The Fabelmans

Tropic Sprockets by Ian Brockway

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From Steven Spielberg, the director who revitalized the “cliffhanger” sensation in American cinema, “The Fabelmans” is the auteur’s Truffaut exercise. Spielberg has crafted his autobiography and it is charged with electricity and great heart.

As young boy Sam (Mateo Zoryon Francis-DeFord) is obsessed with trains. He wants to see them crash as an effort to control events.

His engineering father (Paul Dano) buys him a train set and his mom (Michelle Williams) sneaks his father’s 8mm camera to him. Sam films his own homemade train accident, hypnotized by the motion picture.

Soon he dresses up his sisters in mummy bandages using toilet paper and makes little films documenting his day to day occurrences and fantasies.

In high school, Sam (Gabriel LaBelle) is shy but cheerful. He tries to be outgoing but he is brutally bullied by Logan (Sam Rechner), a Tab Hunter lookalike and anti-semite.

Sam has desire for the glamorous Monica (Chloe East). Monica is struck by Sam’s charming shyness. She wants to pray with him. The two kiss under a huge crucifixion in one of the film’s most stirring and confrontational scenes.

Gabriel LaBelle gives a stand out performance as the somewhat voyeuristic kid who lives in his head and Michelle Williams is superb as a wife trapped by a milquetoast husband. She daringly loves her film-obsessed son but yearns for something more.

There are some great Spielberg touches that fans will recognize. The shots of suburban split level houses out in Arizona, reminiscent of the Spielberg produced “Poltergeist” (1982) or the reaction shots of the kids seeing the monkey that recall “E.T.” and “Raiders of the Lost Ark.”

Ever present is the medium of film itself, Sam’s personal friendly ghost, his spirit and his solace. Blue gray light invariably moves across the boy’s face, a balm of light.

The high school moments recall De Palma’s “Carrie.” Older and more physically mature adults are scary, monstrous and violent. Logan’s teeth flash like a Great White Shark, as he pummels Sam to the ground with a volleyball.

At the prom, one almost feels that Sam will get a bucket of blood on him. The gold cross he gives Monica flashes supernaturally in the light just like the bassinet in “Rosemary’s Baby” (1968).

In one scene Sam’s mother slaps him percussively on the back, the print of her hand is hectic red and flashing with anger, the mark of a beast. And did Sam see his mother’s hips lasciviously rub against Benny (Seth Rogen) his father’s best friend?

To be an adult is to be a creature of torment and Sam wants none of it. Even Sam’s relative Boris (Judd Hirsch) is animalistic and crazed by art, a kind of van Gogh as he rends his shirt into tatters.

The light of a projector covers Sam in a blanket of warmth and images.

The posters of the cinema are constructed like a shrine in Sam’s eyes and at the center of this shrine is a wrinkled face obscured by a huge Hollywood cloud of cigar smoke, revealing Sam’s Wizard of Oz: John Ford, channeled by David Lynch.

When Sam leaves the studio office he jumps up in a giddy leap as if he were just kissed by his girlfriend.

The camera, unlike girls, will always be faithful to him.

Warmly nostalgic and full of film references as well as parental terror, “The Fabelmans” make us a captive audience yet again.

Write Ian at ianfree11@yahoo.com