The Fabelmans (Steven Spielberg, 2022)

[therewillbeblus]

Well said. Agree that the stuff with Dano is the richest for how Spielberg leans into and actually stays with the powerlessness of it all, even if I wish this skill was extended more consistently and honestly elsewhere. Good writeup, Drucker

[therewillbeblus]

Spoiler

[hearthesilence]

Joyce Carol Oates doesn't pull any punches. Don't click on it if you're concerned about spoilers, but in case that tweet ever gets deleted:

Spoiler

"By making a blonde-Aryan-antisemite the pseudo hero of his high school movie the young Fabelman disarms enemies & wins a pseudo friend. is this an acknowledgment of the superficial triteness of the director’s career as an entertainer?"

[therewillbeblus]

I dunno about that, but he's definitely putting the horizon in the middle

[yoloswegmaster]

Joyce Carol Oates never liked Spielberg ever since she found out his horrible past...

[colinr0380]

Not having got to the film as yet, I just keep wondering how The Fabelmans may work in a double bill with A.I.: Artificial Intelligence. Whilst I'm sure that it will be an interesting film in its own right, and maybe be the key to 'unlocking the mysteries' of Spielberg for audiences (or at least the mysteries that he allows us to see!), I am just not entirely sure if I need the bluntly literalised (if ironically all the more ersatzly recreated) autobiographical version of themes that had been treated very successfully in more oblique and metaphorical terms. Which suggests (as with the similarly uncomfortably over-blunt Schindler's List) that I may probably not the intended audience for this one.

[Roger Ryan]

I think the best way to the approach The Fabelmans is to see it as a wistful, nostalgic evocation of the director's early years in the same way that Fellini indulged in filming his own past in Roma, Amarcord, and Intervista. Spielberg's film is a fanciful concoction which presents a few years in time the way he would like to remember them. Whatever painful experiences he may have had are sanded down so as not to disrupt the overall reverie. I'm probably just repeating what others have already said here, but I think there is an honesty in what this film shows us: young Sammy relates to the world and those around him through the viewfinder of a camera; he's not interested in documenting reality, but in manipulating it, creating a heightened, warmer, more palatable version of it. It's what Spielberg does and, in The Fabelmans, he tells you this predilection was there from the beginning for him. It's not that different from Fellini preferring to see his past as a series of naive, romantic encounters coated in surrealism.

The moment that seemed to trouble Joyce Carol Oates so much worked a little differently for me...

Spoiler

... in that I think the main takeaway from the scene is not that Sammy is trying to ingratiate himself with the high school bully, but how the bully is so unnerved by how he is presented in the "Senior Ditch Day" film. The bully realizes the representation is not accurate; Sammy's interpretation is manipulative and romanticized. The bully could be any of us taken aback by how Spielberg might choose to present us on film. But once he has captured the images to manipulate, Spielberg knows we will all have to live in his world.

[Mr Sheldrake]

The French love The Fabelmans
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023 ... -audiences

Cahiers du Cinéma, the reference for French cinema-lovers, said that at 76 years old, Spielberg had “come to represent like no other, the idea of cinema as wonder, at a time when the relationship to the spectacular and the cinema seems more tormented than ever”.

[tenia]

Spielberg is pretty much getting canonified through The Fabelmans in here, indeed. The movie currently holds 36 5-stars reviews out of the 42 referenced on Allocine, the other 6 being 4-stars ones.

The moment that seemed to trouble Joyce Carol Oates so much worked a little differently for me...

Spoiler

... in that I think the main takeaway from the scene is not that Sammy is trying to ingratiate himself with the high school bully, but how the bully is so unnerved by how he is presented in the "Senior Ditch Day" film. The bully realizes the representation is not accurate; Sammy's interpretation is manipulative and romanticized. The bully could be any of us taken aback by how Spielberg might choose to present us on film. But once he has captured the images to manipulate, Spielberg knows we will all have to live in his world.

Interestingly, that's not how I took it :

Spoiler

To me, Sammy presents actually how the bully is living within high-school's hierarchy : he's a bully, but almost everybody glorifies him while despising his faire-valoir friend who's considered silly and to-be-belittled. The bully is the one manipulating people around him by glorifying him despite being kind of an ass, and he's opportunistically taking this advantage. Through the movie, Sammy sees through this, and then put all on the glorious screen for all to see. Sammy saw behind the manipulation, behind the mask, behind the typical high-school hierarchy of jocks being mean but glorified, and the bully either (or both) disliked being unmasked, or being told how easy this allows him to have it, how unfairly advantaged he is over someone like Sammy. And it felt like... the bully doesn't really want to be glorified. Sure, he's taking advantage of it, but it's not something he's handling all that well, possibly because he has to kind of perform to maintain this, and it's wearing him down. And for once, someone spelled all this out loud, and it's possibly at least one person he won't need to perform for.

[Roger Ryan]

...

The moment that seemed to trouble Joyce Carol Oates so much worked a little differently for me...

Spoiler

... in that I think the main takeaway from the scene is not that Sammy is trying to ingratiate himself with the high school bully, but how the bully is so unnerved by how he is presented in the "Senior Ditch Day" film. The bully realizes the representation is not accurate; Sammy's interpretation is manipulative and romanticized. The bully could be any of us taken aback by how Spielberg might choose to present us on film. But once he has captured the images to manipulate, Spielberg knows we will all have to live in his world.

Interestingly, that's not how I took it :

Spoiler

To me, Sammy presents actually how the bully is living within high-school's hierarchy : he's a bully, but almost everybody glorifies him while despising his faire-valoir friend who's considered silly and to-be-belittled. The bully is the one manipulating people around him by glorifying him despite being kind of an ass, and he's opportunistically taking this advantage. Through the movie, Sammy sees through this, and then put all on the glorious screen for all to see. Sammy saw behind the manipulation, behind the mask, behind the typical high-school hierarchy of jocks being mean but glorified, and the bully either (or both) disliked being unmasked, or being told how easy this allows him to have it, how unfairly advantaged he is over someone like Sammy. And it felt like... the bully doesn't really want to be glorified. Sure, he's taking advantage of it, but it's not something he's handling all that well, possibly because he has to kind of perform to maintain this, and it's wearing him down. And for once, someone spelled all this out loud, and it's possibly at least one person he won't need to perform for.

I don't disagree with your interpretation; in fact, you've assessed the scene more thoroughly than I had. Still, I think we're closer in the way we see Spielberg's intentions that how Oates interpreted them.

[tenia]

Yes, while we don't really have the same interpretations, it's still nowhere close to what Oates thought.