ARoman Catholic kid of my acquaintance, on his first trip to the cinema, paused to genuflect in the aisle before taking his seat. A perfectly understandable mistake. The same kind of awe consumes Sammy Fabelman (Mateo Zoryon Francis-DeFord), a young Jewish boy, as he yields to the ineffable mystery of the big screen, at the start of Steven Spielberg’s “The Fabelmans.” No bending of the knee, but Sammy has never seen a film before, and his eyes widen, in delicious dread, at the sight of a train crash in “The Greatest Show on Earth.” For him, I reckon, that could be the title of every movie ever made.
It is 1952, and Sammy has been taken to the pictures, in New Jersey, by his parents, Burt (Paul Dano) and Mitzi (Michelle Williams). For Hanukkah, he gets a train set, and he promptly tries to re-create, in miniature, the disaster that he saw in “The Greatest Show on Earth,” using Burt’s cine-camera. Three things are worth noting here. One, Sammy makes a pretty good job of it, igniting a fascination with filmmaking that will take fire throughout his childhood and beyond. Two, Mitzi, who instinctively fathoms his reasons for committing the crash to celluloid (“He’s trying to get some kind of control over it”), suggests that they keep the project to themselves, without telling Burt. Such is the initial hint of a closeness, between mother and son, that will acquire the breathless intensity of a secret. And, three, given that “The Fabelmans” is, to an extent, a semi-disguised autobiography, is it O.K. to glance ahead to the gonzo train wreck in J. J. Abrams’s “Super 8” (2011), on which Spielberg was a producer? Could it be that his personal past has not merely fed his own work but rubbed off on the films of others?
The Fabelman household comprises Sammy, his parents, and his three sisters, plus, more often than not, Uncle Bennie (Seth Rogen), who isn’t an uncle at all. He is Burt’s best friend; both of them are involved in electrical engineering, riding the swell of the nascent computing industry, though Burt is clearly the smarter of the two. His talent will pull the family (plus Bennie) to Phoenix, and then (minus Bennie) to California, where a plum job awaits at I.B.M. “The Fabelmans,” you might say, is exploring and expanding on the double impulse that has continually tugged at Spielberg: the need for roots, versus the risks and the rapturous promise of uprooting. No other director has dramatized that quandary with greater concision. “Come,” E.T. said to Elliott, bidding him to board the spaceship. “Stay,” Elliott replied. His mother, gazing on, sank to her knees.
With every change in location, Sammy ups his game. As a Boy Scout, in Arizona (now played by the engaging Gabriel LaBelle), he recruits his pals to be extras, or proud leads, in a Western and a war movie. In California, having completed his odyssey from coast to coast, he shoots a beach flick, for the class of ’64, with ice cream standing in for seagull poop and roles for the jocks and the Jew-baiters who have made his final year so purgatorial. What gratifies Sammy is how unmanned the jocks are by viewing themselves writ large, and you can feel Spielberg insisting, via his hero, on moviemaking as a dual-purpose art: a technical adventure that throws an emotional punch. Puncturing the surface of the film with pins, for example, allows Sammy to add a momentary flare to gunshots, and it’s only fitting that “The Fabelmans” should end with Sammy meeting the aged and cranky John Ford—you won’t believe who plays him—and being told where the horizon should lie in the frame. Top or bottom, apparently. Anywhere in the middle, Ford says, is “boring as shit.”
What sort of movie is this? Well, it’s a bildungsroman, co-written by Spielberg and Tony Kushner, and peppered with incident rather than plotted. Characters get chapters to themselves. Check out Monica (Chloe East), the high-school belle, who comes on to Sammy by praying that Jesus descend unto him, or, back in Phoenix, Uncle Boris, who shows up at the door, uninvited, and preaches creative zeal. “We are junkies,” he says to Sammy. “Art is our drug.” Boris is played by Judd Hirsch, doing his kindly fiery-gruff shtick—the one he gave us in “Independence Day” (1996)—and, reportedly, earning a round of applause when “The Fabelmans” made its début, in Toronto. Yet the movie somehow slackens as it grows most broad, and I’m afraid I could have done without Boris altogether. His function is to spell out feelings that we sense far more keenly when they lie, unspoken, beneath the skin of the action.
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That is why the core of the tale resides in an almost wordless scene. (Spirit Spielberg back to 1922, to the acme of silent Hollywood, and he would slot right in.) It seems cozy enough: a peaceful evening chez Fabelman. Mitzi, a fine pianist, who dreamed of a professional career, plays Bach. Burt, devout as ever, listens. Sammy, crouched over his editing machine, cuts and splices footage from a family camping trip. Slowly, however, as he runs the film back and forth, he realizes that whenever his mother, out there in the woods, looked at Bennie—goofy, grinning Uncle Bennie, a pal to all—something flickered between them. For an instant, in the background, they held hands. Many children happen upon a flaw in their parents’ marriage, but the happening, for Sammy, is the bitterest of blows; through the very medium that he worships, and hopes to master in his adult life, he catches sight of a truth he would rather not know. Film is the bringer of pain.
It’s one of the most piercing passages in all of Spielberg—up there with the finale of “Empire of the Sun” (1987), when another boy, marooned by war, is reunited with his parents. His father fails to recognize him and walks on by; his mother sees him, changed utterly yet still her son, and gathers him in. How strange it is that the guy behind Indiana Jones and Jurassic Park should also have delved, fitfully but to a startling depth, into the Oedipal agon; if you want to anatomize Sammy Fabelman as a moody bourgeois Jewish Cold War Hamlet, whose mom nixes his dad for the sake of an “uncle,” be my guest. You could go further, and argue that it’s not actually Sammy but Mitzi, in Williams’s near-to-the-brink performance, who takes possession of the new film. “Do you have any idea how much I love you?” she asks her son. He, in turn, though he treasures his relatives, loves cinema “a little more,” as Boris tells him. “The Fabelmans” may look nice ’n’ easy as it swings along, with a pile of laughs to cushion the ride, and a nifty visual gag in the closing seconds, but take care. Here is a film that is touched with the madness of love.
If anything, the new film from Luca Guadagnino, “Bones and All,” is even more nomadic than “The Fabelmans.” We are in nineteen-eighties America, and the movie is eager to hustle through as many states as possible. Abbreviations flash onscreen: VA, MD, OH, IN. What, you ask, could drive such restlessness? A hunger for home, a fear of the law? Warm. The need for a square meal? Warmer.
On the lam are two young souls in love. They meet in a grocery store, where Lee (Timothée Chalamet) comes to the defense of a customer named Maren (Taylor Russell), who is being harassed. Before long, the pair of them hook up, shackled together by a common plight: they are both Eaters, who feast on human flesh. Every romance requires an obstacle—something to block a couple’s path to happiness and shear them off from regular society. Color, class, clan, creed, and sexual preference no longer cut it; cannibalism, however, is still off-limits, though the Cooking Channel is open to suggestions.
“Bones and All” is adapted by Guadagnino and David Kajganich from Camilla DeAngelis’s novel of the same name, and the opening minutes are a model of narrative swiftness. Maren, who is still at school and lives with her father, Frank (André Holland), attends a sleepover at another girl’s house, and bites off more than she can chew. Frank’s reaction—“Not again”—tells us plenty, signals the need to take flight, and makes it inevitable that his daughter will go her own way.
Some Eaters can smell one another from afar, and Maren is soon sniffed out by Sully (Mark Rylance), who radiates pure threat. (He has a jaunty feather in his hat, which heightens the creepiness—a typical Guadagnino detail.) In a movie awash with blood, nothing is nastier than the spectacle of Sully waiting patiently for an old woman to die before he can tuck in. Sensing danger, Maren flees once more, and her loneliness finds no relief until she encounters Lee. The two of them are like a brace of beautiful scarecrows, and they grab at moments of joy as if snatching purses; look at Lee, breaking into an empty house and dancing wildly to Kiss. “Let’s be people,” Maren says, aching for normality, as they embrace in a tranquil landscape, but that glimpse of a happy ending is overtaken by events; like Gus Van Sant’s “My Own Private Idaho” (1991), this is an anthem for doomed youth. The horror is genuinely visceral, yet the story, aided by impassioned work from Chalamet and Russell, pushes onward with a rough and desperate grace. “Bones and All” proves difficult to watch, but looking away is harder still. ♦
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