The Fabelmans: A Review - The Naked Truth Is That Emperor Spielberg Has No Clothes

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 1.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. A terrible, self-indulgent, truly awful film that features poor performances, an abysmal script, and dreadful direction.

This past year has been a boon for self-indulgent film directors and a bane for movie audiences, as auteurs have shat out a bevy of sub-par autobiographical movies about their childhoods and the magic of cinema.

First there was Alejandro G. Inarritu’s atrocious Bardo, followed quickly by James Gray’s artistically anemic Armageddon Time, and then there was Sam Mendes’ universally panned Empire of Light (which, to be fair, is less blatantly autobiographical), and finally there is Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans.

I’ve seen all of the above except for Empire of Light. What has been alarming is that each of these films I have seen has gotten progressively worse than the one I saw before it. Armageddon Time is shlocky, politically correct garbage, but Bardo is simply an astonishing cinematic atrocity. Bardo is supremely awful, but it’s at least visually and narratively ambitious if not audacious, which is in stark contrast to Spielberg’s newest flatulent film The Fabelmans.

The Fabelmans describes itself as a coming-of-age drama, co-written by Spielberg and Tony Kushner, that chronicles aspiring filmmaker Sam Fabelman (a stand in for Spielberg), a precocious young man in love with moviemaking, as he navigates his childhood and teen years growing up with a scientific father, Burt, and an artistic mother, Mitzi.

The Fabelmans is easily the worst of the Spielberg’s late-stage movies, which is quite an accomplishment considering the garbage he’s churned out over the last twenty years or so. This film is, quite frankly, so bad as to be an utter embarrassment. I watched a screener of the movie with my wife and we laughed out loud numerous times AT the movie, but never with it. The movie is such an amateurish, after-school special level production that we literally stopped it on multiple occasions and turned to each other and asked “what the fuck?”

At one point in the film, aspiring director Sam Fabelman is watching the footage of a movie he’s shot with his Boy Scout troop, and he shakes his head and mutters to himself in disappointment, “Fake. Totally fake.” Too bad Spielberg didn’t have the same discerning eye at 76 that he did when he was 14 as The Fabelmans rings so egregiously phony that I actually pondered “how could Spielberg watch this and agree to release it?”

There are so many scenes and sequences in this movie that are simply mindboggling for how appallingly awful they are. Just when you think the worst scene is behind you a new cinematic and dramatic atrocity steps in to take its place.

There’s the dinner scene which is staged and acted like the worst high school play you’ve ever had the displeasure to endure. Then there’s the masturbatorial scenes where audiences of Boy Scouts and family are overly amazed to the point of ecstasy at Sam Fabelman’s “brilliant” movies that aren’t brilliant. And then there’s the ultimate cringe worthy scene where Mitzi Fabelman does her best Corky St. Clair “Penny for your Thoughts” from Waiting for Guffman imitation as she “dances” in a see-through nightgown in front of a campfire and car headlights while on a camping trip.

Then there’s the scene where Sam edits the footage of this camping trip and discovers a family “secret”, which is shot like it’s from a bad pre-teen show on Disney Channel. Then there’s the scene where family friend Benny gives a camera to Sam as a going away present, which is staged with all the grace of monkeys having a shit fight at the zoo. Then there’s the scenes of gay, neo-Nazi, Schindler’s List wannabe, anti-Semites who bully Sam in high school which all feel like they’re from the worst episode of Happy Days you’ve ever seen. And on and on and on.

There is literally only one scene in the entire film which crackles with any life or dynamism, and that’s the last scene of the movie. This exuberant scene only goes to remind how badly mismanaged the dismal and dull preceding two-hours and thirty-minutes truly were.

Spielberg has always been addled by his addiction to a saccharine sentimentality, and The Fabelmans is no exception, except here the sentimentality is, to reference another Christopher Guest movie, turned all the way up to 11. Unfortunately, this sentimentality has blinded Spielberg to the stark lack of craftsmanship across the board in this movie.

John Williams score and Janusz Kaminski’s cinematography are banal, underwhelming and shockingly second-rate. Tony Kushner’s (and Spielberg’s) script is so inelegant and so lacking in cohesiveness and humanity, as to be cinematic malpractice.

Speaking of cinematic malpractice, there’s a scene in the film where Judd Hirsch, who compellingly plays a sort of crazy-genius grand-uncle, is spewing contrived pieces of wisdom to young Sammy Fabelman, and yet throughout the scene you can see his mic pack bulging through his wife beater t-shirt. This is a $40 million movie, not some $1,200 student film…how the hell does that level of shoddiness make it to the screen?

The performances are just as abominable as the rest of the work on the film.

Michelle Williams is an actress I like, but her Mitzi, featuring a haircut from hell, is one of the most hollow, disingenuous and grating pieces of acting I’ve witnessed in recent years. Everything is so mannered and so contrived that it feels like watching a toddler ham it up in grandma’s clothes to entertain the family after rowdy Thanksgiving dinner.

Paul Dano is an actor I greatly admire, but his performance in The Fabelmans is so vacuous and devoid of any inner life or intention as to be remarkable. Dano is dead-eyed as he mechanically utters his lines like he’s auditioning for a job at either a wax museum or a mausoleum.

And just when you thought the acting couldn’t get any worse…Seth Rogan shows up. Good lord. Seth Rogan is to acting what a dirty diaper is to ambience.

On top of all the bad acting, every character is extremely unlikable (the same is true in Armageddon Time and Bardo…why are director’s families so repulsive?). Early in the film, Mitzi, for some incoherent reason, drives the family towards a tornado and all I could do was hope that they would all be thrown miles away and end up a red stain on the dashboard. Once that didn’t happen, I was left praying for a pack of coyotes to come along and maul them all in their sleep, or a gas leak or a septic tank explosion, to take them out and put me out of my misery.

There’s also a very strange and frankly very ugly strain of anti-Christian sentiment that rears its head about two thirds of the way through the film. I’m not someone who ever cares about this sort of thing but Spielberg goes out of his way to demean and belittle a Christian character in the movie, and explicitly mock her religion. The treatment of this girl and her Christianity is nasty and mean-spirited and totally out of place with the tone of the rest of the film. It’s the equivalent of what the gay Neo-Nazi anti-Semites do to the Sam Fabelman character when they call him ‘Bagelman’ and demand he apologize for killing Christ. In other words, it isn’t clever or insightful or amusing, it’s just vicious and small-minded. That Spielberg, who is allegedly a man of faith (he’s made quite a show of his connection to Judaism over the years), would demean, disparage and denigrate the lone character of a differing faith in his film and gleefully embrace this repellent but culturally acceptable prejudice, speaks volumes about his lack of character.

The Fabelmans has been a major box office flop, as it has only made $25 million against a $40 million budget. But Spielberg didn’t make this movie to make money, he made it to win an Oscar….and he might just succeed.

It's a testament to Spielberg’s iron grip on Hollywood that this movie, this dreadful, no-good, really bad movie, is nominated for Best Picture and Best Director, as well as Best Actress (Michelle Williams) and Best Supporting Actor (Judd Hirsch).

Spielberg’s power over Hollywood and the lack of intellectual integrity among critics, also accounts for why the movie is adored by most critics (92% critical score Rotten Tomatoes). But don’t be fooled by the vacuous opinions of these sycophants and philistines.

The reality is that the once great Emperor Spielberg, who gave us cinematic marvels like Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Raiders of the Lost Ark, E.T., Jurassic Park, Schindler’s List and Catch Me If You Can, has no clothes.

The naked truth for all to see but few will admit, is that The Fabelmans is an embarrassing and humiliating failure of a film. To claim otherwise is either dishonest, delusional, or both.

©2023

Bardo, False Chroncile of a Handful of Truths: A Review - Inarritu's Head Up Inarritu's Ass

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. A self-aggrandizing, self-pitying, self-righteous, and self-indulgent…not to mention pretentious, piece of crap.

In case you’d forgotten, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu has won two Best Director Academy Awards – for Birdman and The Revenant, which puts him in some very rarified air. To put into context, Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola have one Best Directing Oscar each, and Stanley Kubrick and Robert Altman have none.

I readily admit that I enjoyed Birdman (2014) and thought it was clever, and in hindsight its critique of superhero culture was spot-on and before its time, but I also thought the film badly bungled its ending.

I thought The Revenant (2015) was a flawed film but was deeper than it appeared on the surface and became much more interesting when seen through Jungian dream analysis rather than through the pop culture lens.

Except for those two films, Inarritu’s filmography is littered with some truly abysmal and pretentious pieces of work. For example, Inarritu’s 2006 shlockfest Babel may be the worst ‘taken seriously’ movie of the 21st Century…and its main competition is another Inarritu movie, 2003’s 21 Grams.

Which brings us to Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths, Inarritu’s newest cinematic venture, which is currently streaming on Netflix.

Bardo, which was a Netflix production and hit the streaming service October 27th, was written and directed by Inarritu and stars Daniel Giminez Cacho and Griselda Siciliani.

The movie, which describes itself as an epic black comedy-drama, is a fictional, pseudo-autobiographical story that chronicles Silverio Gama – a sort of stand in for Inarritu himself, as he navigates his life as a big-time journalist and documentarian who immigrated from Mexico to the U.S.

Gama wrestles with his career success, his critics, his artistry, his family, his grief, and his past, as well as the past of Mexico and his guilt over having left the country of his birth. Of course, these are all the same things with which Inarritu grapples.

Bardo, which runs two hours and forty minutes, is another in a bevy of films this year made by auteurs examining their own lives in feature films. For example, I recently reviewed Armageddon Time, James Gray’s dismal autobiographical effort, and I’ve yet to see Spielberg’s The Fabelmans or Sam Mendes’ Empire of Light.

I will say this about The Fabelmans and Empire of Light…it is absolutely impossible for them to be worse than Bardo. Bardo is bad-o. Really bad-o. Like excruciatingly bad-o. Like so bad it makes the awful Armageddon Time feel like Citizen Kane.

Bardo, which has a grueling two-hour and forty-minute run time, is somewhat remarkable as it’s simultaneously self-aggrandizing, self-pitying, self-righteous, and self-indulgent.

The problem with Bardo is not cinematic incompetence on the part of Inarritu. If Inarritu is anything it’s competent. He knows how to shoot a film and make beautiful images – and he’s aided in this effort by cinematographer Darius Khondji (who…curiously, also shot Armageddon Time – poor bastard). What Inarritu doesn’t know how to do is turn off his ego and turn down his adolescent maudlin impulses in order to tell a coherent and compelling story.

Bardo is supposed to be infused with magical realism but is devoid of magic and allergic to realism. In their stead Inarritu injects an extraordinary lack of subtlety and pronounced heavy-handedness as well as a steaming hot serving of middlebrow bourgeois bullshit philosophy.

This movie is, without exaggeration, literally a director bitching about how persecuted he is by critics, how envied he is by jealous less successful people, and imagining how devastated everyone will be when he dies. This is more akin to something a petulant teenager would dream up as they cry in their bedroom after their parents refused to buy them a sports car for their sixteenth birthday than something an adult filmmaker should put in a feature.

To give you an indication of what an absolute shitshow Bardo is, consider this…the film features a graphic scene where a baby is literally pushed back into a vagina, and another scene where Gama’s adult face is CGI’d onto a little kid as he has a discussion with his father in a sort of dream like sequence. Did I mention it was heavy-handed? Yikes!

In addition to all of that self-serving navel gazing, Inarritu also throws colonialism and anti-Mexican racism shit against the wall to see if any of it sticks…and none of it does.

Then there’s the virtuoso filmmaking stuff, like the extended, one-shot dance scene, which I was supposed to be impressed by but which I wasn’t impressed by.

What’s astonishing about Bardo is that Inarritu has made himself the hero of the story but only succeeds in exposing himself as being relentlessly unlikable. The Inarritu character Gama is one of the most punchable people to have graced the silver screen this year, and maybe this decade.

Even the film’s more interesting visual sequences, like when people start dropping dead in Mexico City, is derivative. I saw the same sequence done better in a Radiohead music video nearly thirty years ago.

Speaking of derivative, it seems to me that with Bardo Inarritu was trying to copy/emulate his fellow Mexican director Alfonso Cuaron’s film Roma (2018), and maybe even Terrence Malick’s Knight of Cups (2015). Roma is a brilliant, magical realist, autobiographical story about growing up in Mexico, and Knight of Cups is, in my opinion, a dreamlike masterpiece about navigating the hell of Hollywood and moviemaking.

The problem though is that Inarritu is no Cuaron and no Malick. He lacks their deftness, their depth and their profundity. Inarritu is an artistic poseur. A pretentious pretender who thinks cinematically pouting and preening is equivalent to being profound.

What is bothersome about Inarritu’s failure on Bardo is that we are witnessing the end of the auteur era at Netflix. The streaming giant in recent years made the decision to throw money at auteurs and let them do what they want. In the case of Cuaron, David Fincher and Martin Scorsese, that decision was cinematically fruitful as it gave us Roma, Mank and The Irishman. This year the two auteurs blessed by Netflix’s desire for prestige were Noah Baumbach and Inarritu, and they delivered the excrement filled dump-trucks that were White Noise and Bardo. It should not be a shock that Netflix announced this year that they will no longer throw money at auteurs…thanks Baumbach and Inarritu.

The bottom line is that Bardo may finally expose Inarritu for the philosophically trite filmmaking fraud that he is. His elevation to the heights of Hollywood success is more a testament to the buffoonery of the movie business than to the artistic genius of Inarritu.

Whatever one may think of Inarritu as a filmmaker, there is simply no denying that Bardo is an artistic catastrophe of epic proportions. This movie is nothing but a vacuous, vapid and vain exercise in cinematic masturbation. Avoid it at all costs.

©2023