Steven Spielberg, one of the most influential filmmakers in the history of cinema, has made a genre-defining war movie, a $100 million musical and several Oscar-winning historical dramas.
He has explored slavery, presidency, and dystopian fictions.
And yet, the term “Spielbergian” remains rigidly specific.
AI doesn’t cry at the end of A.I. Artificial Intelligence.
But even a chatbot can tell you – we did ask – that “Spielbergian” is “...characterised by an emphasis on family, adventure, and fantasy, as well as a sense of wonder and awe. Examples of Spielberg’s films… considered “Spielbergian” include ET the Extra-Terrestrial, and Jurassic Park”.
“I mean what frustrates me is that sometimes people say Spielbergian and they mean sentimentality or respectability depending on whether or not they want to condescend to him,” says Tony Kushner, a now frequent Spielberg collaborator. “Sometimes they mean both. It’s annoying the extent to which critics and other film-makers want to diminish the significance of those broken families. Or to insist that his films are handing out pabulum and palliatives and that’s why he’s so successful. But the reason he is successful is that in addition to being able to construct incredible thrill rides like Indiana Jones and his astonishing mastery of the form that even Hitchcock recognised immediately, the human element is profound in all of his work.”
ET and The Goonies – based on Spielberg’s stories – seem to exemplify the twin creative engines that biographers love to ascribe to the director: his parents’ divorce and growing up in suburbia.
It wasn’t unacceptable to have a career and a family, but the minute you did, people would poke holes. For women, selfhood was a form of bad mothering
And not just biographers: having blamed his father for the dissolution of his nuclear family for many years, the film-maker eventually discovered that his mother had instigated the divorce. Spielberg’s subsequent 1999 reconciliation with his father Arnold was deemed newsworthy enough to make the cover of Life magazine.
Following hot on the heels of Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast and Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma, The Fabelmans offers a lightly fictionalised version of Spielberg’s youth and something like a heartfelt apology to Spielberg’s father who died, aged 103, last summer.
Spoiler alert: despite concerning his parents’ divorce and growing up in suburbia, the film is not remotely Spielbergian in the accepted sense.
The characters on-screen are complex, but no one would hesitate to place them in the same sentence as “wonder and awe”.
In preparation for the project, Fabelmans screenwriter Kushner interviewed his friend so routinely that Spielberg now jokingly refers to him as his therapist.
“We both decided early on that the only way that this could be turned into a film is if we were really sure that a person who cared nothing about movies or Steven Spielberg would find something of value in it,” explains Kushner.
“Steven was very apprehensive about making something that would be seen as a vanity project. We didn’t want to make a nostalgic film or a memory pageant. We wanted something that had a dramatic shape and narrative momentum, and conflicts. I gathered a lot of his memories. I tried to think my way through them in terms of what they meant to the characters, as opposed to trying to ask Steven for the answer.
It wasn’t unacceptable to have a career and a family, but the minute you did, people would poke holes. For women, selfhood was a form of bad mothering
“I’ve known him for 17 years and knew his father a little bit. I’d never met his mother, but I knew his family. I had to think of them as fictional inventions that had no relationship to the original. And then, he went over that version and said: well I don’t think my mother would ever have done that. Or I don’t feel comfortable with my father doing that. But mostly, he really enjoyed having somebody take his memories and turn them into a work of fiction.”
Tony Kushner is an American playwright, screenwriter, essayist, and director. He became an overnight global sensation with his seminal 1993 play Angels in America, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and provided much-needed airing for the devastating contemporaneous impact of the Aids epidemic.
An engaging presence and one of the most prominent and influential writers of his generation, he’s a terrific creative fit for Spielberg.
Both men have experience of American-Jewish life far away from such American-Jewish population centres as New York. And both men had musical mothers. Leah Adler, Spielberg’s mother, was a concert pianist and painter who abandoned her artistic ambitions to raise Steven and his three sisters in Arizona.
Kushner’s mother Sylvia was a bassoonist and one of the first women to hold a principal chair in a major orchestra. She played with the New York City Opera, recorded with Stravinsky, and toured with Sadler’s Wells Ballet, before relocating to Louisiana to raise Kushner and his siblings.
When Sylvia’s first child was born deaf, her brother, a prominent psychoanalyst, suggested that her daughter’s deafness was due to her career.
On Lincoln, I remember after the first long scene with Daniel Day-Lewis, Steven went off to hide. He had never seen anything like it
“I grew up in the deep south. Stephen grew up in the west rather than the south. But his mother’s family comes from Cincinnati, which is very much middle America and he grew up in New Jersey and then moved to Arizona. He’s 10 years older than I am so in a way we’re different generations, but we have similar experiences of our world and our country,” Kushner says.
“My father was in a military band during World War II, his father was in combat at some point, but also had a desk job doing engineering and figuring out how to blow up bridges. Leah was frustrated with her ambitions. She didn’t have a career as a professional musician. My mother had a very successful career before the whole family moved to Louisiana.
“That was in part because of her feeling a conflict between having a profession and being a mother. Postwar feminism was pre-Feminine Mystique in the nascent stages. It wasn’t unacceptable to have a career and a family, but the minute you did, people would poke holes. For women, selfhood was a form of bad mothering.”
To date, Kushner has written four screenplays for the director: Munich, Lincoln, West Side Story and now The Fabelmans. The latter was inspired by a conversation about a family camping trip that Spielberg told Kushner on location for Munich.
“My mom and I had a secret for a long time, and my mom would always say to me: Gee, Steve, this would be a really terrific movie. Why don’t you make that movie someday?” Spielberg told fellow director Martin Scorsese in a public conversation last month. “So I had her coming at me from one side and Tony Kushner, who had heard the stories and was really kind of pushing for it.”
On Lincoln, I remember after the first long scene with Daniel Day-Lewis, Steven went off to hide. He had never seen anything like it
The camping anecdote that the filmmaker revealed to Kushner is now a pivotal scene in The Fabelmans, which recasts Steven as Sammy Fabelman (Gabriel LaBelle), an aspiring teenage director who initially fails to notice that all is not well between his father, Burt (Paul Dano), a pioneering electrical engineer, and mother Mitzi (Michelle Williams), a pianist struggling with her stifling role as a traditional 1950s housewife.
Speaking to this newspaper in 2018, Spielberg spoke of his particular genetic legacy: “I don’t spend my time thinking about how the balance works. It just somehow does. It’s just lucky genetics between my piano artist mom and my computer inventor father. My brain is both parents.”
Neither parent is afforded a hagiographic treatment in The Fabelmans.
His father, though patient, is too absorbed in his work to notice the psychodrama unfolding at home. His mother, meanwhile, is flighty, flinty and insecure.
[ Steven Spielberg: ‘I decided I had to have the courage of my convictions’Opens in new window ]
It’s a family portrait that can be difficult to watch. The Fabelmans, notes Kushner, are easy to find in Spielberg’s filmography. They’re in ET, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Jaws. But they have never been so exposed before.
“One of the great joys of working with him is that he has this incredibly steep learning curve on every film,” says Kushner. “On Lincoln, I remember after the first long scene with Daniel Day-Lewis, Steven went off to hide. He had never seen anything like it. For him, it was like driving a Volkswagen and then somebody hands you a Ferrari. He didn’t want the set to see him so vulnerable. He never makes a movie that he doesn’t feel terrified before filming begins.
“In this film, the family that has been a preoccupation all the way through his career is right there. There’s no alien showing up. It’s not World War II. There are no dinosaurs. It’s a very naked film. There’s a gorgeous 45-second portrait of the moment that the marriage dies. And both people are so crushed by what’s happening because they still love each other and it’s just devastating. We’re watching a particular world of intimacy and love and pain. It feels like a great privilege to see an artist working on that level.”
Michelle Williams’s Mitzi is far from cuddly but Kushner, by now, is accustomed to fashioning and enjoying complicated women characters. Citing All About Eve as one of his favourite films, he notes that even Bette Davis’s formidable Margo Channing was hamstrung with “an ugly line” in an otherwise “dazzling, original script”: “It’s one career all females have in common – being a woman. Sooner or later we’ve got to work at it no matter how many other careers we’ve had or wanted. And in the last analysis, nothing is any good unless you can look up just before dinner or turn around in bed and there he is. Without that, you’re not a woman. You’re something with a French provincial office or a book full of clippings but you’re not a woman.”
In Kushner’s fearless play, A Bright Room Called Day, a middle-aged actress in 1930s Germany and a young Long Island woman in the 1980s compare and contrast their respective regimes.
In Angels in America, the closeted, HIV-positive Roy Cohn – a chief witchfinder during the McCarthy era purges – is visited by the ghost of the late communist Ethel Rosenberg.
We’re in a profound crisis in the film industry,” says Kushner. “Things have really radically changed and we don’t know what to do
Ethel and her husband, Julius, were convicted and executed for treason in 1953; Cohn illegally influenced a judge to ensure that Ethel would die in the electric chair. Contemporaneous expectations around motherhood, as with Spielberg’s mother, were sadly relevant.
“There are several people who say that when Ethel Rosenberg first got pregnant, she was an incredibly smart woman and she started reading all of these books that were coming out,” says Kushner. “Books by Dr Spock and other things at the time about how to be a mother. And they were so overwhelming to her.
“She was offered amnesty from the death penalty if she would turn state evidence against Julius, who was already going to die. She was told by the government that if she actually accepted this, she wouldn’t be electrocuted and that she might be eligible for parole some years later and be able to see her children in prison. She chose not to, She chose to die. Part of that was to stand by Julius and not give in to these people. But part of it, some people say, was the incredible inadequacy she felt about being a mother because of all the literature coming out.”
These valuable historical insights may be confined to a smaller audience than one might anticipate. The Fabelmans – for all its rave reviews and awards – has grossed just $17.8 million at the box office. West Side Story, Spielberg and Kushner’s previous collaboration, earned $76 million of the estimated $300 million it required to break even.
“We’re in a profound crisis in the film industry,” says Kushner. “Things have really radically changed and we don’t know what to do. The model of how films get financed, how you figure out who will come and how much money to put into a film – because these things are hugely expensive – is dead. The theatrical release is completely gone except for the occasional Marvel comic book movie.
[ What do you mean, we have to wait two months for the film to come to Ireland?Opens in new window ]
“So what happens to movies for adults? What happens to independent films? We’re undergoing a profound shift in human consciousness with the digital revolution, which is a really protean, transformative thing. We haven’t begun to wrap our minds around what any of this means. The film industry is now at a place where the music industry was about 10 years ago. There will always be movies. Just as there always be theatre. But no form is immutable. Twenty-first century sonnets are not like Marlowe and Shakespeare.”
The Fabelmans opens on in cinemas on January 27th
