But when “Schindler’s List” hit the theaters, it became immediately and abundantly clear that the man could also tick the artist box, and with such infuriating ease that Hollywood’s haters were loath to admit that one man could just undisputedly scrape all the marbles together into one big pile like that.
Beginnings
It’s 1952. Mitzi (Michelle Williams) and Burt Fabelman (Paul Dano) take their young son Sammy (Mateo Zoryon Francis-DeFord) to see his first movie—Cecil B. DeMille’s “The Greatest Show on Earth.” His response is of course like the YouTube video where a pet otter pup that’s never seen water before gets put into a bathtub.
We’re shown Sammy’s “Leave It to Beaver”–esque progression from filmmaking otter pup to teen wunderkind (teen Sammy is played by Gabriel LaBelle). He casts his chatty little sisters as actors in his teeny horror flicks, using up the family’s entire bulk shopping supply of toilet paper to wrap and mummify them. Later, as a Boy Scout, he casts his buddies in improvised Westerns and war flicks (many of which are re-creations of Spielberg’s early “works.”) An enthralling scene finds the young director discovering that he has the language and psychological wherewithal required to communicate to non-actors about how to generate real, believable emotions.
But the film is, naturally, equally a portrait of Sammy’s family. We need that narrative and perspective to see how Spielberg’s talent was planted, cultivated, and how it blossomed. And so the greatest show on earth (if not the greatest, then maybe the loudest) is happening right in Sammy’s own home.
Or rather—homes. Sammy’s dad is an emotionally buttoned-up electrical engineer (benignly disdainful of his son’s artistic interests), who moves his family from New Jersey to Arizona and then to California to the tremendous bother of everyone involved.
Free-spirited artist Mom Mitzi was a classical pianist who jettisoned her musical career to raise her family. And since she was never able to fully let go of her art, she comes across as a bird with an emotional broken wing: a superficially bubbly housewife who is constantly caroming off the rigid expectations of prim 1950s’ domesticity. One depiction of her inner state is when she packs the kids into the car and drives them dangerously close to a tornado out of sheer reckless interest.
There’s also family friend “Uncle” Bennie (Seth Rogen) and nutty old great-uncle Boris (Judd Hirsch, who hilariously steals the entire movie in what’s little more than a cameo). Sammy’s little sisters, friends, and eventually a famous director of Westerns (played similarly hilariously by film director David Lynch) also shape Sammy’s trajectory along the way. The point is clear: Artists are not created in a vacuum.
The Magic
What’s particularly wonderful about this film is how we’re shown the existential need that artists must have regarding their art. The deepest talents are such that the artist can’t live without that vehicle of self-expression; their art is a functional and necessary component whereby they interpret and navigate life. We see how filmmaking is not just the thrill of pleasing audiences and getting attention, but also how young Sammy needs it to process his emotions, and to put some distance between himself and a world that is often frightening and/or confusing.Directors, much like actors, will sometimes discover themselves inadvertently, automatically, stepping outside themselves and objectifying traumatic emotional events playing out in front of them—switching into director or actor mode and imagining how they’d shoot or act that particular scene, in the movie version of their lives.
Two examples of movie magic are especially revealing: Spielberg demonstrates to us the use of the movie camera as a forensic truth-detector. When browbeaten by his father to make a film for Mitzi to make her happy on her birthday, Sammy—examining random footage from family gatherings and rerunning certain sequences, scrutinizing body language and facial expression—slowly and unwillingly comes to the horrible realization the his mother and “uncle” Bennie are not just friends.
The second example is where Sammy is goaded by his extremely Christian, goyische (non-Jewish) girlfriend into filming their high school’s traditional annual beach outing. In it, Sammy decides to placate and ingratiate himself to his worst nightmare: the school’s ultra-bullying, handsome football jock (Sam Rechner).
By portraying this big-man-on-campus jock in a heroic light, Sammy manages to reunite the football star with the girlfriend (Isabelle Kusman) who dumped him because of his rabid anti-Semitism. In a subsequent hallway locker scene, the bully has an emotional breakdown due to massive cognitive dissonance, pleading to know how Sammy transformed him from the lowly, immoral creature he inwardly knows himself to be, into a golden screen god his ex-girlfriend suddenly feels compelled to be with again. The scene demonstrates the magic of filmmaking, and the magnetic power that the ability to sprinkle magic dust upon others can confer upon a filmmaker.
The End
Audiences expecting a sweet, Spielbergian childhood autobiography about the magic of the movies may inadvertently raise their eyebrows at how bittersweet and raw the story actually is. But it’s exactly that bittersweet quality that gives the movie heft, and opens the door from Spielberg’s entertainment moviemaking wheelhouse into his art moviemaking wheelhouse. Remember, this man’s monopolized all the moviemaking marbles.
