It hasn’t been a great decade for Steven Spielberg, I really didn’t enjoy last years West Side Story and the film he directed before, Ready Player One, was the worst film he’s ever made. Last year, like plenty of other directors, he’s gone for a little introspection. He’s wrote something about his own life and made an autobiographical film about his childhood. A little like Kenneth Branagh with Belfast last year.
Belfast didn’t entirely work for me but I never really warmed to Branagh’s screen work in the first place. Spielberg, on the other hand, has been an important figure in my life in my life since I was old enough to watch movies. He doesn’t do many personal interviews so I was really interested to see what he would come up with here.
The film mostly centralises around his parents' divorce, clearly a massive event in his life. His mother, a musician and former piano player and his father is an extremely pragmatic engineer. When you think on Spielberg's career it’s quite clear how both his parents and their relationship influenced his work. I’m thinking of the finale of Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, where to speak to the aliens the scientists in NASA use music and light. The combination of art and science.
Spielbergs surrogate here is a character called Sammy Fabelman; he didn’t use his real name as lots of the characters are amalgamations or composites of several people. Sammy's parents are played by Michelle Williams and Paul Dano. Much more difficult roles than they appear on paper. The divorce is the key event of the film but is a little trickier than a usual film divorce. There are no big shouting arguments or plates thrown at the wall; Some arguments, yes, but it’s a slow relationship dissolve. We also see them work well as a loving family unit. It’s a clever decision and it makes for a more interesting film.
Michelle Williams plays his mother and is nominated for an Oscar for it. A very human performance, it would be easy to romanticise, the part but she has an uncomfortable presence. She loves her kids but is far from a perfect mother. Only an actress the calibre of Michelle Williams could pull it off without making her wholly unlikeable, but she maintains a tragic edge to her and alludes to mental health struggles which all make sense. I also think there is an oedipal edge to the relationship of the mother and Sammy which is a brave call.
There is an episodic nature to the film, it moves from the different eras of his childhood. The middle section when Sammy is high school is probably the only time the film didn’t entirely work for me, it was a little too 'Happy Days' I thought. A little too clean. That said, there are some really great scenes, particularly when he is asked to film their school trip and it’s played for the his class. His first premiere.
So overall I thought the film frontloaded the really good stuff; I’m thinking young Sammy filming his toy trains and projecting it back onto his hand like he’s looking at a smart phone. That was an image that really stayed with me. It’s the relationship between his parents is the real thesis of the film and it’s a very interesting and nuanced look at divorce.
In this new genre of film makers looking into their own past, it is one of the better ones. I’d have it comfortably ahead of Belfast or Empire of Light, but doesn’t reach the heights of Roma or The Soul. I admire how little vanity is on display here. For a man known for sentimentally, he manages to keep that at a healthy distance. He’s finally making a movie about his own family and he's so restrained here.
Compare ii to its competitor in the best picture caratogry in this years Oscars The Fabelmans might be a little low stakes and straightforward but there is something powerful in its simplicity. It’s not going to win many awards, but I think its the best film Spielberg has made in a long time.
