Steven Spielberg is Peaking in his 70s

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 Is "The Fabelmans" the very best film that Spielberg has ever made? No. ("West Side Story" is, however, a dangerous contender) But of course, leave it to Spielberg to turn a "magic of the movies" movie on its head, spin it around, and end in the land of melancholy. 

 What we have here is a young boy called Sammy Fabelman, one of the great names of cinema. Spielberg sees the superhero wave surrounding him and creates a superhero of his own, one whose power is storytelling. Sammy likes movies, and is preternaturally good at making them. The sequence where he gets the idea for, and then executes, creating light flashes to represent gunshots in his boy scout film he makes as a young teen is more thrilling than plenty of action movies being pumped out by Hollywood today. Because Sammy Fabelman is the most obvious director stand-in since Bob Fosse brought Joe Gideon to the big screen, his parents will not stay together, and this will make him profoundly sad.

 As a straightforward family drama, "The Fabelmans" is fine but didn't move me. Michelle Williams as Sammy's mom is a bit too obviously cheating on Sammy's dad from the very first frame, and the script is never interested in letting his dad (Paul Dano, steady in a role that's too passive) articulate what he's going through. Everyone raves about how smart of a guy Father Fabelman is - surely he is as privy to his wife's feelings as we are. Or, the movie suggests, maybe not. Cameras catch the truth, and then editors lie. Sammy learns of his mom's affair by shooting a movie, and then hide that knowledge on the cutting room floor, preserving the secret. 

 What of the school bully? Steven Spielberg's camera see Sammy get abused by some jocks for being Jewish, and for being too meek to fight back. Sammy's camera sees one bully's athletic talent, and his edit emphasizes that to such a degree that the kid catches imposter syndrome the moment the film screens. That is a truly weird layer. Is Sammy making amends or fighting back through his camera? I'm not sure what, if anything, Spielberg is saying about his own career, but it's a much more complex way of saying that movies exaggerate life for good and for bad than I would have expected. The weirdest layer: after sitting through a decade of movies about how movies can do anything, Sammy's movies fail to fix his parents relationship or his relationship with his girlfriend (a bizarre, funny-on-purpose Christian girl), but are explicitly the thing that fixes the the bully's romantic relationship. Having a "life isn't like the movies" "but you got the girl at the end" exchange applied only to the film's meanest character is something that I can't imagine 90s Spielberg doing.

 I also can't imagine 90s Spielberg being quite this vulnerable. Sammy is obviously emotionally stunted when he can't filter his life through his camera. There's a strange meta element, where the movie tells us that Sammy could process his parent's divorce only if he was shooting it in a movie. Hasn't "The Fabelmans" been exactly that? Spielberg smartly takes the middle road on his parents' art vs science debate. It would be so easy to say that Michelle Williams is right, movies are about dreams and magic, but there is a lot of emphasis on how technical knowledge and thinking like an engineer is necessary to make that magic real. The reverse side is that every character in this movie find's Paul Dano's technical knowledge boring. He loves to explain how things work, and they are all dreadfully bored by it, and there's no scene where him explaining engineering finally clicks with anyone else. Is Spielberg worried that he'll bore people with a film about his technical knowledge of film? That's the psychology subtext I want to dwell on here. 

 If Spielberg has a reputation for being a bit emotionally simple, his last two films mark a total change in his career. They manage to be both more cynical and more playful than many of his earlier dramas. By the end, Sammy must accept that he cannot fix things in the real world through his art. Also, the end is a sight gag about horizons. For most of the 2010s, it was in vogue to say that Steven had fallen off. Right now, it feels like he's just getting started.

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