The Fabelmans

Steven Spielberg's autobiography-cum-confessional, The Fabelmans, describes a person besotted with destruction and their ability to, eventually, have some control over the ways in which it is captured or expressed. We experience this bewitchment first in crude terms: the mix of horror and pleasure derived from witnessing a runaway train coming off its tracks then piling up in a heap. A young Sammy Fabelman (Mateo Zoryan Francis-DeFord, a blue-eyed cherub not completely dissimilar in look to Empire of the Sun era Christian Bale) gets the zap put on him by a luxurious appointed derailment from Cecil B DeMille's The Greatest Show on Earth. This special effects sequence spooks him to such a degree that he longs to repeat the sensation, eventually leveraging a series of Hanukkah gifts into a scale approximation - one that Sammy blasts directly at his own face. Later in the film this fixation is expressed in interpersonal terms. During the argument that marks the dissolution of his family our eyes are directed to a mirror where we see a teenage Sammy (now played by Gabriel LaBelle) standing over his weeping sisters, prodding at them with his camera. 

This glimpse, an intrusive thought given an accusatory physical life, momentarily chides the young man for being unprepared to document this real-time collapse, before the conscious, present mind actually experiencing this trauma wakes up and banishes these cold-blooded insinuations altogether. Spielberg and Tony Kushner's screenplay revolves around a certain kind of loneliness then, one achieved through a lifelong dedication to emotional passivity all while possessing an incisive grasp on that which makes other, separate people tick. Michelle Williams' Mitzi Fabelman dominates both her son's life and the first half of this film; a mother churning through a slow-motion nervous breakdown. Her crumble marked by varying gradients of grinning terror. Mitzi's neuroses are so obvious and relentlessly acted out that they have, inadvertently, subordinated every other member of her family into the role of an appreciative audience. They are the extras or background players, condemned to swirl around this subject to very little effect. Mitzi is a sitcom character trapped outside of her natural habitat and suffering for this cruel displacement. Her husband (played with a strange, extraterrestrial heroism by Paul Dano) and children, are so numb to this never-ending performance that any recognition of impending doom is imparted solely to us, the audience, to note.