The Bombing of Spielberg

Whose idea was it that The Fabelmans should open “wide” (Hollywood lingo for expanding to more theaters) on Thanksgiving weekend? Did Spielberg think that the fictional memoir recalling when his impulsive mother Mitzi (Michelle Williams) left his deceived father (Paul Dano) was wholesome family entertainment?

Failing to draw many ticket-buyers (grossing just over $2 million across the country) indicates that maybe Spielberg’s once-infallible pop instincts are now defective.

Spielberg’s latest collaboration with playwright Tony Kushner suffers several crucial miscalculations (like last week’s She Said flop). Ever since Lincoln (2010), Spielberg’s formerly ecumenical perspective has become politically slanted. Did he hope that the current craze for “nonbinary” gender identities would make the collapse of the family unit in The Fabelmans comply with the BLM charter, or make it suddenly become popular?

Unpopular ideas overtake the second half of The Fabelmans: Spielberg discovers the nature of his family’s dysfunction, fumbling his mother’s infidelity and the Oedipal issues illuminated by her near-naked campfire dance. The latter Freudian image projects a disturbing version of Ingmar Bergman’s magic-lantern symbology that’s so important to Spielberg’s identity as a moviemaker.

This uncertain sense of self becomes more complicated when the Fabelmans relocate to Northern California (“the land of the sequoia people”). Sammy/Spielberg (Gabriel LaBelle) mocks his towering, enviable WASP classmates, approaching Schindler’s List and Munich territory. The anti-Jewish bigotry that Sammy/Spielberg encounters is startling in a narrative that previously glossed over ethnic identity. Judd Hirsch’s Uncle Boris, an Old World circus performer who clues Sammy in to the art and heart of Jewish entertainment, briefly jolts the movie with an element of cringing, showstopping ambivalence.

But the shift into racial and social hostility creates a different film altogether. Not provably diaristic, the blood-libel and ethnic slurs accompanied by physical violence flatten the story’s appeal; it’s just unfathomably unpleasant. Uncle Boris didn’t warn Sammy, which makes these scenes feel more Kushner than Spielberg — as if some kind of delayed, spiteful vengeance is playing out. The artist behind The Color Purple, Amistad, and Munich rose above resentment — which makes them greater films than Schindler’s List, and ineffably personal.

In The Fabelmans, Sammy’s introduction to the WASP world is not realistic. Scenes of Sammy kissing his goofily Christian girlfriend, Monica (Chloe East), and his fascination with golden-boy athlete Logan (Sam Rechner) resemble the sitcom Americana of Back to the Future — the “sequoia people” cut down to satirical size like the “very fine people” in Charlottesville. Sammy eventually exposes them in a 16mm movie shown at the prom, but all these scenes feel false; they play according to contemporary notions about “deplorables,” such as the white Jets gang who were condemned to lower-class hell in Kushner’s West Side Story script. The “bagel hole” noose planted in Sammy’s gym locker evokes the Bubba Wallace and Jussie Smollett allegations rather than the more piercing and likely 1960s affronts. Sammy endures worse treatment than the token black kids seen in the background of his locker-room confrontation and on the prom’s periphery.

This selective depiction of a bigoted USA is both cunning and far-fetched. Critic John Demetry observed that the 16mm movie Sammy makes, with its idolized depiction of Logan, resembles the sports montages of Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympiad, ironically (deliberately?) imputing Aryan and Nazi characteristics to high schoolers. Sammy’s adoration is superficial, therefore suspicious and secretly contemptuous. The movie goes from being about Spielberg’s inner life as we might be interested in it to one that’s more about his outer life, stoking Millennial fears of racism and distrust. Logan becomes a guilt-ridden oaf who rejects his own best qualities — a punishment that leaves Sammy the victor. (Next stop, Hollywood.)

This smug morality tale is both anachronistic and antagonistic to the humanism that once drew generations of viewers to Spielberg’s vision of America and the world. More than a hundred years after Griffith’s cross-racial spiritual advance, in Broken Blossoms, Spielberg’s self-glorifying memories result in an anti-Intolerance, and his self-praise ultimately makes The Fabelmans unrelatable, a box-office bomb.