Steven Spielberg

THE FABELMANS: a mom, a dad and their genius

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Photo caption: Paul Dano and Michelle Williams in THE FABELMANS. Courtesy of Universal Pictures.

In his cinematic memoir The Fabelmans, that great storyteller Steven Spielberg relates two braided narratives – one about the origins of his own dedication to filmmaking and a second about his parents, two people who loved each other but could not be happily married. Both parents were creatives in their way. His dad (Paul Dano) was an electronic engineer in the transistor age who could imagine modern computing. His mom (Michelle Williams) was an aesthete, a pianist-turned-house mom whose exuberance often manifested in song, dance and visual arts. And, importantly, both parents were dreamers who would come to understand their son’s passion.

The story’s stand-in for Spielberg is Sammy Fabelman (Gabriel LaBelle). We watch as his parents drag him to his first movie. That first film, incidentally, was The Greatest Show on Earth, always in the conversation as the worst movie ever to win the Best Picture Oscar. Nevertheless, it contains a thrilling rain wreck sequence, which definitely left its mark on the young Spielberg. You can draw a line from the train wreck scene in The Greatest Show on Earth and the very young Sammy’s home movie version with a Lionel model train to the final scene in Spielberg’s first real-life feature, the TV movie Duel.

Young Sammy starts making his own home movies, and after the family moves to Arizona, starts enlisting his sisters and his friends in increasingly sophisticated amateur film productions, including a WWII movie with an robust combat finale.

Gabriel LaBelle in THE FABELMANS. Courtesy of Universal Pictures.

When the dad gets a job at IBM in San Jose, it’s one too many moves for mom. She misses a friendship that made her husband’s absences bearable, she decompensates and the differences between the two simmer and finally boil over.

The kids aren’t happy in what will become Silicon Valley either. Sammy and his sisters attend Saratoga High, which is thinly disguised as “Grand View High”, and Sammy suffers antisemitic bullying (and I have read about Spielberg’s bitterness at his experience there). Indeed, Saratoga High in The Fabelmans looks like a camp for Hitler Youth.

Although high school is hellacious and his parents split, Sammy survives to try to break into the film industry. Each parent is able to provide support in his or her own way, and Sammy gets some valuable advice from other adults along the way, including one very famous one.

Gabriel LaBelle, who looks like the teenage Spielberg and who is much shorter than the Aryans at Saratoga High, is completely believable as Sammy. While his performance as this specific character is more than adequate, I’m really not hoping to see him as Mercutio or Holden Caulfield or Billy the Kid. And, as befits the title, The Fabelmans is at least as much about the parents’ impact on Sammy as it is about his own actions and inner life.

How many times can you call an actor’s performance a “revelation”? That’s the challenge in describing what will be another Oscar-nominated turn by Michele Williams. The Fabelman family really revolves around the mom – for better when she is the glue that holds the family together through its moves across the US. And for worse, when she experiences moments of instability and then breaks down completely. Williams’ performance (as always) brings texture and subtlety, along with the strong emotions of joy and despair. There’s a moment when the dad, experiencing unrestrained joy, carries her over the threshold of a new house, one that she has been yearning for; she smiles appropriately for the moment, and then the expression in her eyes slightly changes to hint that things cannot be made right, after all. It’s a singular Michelle Williams moment.

Paul Dano excels as the Fabelman Dad, who is trying so damn hard within the confines of 1950s gender roles, but is often confounded by his wife and his own children.

The rest of the cast is good, too, including Seth Rogen, unrecognizable but for his voice. Julia Butters (who stole a scene from Leonardo DiCaprio in Once Upon a Time..In Hollywood) and Keely Karsten are really excellent as Sammy’s sisters. Judd Hirsch, who is now 87, has a hilarious cameo as the mom’s long-unseen grand uncle, who parachutes in with what amounts to a bizarre pep talk for Sammy. Another great filmmaker, David Lynch, has a priceless and gut-bustingly funny and dead-on cameo at the end as an even more famous filmmaker; Lynch and Spielberg must have been howling with laughter between takes.

Personal digression: The protagonist’s first movie – and the rest of the film – made me think about whether there was one moment in my life that steered me toward my own day-job career in law and politics – certainly there was a zeitgeist of the times in the 1960s, but I ‘ll have to reflect more to come up with a single catalytic moment. For my love of movies, however, there’s a clear spark – seeing movies like Casablanca, Double Indemnity, All About Eve, Strangers on a Train, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The Rules of the Game and 8 1/2 for my sophomore History of Film class at Stanford, along with The Godfather, Chinatown, Five Easy Pieces, The Last Picture Show, American Grafitti and other, then contemporary, work by the New Directors in the early 1970s; imagine seeing those 12 movies for the first time within a couple years.

I’ll be adding The Fabelmans to my Best Movies of 2022. It’s peeked out in a few theaters, and I expect a much wider theatrical release after Oscar nominations are announced in late January.

THE POST: riveting thriller and revelatory personal portrait

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Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep in THE POST

The Post may be a docudrama, but it plays as a thriller and an astonishingly insightful portrait of Katharine Graham by Meryl Streep. It’s one of the best movies of the year – and one of the most important.

Essentially, this movie is about a corporate decision, but master storyteller Steven Spielberg sets it up as a tick-tock, high stakes thriller.  Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham (Streep) must decide whether to publish the Pentagon Papers at a moment when her company is most vulnerable to market forces and government intimidation.  Nothing less than the American principle of freedom of the press hangs in the balance.

The Post also delivers the personal and feminist transformation of Katharine Graham, learning to move beyond her Mad Men Era roles as wife/mother/socialite andto , for the first time, assume real, not titular, command of a business empire.  And she goes All In on the ballsiest gamble any CEO could make.  To say that Streep brings Graham to life is inadequate.  Streep IS Graham. It sometimes seems like Streep can get an Oscar nomination without even making a movie, but this performance is one of Streep’s very best.

Spielberg surrounds Streep with a dazzling cast.  Tom Hanks lowers the pitch of his voice and becomes the swashbuckling editor Ben Bradlee.  Tracy Letts gives us another fine performance, this time as Graham’s financial guru Fritz Beebe.  As Bradlee’s second wife Tony, Sarah Paulson ignites a monologue with her piercing eyes.

Bruce Greenwood is quite brilliant as Robert McNamara, Graham’s old friend and the architect (and unwilling sta) of the Pentagon Papers. Greenwood is such an overlooked actor, and he’s so reliably good (he was even good in Wild Orchid, for Chrissakes).

The Pentagon Papers was the 7,000-page secret official history of the American involvement in the Vietnam War. Commissioned by then Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, the Pentagon Papers chronicled the years of bad decisions by the Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson administrations and, especially, the deceitfulness of JFK’s and LBJ’s public optimism about the War.  The truth was that the US government knew that the war was unwinnable and that it was only prolonged because nobody knew how to get out while saving face.  The US President in 1971, Richard Nixon, was following the same course, unnecessarily wasting the lives of another 20,000 Americans during his term of office; the ruthless Nixon and his henchman Henry Kissinger were desperate to keep the Pentagon Papers secret.  A private sector defense expert, Daniel Ellsberg, had access to the Pentagon Papers and sought to have them published, and The Post tells this story, which takes the audience from a jungle firefight into the courtroom of the US Supreme Court.

Baby Boomers will appreciate being transported back to quaint 1971 technology: typewriters, one-page-at-a-time Xerox machines, rotary pay phones, real typeset and ink presses.  (And cigarette smoking in restaurants and cigars in the workplace.)

I’ve also written an essay on some of the historical figures and events depicted in The Post: historical musings on THE POST.

The Post is worth seeing for Streep’s performance, for the history (incredibly important at this moment in the nation’s history) and for the sheer entertainment value.  One of the year’s best.

 

BRIDGE OF SPIES: pretty good spy story with a great Mark Rylance

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Tom Hanks in BRIDGE OF SPIES
Tom Hanks in BRIDGE OF SPIES

In Steven Spielberg’s true-to-life espionage thriller Bridge of Spies, Tom Hanks plays James B. Donovan, the insurance lawyer who went on a Cold War secret mission to negotiate the trade of a captured Russian spy for the captured US spy plane pilot Francis Gay Powers.  That Russian spy was Rudolph Abel, played by Mark Rylance – himself perhaps the best reason to see this movie.

Rylance is a top echelon Shakespearean actor from the UK – best known in the US for his star turn as the dour Thomas Cromwell in the television miniseries Wolf Hall.  In a remarkably minimalist yet evocative performance, Rylance reveals a man who lives by a code and is doggedly loyal to his own misguided cause – with absolutely no expectations of fairness or mercy from anyone else.  The effect is to make us sympathize with a guy who is trying to give our most menacing enemy our dearest nuclear secrets.  As my friend Karyn noted about Rylance, “less is more”.

This is not a great movie.  Sure, Spielberg is the master of entertainment (complete with sentimentally swelling music at the end).  After the movie’s riveting opening sequence of spy craft, we settle into a sometimes ponderous segment showing the Abel trial and the U-2 missions.  Bridge of Spies takes off again when Hanks’ Donovan must head behind the Iron Curtain.

[SPOILER ALERT – After seeing the film, I was compelled to research James B. Donovan to see if he really represented Abel and negotiated both the Abel-for-Powers deal AND the release of over a thousand Cuban prisoners from the Bay of Pigs fiasco.  Indeed, he did – all of the acts depicted in the movie seem to be factual.  But the real James B. Donovan was not the Everyman portrayed by Spielberg and Hanks.  Before going into private practice, Donovan served a stint as the General Counsel of the OSS – the predecessor of the CIA.  While slipping off to East Berlin to barter for Powers, he was on the New York City Board of Education.  And, instead of returning to obscurity after bringing Powers back to the US, he ran for US Senate from New York.]

 

coming up on TV: Steven Spielberg’s brilliant debut in DUEL

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Dennis Weaver in Stephen Spielberg's DUEL
Dennis Weaver in Stephen Spielberg’s DUEL

Set your DVRs for Turner Classic Movies’ November 21 airing of Duel.  In 1971, some Universal exec hired 25-year-old Steven Spielberg to make some TV movies, the first of which was Duel.  This low budget suspense thriller foreshadowed Jaws, Raiders of the Lost Ark and the rest of Spielberg’s masterworks.

In the pre-cell phone era, Dennis Weaver plays a traveling salesman driving through an isolated desert mountain road when he becomes embroiled in road rage to the extreme – the driver of a tanker truck starts relentlessly hunting him down. This imposing 1955 Peterbilt 281 tanker truck becomes every bit the scary monster as the Great White Shark in Jaws.

At the time, Dennis Weaver was one of America’s most familiar faces from his oft comic supporting role in TV’s iconic Gunsmoke, and he had just become a star in his own right with McCloud.  He is perfect here as an Everyman – right down to his Plymouth Valiant.

I don’t know whether TCM is airing the original 74-minute (TV) or the 90-minute (theatrical) cut, but both are just about perfect. When I saw this on TV in 1971, I wasn’t thinking about who the director was, I was just riveted to the story, terrified that Dennis Weaver wasn’t going to escape his fiendish nemesis.

Lincoln: Spielberg introduces us to Lincoln the man

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At the moment of Abraham Lincoln’s death, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, standing at the foot of Lincoln’s bed, said “Now he belongs to the ages”.  Indeed, Lincoln became immortalized as moral icon, martyr and master of language (all of which he was).  But, because we didn’t see Lincoln campaign and govern on the nightly television news (or even on newsreels), there has been no popular familiarity with Lincoln in the flesh.  With Lincoln, Steven Spielberg has pushed aside the marble statue and re-introduced us Lincoln the man.

The great actor Daniel Day-Lewis becomes the man Lincoln.  We see him as the genius of political strategy who is always several moves ahead of the other players.  We see him as the pragmatist who will do what is necessary to accomplish his goals.  We see him fondly cajoling his wife but gingerly avoiding her outbursts.  We see him as a complex father – grieving one son, doting to a second, distant to another.  And we see Lincoln as a very funny guy –  both a master communicator who tells anecdotes to make his point and a raconteur who enjoys laughing at his own bawdy stories.  Day-Lewis brings all of these aspects to life in a great performance.

Besides Day-Lewis, Tommy Lee Jones, as a key Congressional leader, and James Spader, as a political fixer, get the best lines.  Sally Field is perfectly cast as Mary Todd Lincoln.  Bruce McGill, David Straithern, Hal Holbrook, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Jared Harris (Mad Men) and Jackie Earle Haley (Little Children) are all excellent, too.

Spielberg and screenwriter Tony Kushner chose to focus on the few months at the end of the Civil War when Lincoln was trying to get Congress to pass the 13th Amendment to ban slavery.   Lincoln knew that, once the Civil War ended, his earlier Emancipation Proclamation was unlikely to withstand legal and political challenges and act to permanently ban slavery.  He also gauged that passage of the 13th Amendment was only viable before the end of the war, which was within sight.  His only recourse was to try to rush a successful vote over both the obstructionism of the opposing party and attempted sabotage by the Confederacy while both wings of his own party refused to join in collaboration.  It’s a horse race.

So we have a political thriller – one of the best depictions of American legislative politics ever on film.  Lincoln retains a team of lobbyists played by Tim Blake Nelson, John Hawkes and Spader.  These guys know that appealing to the principles of the targeted Congressmen is not going to get enough votes, so they enthusiastically plunge into less high minded tactics.  Spader’s character operates with unmatched gusto and is one of the highlights of the movie.  Lincoln’s lawyerly parsing of a note to Congress would put Bill Clinton to shame.

All of this really happened.  Lincoln, based on Doris Kearns Goodwin’s absorbing Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, is utterly historically accurate. Lincoln buffs will especially appreciate small touches like Lincoln’s pet name for his wife, Stanton’s aversion to Lincoln’s endless stream of anecdotes, Thaddeus Stevens’ wig, Ben Wade’s scowl, Lincoln’s secretaries (the White House staff) sharing a bed and the never ending flood of favor-seekers outside the door of the President’s White House office.  I think that Mary Lincoln is portrayed a bit too sympathetically, but that’s a tiny quibble.  One more fun note:  the 1860s were to male facial hair what the 1970s were to apparel – a period when everyone could make the most flamboyant fashion choices, mostly for the worse.

Lincoln is one of the year’s best films, and like Lincoln himself, timeless.

Trailer for Spielberg’s Lincoln

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Here’s the trailer for Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln with Daniel Day-Lewis. It’s based on Doris Kearn Goodwin’s absorbing Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln.  The film will be released on November 9.

The brilliant cast also includes Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Tommy Lee Jones, Jared Harris, Jackie Earle Haley, Hal Holbrook, Sally Field, John Hawkes, James Spader, Bruce McGill, David Straithern, Tim Blake Nelson, Walton Goggins (Justified) and Dakin Mathews (the horse trader in True Grit).

Because Lincoln’s prose is so exquisitely profound and because he is such an icon, he is often played on screen with a deep speaking voice.  In fact, Lincoln’s voice ranged high, and I enjoy hearing Day-Lewis capturing that characteristic in the middle and end of this trailer.

DVD of the Week: War Horse

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War Horse is a sweeping epic that traces the journey of an especially spirited horse and its series of owners before and during World War I.  It’s not a critical spoiler to let you know that the horse survives, although its various handlers are all savaged by war.

It’s a movie that we could have seen in the 1950s – but a very, very good 1950s movie.  The story is sentimental, but neither simple nor dully plotted.  The movie is beautifully composed and shot, and many scenes recall John Ford’s use of landscapes and action.  The silhouettes and sky in the final shot are lit as in the similar climax of Gone With the Wind.

War Horse is also one of the better movies about World War I, of which the central fact was its massive, brutally stupid waste of lives on a thereto unimagined scale.  Along the way we see clear and accurate depictions of trench warfare, No Man’s Land, foraging, and the relative utility of cavalry, infantry, artillery, machine guns, and tanks.  Spielberg doesn’t distract us from the overall horror with unnecessary gore.

For Presidents’ Day: the Lincoln movie

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Daniel Day-Lewis in LINCOLN

In late December, we’ll see a movie about perhaps the greatest American made by perhaps our greatest filmmaker.    Steven Spielberg is directing Lincoln, based on Doris Kearn Goodwin’s absorbing Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln.

Daniel Day-Lewis and Sally Field play the Lincolns.  The dazzling cast includes Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Tommy Lee Jones, Jared Harris, Jackie Earle Haley, Hal Holbrook, John Hawkes, James Spader, Bruce McGill, David Straithern, Tim Blake Nelson, Walton Goggins (Justified) and Dakin Mathews (the horse trader in True Grit).

War Horse: Spielberg’s sentimental epic

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War Horse is a sweeping epic that traces the journey of an especially spirited horse and its series of owners before and during World War I.  It’s not a critical spoiler to let you know that the horse survives, although its various handlers are all savaged by war.

It’s a movie that we could have seen in the 1950s – but a very, very good 1950s movie.  The story is sentimental, but neither simple nor dully plotted.  The movie is beautifully composed and shot, and many scenes recall John Ford’s use of landscapes and action.  The silhouettes and sky in the final shot are lit as in the similar climax of Gone With the Wind.

War Horse is also one of the better movies about World War I, of which the central fact was its massive, brutally stupid waste of lives on a thereto unimagined scale.  Along the way we see clear and accurate depictions of trench warfare, No Man’s Land, foraging, and the relative utility of cavalry, infantry, artillery, machine guns, and tanks.  Spielberg doesn’t distract us from the overall horror with unnecessary gore.