“The Fabelmans”: Close Encounters with the Spielberg Family

Over the years, I’ve had many lunches at the Milky Way, a dairy café on an ethnic stretch of Pico Blvd. in West Los Angeles. Its proprietor was, until her death at age  97, a pixie of a woman named Leah Adler. She was hard to miss, with her close-cropped blonde hair, her bright red lipstick, and het Peter Pan collars. Until old age caught up with her, she’d literally dance around the restaurant, greeting guests warmly, and making sure everyone knew which menu items were preferred by her famous son.

 The movie posters in the lobby, as well as that prominent E.T. doll, told the tale. Leah Adler was the mother of Steven Spielberg, and she wanted the whole world to know it. On one occasion, I even came close to an encounter with the man himself. We’d ordered the cheesecake for dessert, and Leah breathlessly informed us that Steven, seeing it emerge from the kitchen, had declared he was tempted to scoop up a bite with his finger. I looked where she pointed, to an area near the dining room entryway, but could see only the back of a head topped by a baseball cap. So much for star-gazing.

 Anyone aware of this unshakeable mother/son bond would be curious indeed about The Fabelmans, a memory film billed as the true story of Steven’s growing-up years. By the time I saw it, I knew something more of Leah Adler, of her musical aspirations as a young piano student, of her domestic eccentricities, of the painful moment when she broke up the family unit. As played by Michelle Williams in a bravura performance, she’s lively, creative, self-promoting, the acknowledged fairy queen of the household. When, on a family camping trip, she dances in the moonlight in her white nightgown, she wins everyone’s heart. (Mine too!)

 What I knew little about was Spielberg’s engineer father, here called Burt Fabelman, As played by Paul Dano, he’s a brilliant nerd, in love with his wife, his family, and his work on early computer technology. There’s an amiable cluelessness about him that’s a fresh take on movie fatherhood, but at the same time he reminded me of so many screen fathers –-like Chris Cooper in October Sky—who praise their sons’ intellectual drive but can’t accept their chosen professions.

 The young Spielberg clone, Sammy Fabelman, is introduced to movies by both of his parents, with his father focusing on technological achievement and his mother passionately cherishing movies as akin to dreams. When Sam starts to film his own backyard masterpieces, with his little sisters in starring roles, both parents cheer him on. But as he nears adulthood, refining his cinematographic skills and learning to shape the world that surrounds him through the lens of his camera, moviemaking becomes his retreat from the disturbances of everyday life. Ironically it also, in the film’s most crucial episode, becomes his proof of a reality he doesn’t want to face.

 My least favorite part of the film strays from the family story to show a teenage Sam enduring anti-semitic taunting while romancing a girl with a Jesus complex. The outcome of that segment reveals Sam using filmmaking as a quixotic way of handling his oppressors, but the romance—funny though it is—seems a rather cheap way of getting some laughs into the picture. For me the film’s highlight is the visit of Uncle Boris (Judd Hirsch), a rather mysterious circus performer who descends on the family at a time of tragedy. It’s he who explains to  Sam why the artist always has to go it alone.

 

 

Rocketman: Jake Gyllenhaal Reaches for the Stars in “October Sky”

Some people’s lives seem just destined to be a movie. Take Homer Hickam, a teenager whose life was unended when—along with other residents of tiny Coalwood, West Virginia—he watched Russia’s Sputnik 1 pass overhead in October 1957. Mesmerized by the possibilities of space travel, he gathered some friends and some rudimentary equipment, then started to experiment with rocketry on a larger and larger scale. None of this pleased his father, a much-respected superintendent at the local coal mine, who expected his son to someday follow in his own footsteps. But the local science teacher, an ebullient young woman, believed in the ambitions  of the amateur rocketeers, She foresaw that if they could capture first prize at the county science fair, they would earn a trip to a national convention in far-away Indianapolis. The end result, she hoped, would be college scholarships for four bright lads who (not being good at football) had no other hope of paying for college educations.

 There were, needless to say, ups and downs, including a brief tangle with the law when the four  were accused of setting off a forest fire with one of their experiments.  All of this was set down in Rocket Boys, a best-selling 1998 memoir by Hickam, who grew up to be a NASA engineer charged with training astronauts. He’s covered other aspects of his eventful life in additional books, crafted a Rocket Boys musical, and also tried his hand at writing fiction.  Clearly he's a man of many talents, and one who’s also been blessed with a lot of good luck. After all, he could easily have spent his life, as so many of his friends and neighbors did, slogging away in a coal mine. And dying, as his father did, of black lung disease.

 When words on a movie screen note that the film we’re about to see is “based on a true story,” we’re always entitled to a certain amount of disbelief. And so I watched October Sky, the 1999 film that evolved out of Rocket Boys, with a certain sense of skepticism. (Sidenote: the title October Sky, which points to the impact of Sputnik passing over that West Virginia town, is an anagram of Rocket Boys. Why? I have no idea.)  Though I enjoyed this modest film thoroughly, its story seemed a bit too good to be true. Were the boys of Big Creek High School really taken in hand by a pretty and dedicated teacher, one who was secretly dying of Hodgkin’s Lymphoma? Did Homer’s strict but loving father, who disapproved of his son’s rocketry “hobby,” really stay away from every one of the early rocket test launches, even though the rest of the town turned out en masse to see what the boys were up to? Did that same father finally show up for the triumphant final launch, and find himself given the honor of pushing the button that ignited the rocket? According to Hickam’s own commentary, this is exactly what happened. (By the same token, he encourages fans to read a more complicated version of his story in Rocket Boys.) 

 The age-appropriate Jake Gyllenhaal—then barely 19--broke into the Hollywood mainstream with his portrayal of Homer. Laura Dern played the inspirational teacher who hides her personal woes from her students. The key role of Homer’s father was played by Chris Cooper, who’s always convincing as a tough but tender blue-collar guy. Other players were unfamiliar to me, but all showed their comfort with an authentic-sounding West Virginia twang. Following your dreams into space: what a nice theme for a family-centric movie.

 

 

 

An Oscar (Levant) for “The World of Henry Orient”

While watching some of the great MGM musicals of the 1950s, like An American in Paris and The Band Wagon, I’ve been mystified by the appearance of a sour-looking troglodyte named Oscar Levant in sidekick roles. Levant was not much of a singer or a dancer, but the plots of his movies usually found a way to seat him at a piano, for he was (among many other things) a concert pianist of some note. In An American in Paris, which pays tribute to the musical compositions of George Gershwin, there’s a dream sequence in which he appears—elegantly clad—in a concert hall, not only pounding out Gershwin’s Concerto in F on the keyboard but also playing all the other instruments in the orchestra, while functioning as its conductor as well. 

 Levant was also a famous wit, one who’d aired his stock of arcane knowledge on a popular radio show, Information Please. It was he who first quipped, “I knew Doris Day before she was a virgin.” But one target of his wit was always his own hypochondria, which was frequently written into his movie roles  I never saw this as particularly funny, though moviegoers of his era seemed to enjoy it. They also were amused by his wisecrack that “there's a fine line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line." 

 While marveling over Levant’s onetime popularity, I heard that he was the inspiration for the neurotic, womanizing pianist at the center of Nora Johnson’s novel, The World of Henry Orient, as well as its 1964 film adaptation. Having just seen that film, I’m not entirely convinced. But it makes sense that the name Levant (which in French suggests the east, the place of the rising sun) could by adapted by Johnson into “Orient.” The film version gets playful with Henry’s exotic surname, with his young-girl fans adopting Chinese coolie hats and performing vaguely Japanese kowtows in his honor.

 The World of Henry Orient involves two basic stories that ultimately come together. The first involves two lonely young teenage girls, both enrolled in a ritzy New York prep school, who join forces when they realize that their vivid imaginations and their willingness to pull pranks on strangers make them natural allies. The second concerns a talented but egotistical concert pianist who blithely skips rehearsals because he’d rather be rumpling the sheets with a safely married admirer. When the more musical of the two young girls hears Henry Orient tickle the ivories at the local concert hall, she’s in love. From that point onward, Val and Marian pursue Henry around Manhattan, adoringly spying on his every move, while he grows increasingly paranoid. 

 With Peter Sellers (in his first Hollywood film) as the pianist, Paula Prentiss as his main squeeze, and a host of filmdom’s best character actors in featured roles, this film is guaranteed to be spritely fun. It’s directed by George Roy Hill at a lively pace, several years before he captured moviegoers’ hearts with Butch Cassidy and The Sting. What I didn’t anticipate, though, was a scene-stealing Angela Lansbury, whose match-up with Sellers is a classic. She’s Val’s egotistical mother, who’d rather tour the world than attend to her daughter’s growing-up years. Accidentally discovering Val’s serious crush on Henry Orient, she marches off to do her motherly duty by confronting him. Then—whoops!—these two narcissists discover they’re made for one another. Which leads to a reshuffling of priorities in which Val’s easy-going father (Tom Bosley) finally takes a leading role. So hilarity and poignancy both contribute to an ending that’s satisfying while still fun.