Carlos Valladares’s review published on Letterboxd:
Man, when Spielberg's honest, he's on one...
Kept thinking a lot about Melinda Cooper's Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism. It's an ideal "required reading" alongside this film, in which the veil on the image of the high-functioning US family is lifted — the family that the 'Berg helped bring into fruition, what with his PG-13 ratings and his gooey E.T. melodramatics and his easy-to-swallow "save-the-day" hero's tales for teen boys (SAVING PRIVATE RYAN; SCHINDLER'S LIST and JURASSIC PARK in the same year) — and what we see is, let's face it, ugly: fear of women and of sex, total miscommunication between the sexes, a blinkered white-middle-class thirst for the IMAGE of togetherness more than the actual STRUCTURE of it, art commissioned by racists and pedants and assholes and narcissists against your will, art enjoyed IN FRONT OF YOU by the very same pedants and assholes etc who resent you if you make them look bad and resent you more if you make them look great, the roundabout of breakups and pinings, the perpetual worry (knowledge) that one will be (at some point in one's life) abandoned.
The Spielbergian thesis is laid thick here, and it entirely comes out of personal, psychoanalytic origins: A lying image that leaves out everything in the frame is more bearable, more necessary, than a realistic image which looks at the Sun of truth straight-on. Of course, one would say: "We need the latter, always!" But can we? Not "do we".....can we.....we need reprieve! We need breathing space! We need to relax in a world in which we are terminally incapable of relaxing! Don't the eyes burn after a while? Spielberg has been more than aware of this contradiction since literal childhood, and FABELMANS shows how. I don’t necessarily approve of it — perhaps Lil’ Carlos was world-wearier and more used to the unglamour than Lil’ Steve in certain ways, and definitely less afraid of girls in the family than LS — but I can understand.
The "flaws" — that annoying Capital Letters broadness that he demands from all his actors, in particular Michelle Williams, who is asked to loudly chew scenery in a way I'd never thought possible of Michelle "Muse of Reichardt" Williams — are perfectly grooved to the film Spielberg wants to make: a melancholic confession in which the artist shows his neurotic unstoppable compulsion to take control of the objects around him, "because there's already too much going on inside my head." So the son takes control of the mother's image, and turns her into basically Kate Capshaw's manic flibbertigibbet from INDY JONES 2 (guess who Spielberg married? lol): this is who he loves, this is who he fears, this is who he is revolted by, this is who he misses, this is who he will miss once she is no longer, this is who will live on as a substitute memory on film. Always goes back to the mother, doesn't it? Pretty sad stuff. And you know what? A kid scared shitless of the ugly world around him wanting to retreat into the world of images for just one night? Yeah. I can relate.
Spielberg may not have really formed me personally (except A.I. ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, of course), but he definitely formed the culture into which I was historically born. This film serves as explanation for that presence — and an apology for it — and an elegy to the culture. Encouragement for a new one? Not so much, but that's where we come in.
Also Christian girls are wild lmao
