiful Mind (2001) starring Russel Crowe.

The child’s life is also influenced by technology, with his father involved in engineering televisions and then computers, but also in how the young director’s filmmaking advances in leaps and bounds with the acquisition of an editing machine and the use of better and better cameras.

At one point when the story boards get complicated, Sammy puts the camera on a baby carriage to film with the motion of the actors in the scenes to underscore the limits of filmmaking with limited technology. The director keeps working his art though until the backyard home movie hobby is no longer just a hobby.

Seth Rogen plays the unofficial Uncle of every family.

Paul Dano plays Sammy’s father as a compassionate loving person that had a strong nurturing side with that important notion of parental responsibility during the era of family responsibilities.

Michelle Williams really steals the spotlight next to the young director with that nurturing, wearing her heart on her shirt sleeve maternal parent that needs those moments of free expression to break away from the gender roles.

The credits begin to roll soon after Sammy begins to think of film as art during five minutes with director John Ford. Gabrielle LaBelle as Sammy becomes very engaging as he becomes more and more Spielberg like and more and more the accomplished film director people could only previously imagine about.

The overall vision of the film is good with the sublime simplicity of people being shown the childhood that made up the private world of a world famous director.