Still That Freaking Season

Not a Great Movie, But...

The Fabelmans (2022. Written by Steven Spielberg and Tony Kushner. 151 minutes)

A few days before I saw this movie, I got a letter from an old high school friend of mine. She had not seen the movie, but she had seen an interview with Spielberg in which he was talking about the film being about his making elaborate 8mm movies when he was a teenager. She said it reminded her of the 8mm movies I used to make when I was a teenager. She wondered if somebody was going to make a movie about my adolescence. I think she was joking, but I told her I doubt if anybody would care to see a movie about a guy who grows up to be a film historian. Yes for a movie about Stevie, no for a movie about Tommy.

On the other hand, I will mention that in one of mine, I arranged to shoot a bank robbery scene inside a real bank. One of my cast/crew’s dads was the president of the bank. That’s Hollywood, even in Bloomington, Indiana: it’s not what you know, but who you know.

Needless to say, the scenes of Sammy Fabelman, Spielberg’s alter-ego, making his teenage films brought back many fun memories. But there is a lot more to the movie than that. A lot more.

If the movie were simply about a kid, even a stand-in for Spielberg, making 8mm movies, it would only be mildly enjoyable at best. The moviemaking scenes are entertaining, but listen closely, especially to the scene where one of Sammy’s sisters lectures him on what his filmmaking does to him and his relationships, particularly those in the family.

The heart of the movie is the story of the family as they move around the country when the father changes jobs. What struck me about the family scenes is that they are similar in tone and texture to Tony Kushner’s book for the stage musical Caroline, or Change. I may be running a fool’s errand here, but I am going to try to sort out what I think are the different contributions of Spielberg and Kushner to the screenplay. That may sound odd, given that the film is a thinly disguised version of Spielberg’s early years, but keep in mind that the material has been, as always, shaped by the writers into the film we see.

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The overall story is therefore Spielberg’s, but the film is lighter and warmer than his previous films. Catch Me if You Can (2002, screenplay by Jeff Nathanson) is the closest Spielberg has ever come to doing an out-and-out comedy (and no, I am not counting his gift for slapstick in 1941 [1979, screenplay by Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale], which was so heavy-handed that it killed the comedy). Yes, there are comedy bits, but just bits, in the Indiana Jones movies, because the focus is on the action.

In E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982, screenplay by Melissa Mathison) we see the warmth in the family scenes that Spielberg and Kushner will develop further and not let get overshadowed by special effects. I suspect that was at the heart of the collaboration of the two writers.

Early in his career, Spielberg was not that interested in character. He loved actors, which he still does, but that is not the same thing. In Jaws (1975, screenplay by Peter Benchley and Carl Gottlieb), Murray Hamilton, a wonderful actor, has fun playing the mayor, but it is all on the surface. In the same film, Spielberg lets Robert Shaw chew all the scenery as Quint, but as with Hamilton, no depth. There are good performances in The Color Purple (1985, screenplay by Menno Meyjes), especially Whoopi Goldberg as Celie, but still on the surface.

That changes in Schindler’s List (1993, screenplay by Steven Zaillian) and continues in Amistad (1997, screenplay by David Franzoni), Saving Private Ryan (1998, screenplay by Robert Rodat), and Munich (2005). Munich, one of Spielberg’s most underrated films, was co-written by Eric Roth and…Tony Kushner.

Spielberg is smart enough to know good writers when he sees them. The Fabelmans is the fourth film they have worked on together. Their best collaboration was Lincoln (2012, screenplay by Kushner). You can find my detailed review of Lincoln here, where I give you a sense of what Kushner brought to the film. I mention in that review that I like Kushner as a public writer, writing about public issues. Look at all the subjects he deals with in his great play Angels in America and the television miniseries made from it in 2003, but he can write small as well. That is true in individual scenes in Angels in America, and especially in Caroline, or Change, which focuses on a Jewish family in the South in the 1960s and their black housekeeper. There are small, often intense scenes between the housekeeper and the son.

What Kushner brings to Fabelmans is a sense of how to shape and develop the scenes that Spielberg has remembered from his teen years. The film is very episodic, but the scenes are good enough to pull it off. The film gets into the characters of the mother and father in more depth than I can think of any characters in any other Spielberg film.

What is surprising, coming from Spielberg and Kushner, is a lightness of touch that is not present in their other work. I suspect it comes from Spielberg’s wanting to honor his father and mother and Kushner picking up on that. The tone of the film allows for both lightness and drama and the writers balance that out very well. One of the major storylines is the mother Mitzi’s growing dissatisfaction with her marriage to Burt. Both Mitzi and Burt are beautifully drawn by the writers and beautifully directed by Spielberg. Michelle Williams and Paul Dano are sensationally good as they dig into these characters. Their scenes together and each one with Sammy are brilliantly written and played.

I suspect that the shape of many of the scenes comes from Kushner’s theatrical experiences. I mentioned earlier a scene with Sammy and his sister. Another sequence that absolutely floored me begins with Sammy showing a movie he shot of the senior class at a party on the beach. We see what he filmed and we also get great reaction shots of some of the kids seeing themselves on the screen. One, in particular, is just funny. But another one is more than that. Watching the film is the jock, big man on campus who has been a bully to Sammy. He comes across in Sammy’s film as a Greek god. We think he would be pleased, but he follows Sammy out into the hallway. He is not pleased and you will have to see the film to find out why. I suspect the hallway scene is Kushner’s contribution to the sequence.

Another terrific scene is at the end of the picture. Sammy has gotten himself to Hollywood and ends up meeting John Ford. The actor playing Ford (and I am not giving away who it is if you don’t know) does not look much like Ford, but with the writing he is given to work with, he captures Ford's grumpy old man personality perfectly. And then the film tops it up with a quick visual gag based on the scene. It is faster and funnier than in any other work by Spielberg and Kushner. Don’t blink or you will miss it.

I said in my snarky sub-head(line) that this was not a great movie. No, it is not up to Schindler’s List or Lincoln, but then what is? It may not have the scope and the power of those two films, or some of Spielberg’s other films, but it has a lightness, a warmth, and a charm all its own. And that is not nothing in this day and age.

Where Are Those Bridges?

Devotion (2022. Written by Jake Crane & Jonathan A. H. Steward, based on the book by Adam Makos. 139 minutes)

First of all, let’s be clear this is not a remake of the 1946 film of the same name which starred Olivia de Havilland and Ida Lupino as the Brontë Sisters. Emily and Charlotte did not, to the best of my knowledge, fly jets in the Korean War.

A couple of weeks before I saw Devotion, I watched the 1955 film The Bridges at Toko-Ri over the Veteran’s Day weekend. It was the perfect Veteran’s Day movie: praising the men who fight, in this case, Naval aviators in the Korean War. It is not, however, a conventional flag-waver. Lt. Brubaker fought in the Second World War and is bitter about being recalled to action in the Korean War, since it meant he had to give up his law practice and leave his wife and family at home. Since his wife is played by Grace Kelly, you can see why he is bitter. Brubaker is killed after a successful raid on the bridges at Toko-Ri. The admiral who thinks knocking out the bridges will help shorten the war, wonders at the end of the film, “Where do we get such men?” as Brubaker. The cynical answer of course is that you drafted them. The picture is a good solid piece of Hollywood craftsmanship with an unusually serious side to it. It was a commercial success.

Devotion, while it has a lot of similarities to Toko-Ri, is not a remake, and in some ways, it is a better and more interesting picture. It is based on the real-life friendship between two Navy fliers, Jesse Brown and Tom Hudner. Hudner is assigned to Brown’s unit. Brown is not particularly friendly at first but they become close comrades as fliers.

Oh, did I forget to mention that Brown is Black, the first Black man who became a Naval flier, and Hudner is white?

Ah, yeah, one other thing. Brown is the main character in the film. We get more scenes with him at work and with his wife than we do with Hudner. We only see Hudner in relation to Brown. Early on, when the fliers are going to fly planes that are new to them, Brown lags behind the other (white) fliers. He looks at himself in the mirror in the restroom and repeats the racist comments he has heard all his life as a way to psych himself up to fly. It is what actors call a Privileged Moment, something the audience sees but none of the others see.

Generally in movies like this, the flying scenes are spectacular and the ground scenes are dull. That is not true here and that is what makes the film work so well. We are engrossed in the relationship between Brown and Hudner. In Toko-Ri what we get is a sequence where Brubaker’s wife has through her political connections gotten permission to take herself and her kids to Japan to visit her husband when he is on leave in Japan. These are conventional romantic scenes and only hold their own because of the star power of Kelly and Willliam Holden. Devotion does not have that kind of star power, but the writing makes up for it in the scenes on the ground.

The special effects in Toko-Ri were great for their day (they won the Oscar that year), but Devotion’s are state-of-the-art. Since they did not have to spend a lot of money on stars, the money went into making the film look (to us; it may look different to audiences 70 years from now) great. It is worth seeing on the biggest screen you can find.

The attack on the bridges in Devotion comes about 2/3 of the way through the film, and they sure look like the bridges at Toko-Ri to me, but not as much is made of the importance of these bridges as in the earlier film. The big finish comes when the Navy pilots are running cover for Marines attacked by masses of Chinese troops at the Chosin Reservoir. Brown’s plane is shot up and he crash lands it. Hudner tries to land his plane to rescue Brown, but Brown is dead by the time he gets there. Hudner wins an award for gallantry. The end titles will tell you about the relationship between Hudner and Brown’s family from the Korean War to the present. Where do we get these men?

Not John Ford’s Ireland.

The Banshees of Inisherin (2022. Written by Martin McDonagh. 114 minutes)

The opening shot of this film is a gorgeous drone shot floating over a green Ireland with the blue sea in the background. It could be the opening shot of John Ford’s The Quiet Man (1952). But it’s not.

Ford had a nostalgic yearning for Ireland, where his ancestors came from. For him, it was a romantic place, all green and lush, with drunken Irishmen having fistfights in which nobody gets seriously hurt.

McDonagh, an Irish playwright, screenwriter, and here director, has a much darker view of the world and especially Ireland than Ford did. He started as a playwright in the 90s, and his plays capture the dark side of the Irish soul. His 2001 play The Lieutenant of Inishmore is the bloodiest play I have ever seen in a theatre. In 2018 he moved into film, writing and directing In Bruges about two hit men hiding out in the picturesque Belgium city of Bruges after a job goes wrong. It is a funny but not light-hearted piece, nor is his 2012 film Seven Psychopaths. You can read my review of the latter here to see his half-assed self-portrait of himself as a writer.

After the gorgeous opening aerial shots of Ireland, we get right to the heart of the story. Pádraic and Colm have been friends and drinking buddies for years. One day Colm tells Pádraic, “I ain’t your friend no more.” Pádraic is baffled. He has no idea why Colm would say such a thing. Colm won’t immediately tell him, but he eventually does. Colum plays the fiddle and composes music, and he does not want to waste time drinking with Pádraic when he can be composing. Artists are like that, but Colm does not handle it well. And Pádraic handles it even worse. He will not leave Colm alone. Colm tells him if he says another word, Colm will cut off one of his fingers. Not the most logical thing for a fiddler to do, but Colm is serious, and when Pádraic does speak to him, Colm does cut off his finger. And that is not the last time blood will be shed in this film.

For this kind of grim story you need two things: first, the script has to be dead-on in creating the characters so we will believe these people will do these things. McDonagh provides that. His other films (and of course his plays) have been talky, but here the talk is purely at the service of the characters.

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The second thing you need is actors who can convince you that these characters are real. Pádraic is played by Colin Farrell, who starred in In Bruges and Seven Psychopaths, in which he played Marty, the character McDonagh based on himself. One advantage of actors and directors working on several different films is that they both can get a sense of what the actor can do, especially in some way he has not done before. I have not seen Farrell be so rich and nuanced in his character work in any previous film.

Colm is played by Brendon Gleason, who co-starred with Farrell in In Bruges. Colum is a depressed, solitary character so Gleason does not get to show off his skill set as much as Farrell does, but the chemistry between them is compelling. McDonagh has also written some nice supporting roles, especially Siobhán, Pádraic’s smarter, more grounded sister, well played by Kerry Condon. Siobhán is one of those down-to-earth Irish women who knows the men in her life are a little funny in the head but loves them anyway. Until she leaves the island for a job on the mainland.

Oh, did I mention there is a lot of bloodshed later in the movie? There is, but not as much as you might expect from McDonagh.

And Then There is This Old Flaw.

She Said (2022. Screenplay by Rebecca Lenkiewicz. Based on the New York Times investigation by Jodi Kantor & Megan Twohey & Rebecca Corbett, and the book She Said by Jodi Kantor & Megan Twohey. 129 minutes)

Yes, The Fabelmans does in theory fictionalize Spielberg’s family but they are still based on real people. Devotion is very clearly about real people.

If you have read this column long enough, you can see what the problem is with She Said. It is the true story of two writers for the New York Times who reported the story of what a pig Harvey Weinstein is, which started the Me Too! Movement. People writing films about real people in real situations very often assume that because the characters were real people and we are watching them in events that actually happened, they (the writers, and actors, and directors) do not have to do anything but just show them in action. Not true. You have to make them believable as characters. The first half of She Said fails to do that; where is Tony Kushner when you need him?

Megan (Carey Mulligan) and Jodi (Zoe Kazan) are the two reporters assigned to the story, but there is very little chemistry between them. Each actress is very good, but their relationship is bland. Think of Woodward and Bernstein getting on each other’s nerves in All the President’s Men (1976). I would guess that was not the case between Megan and Jodi but Lenkiewicz could have come up with something.

Andre Braugher is a wonderful actor, but as written, his character of editor Dean Baquet is bland. Look at Jason Robards in President’s Men as Ben Bradlee for a better way to do it. Or, if you are too young to have seen President’s Men, look at the dynamics between reporters and their editor in Spotlight (2015) or if you are even younger than that, look at the relationships in the new TV series Alaska Daily (2022).

The picture begins to pick up speed in the second hour when the reporters begin to find women who will talk about Harvey. The writing of the individual scenes gets better, and we get some great actresses playing them. One is Samantha Morton, and another is Jennifer Ehle, and both of them are terrific in their scenes. You would expect no less from them. You also get a couple of great scenes with Weinstein’s lawyer making the best case he can while trying not to descend to Harvey’s level.

The semi-big finish here is Baquet and the reporters huddled over a computer as Baquet gives the command to publish their story. We get the outcome of that in a series of titles, which is similar to the end of Spotlight and the complaint I had there. Both films would be better off with a montage of reactions rather than titles.

Better Than Last Time.

The White Lotus (2022. Written by Mike White. Second Season, 7 episodes)

When I wrote a brief review of the first season of The White Lotus, which you can read here, I said that the flaw in the script was that, probably because Mike White was writing the series in a hurry to get something on the air for HBO, virtually every scene ended up with someone feeling uncomfortable. That made the show, great cast and all, somewhat monotonous. I suggested if he did a second season, “I am not sure that will work, unless White can figure out how to write a greater variety of scenes.” I don’t know if White reads this column (unlikely, since he is rather busy) or if he is just as smart as I think he is (more likely), but he has done just that in the second season, which is better than the first.

We are at a different White Lotus hotel than we were in the first season. This one is in Sicily, but at least one of the guests, Tanya, is the same, so we get more of Jennifer Coolidge’s great performance. She shows up with her husband, whom she met in the first season, but he has to fly home on business, after giving her the motorcycle ride around the countryside that she always wanted. She is left with her assistant, Portia, a young woman who may or may not be the smartest one of the bunch. She is played by Haley Lu Richardson in a terrific performance.

Let me stop right here so I won’t keep repeating myself. All the performances, and I mean ALL, are terrific, including actors who we have seen and loved for decades and some you have never seen before. I was particularly delighted to see F. Murray Abraham, Salieri his own self, as the father and grandfather of two other characters. I have not seen him for a while, and here he is working in a lower key than he often does. I also liked seeing Meghann Fahy, whom I enjoyed in The Bold Type, in a much richer character, written in more nuanced detail than on that show.

One thing we did not have in the first season was two young Italian hookers who hang out in and around the hotel. One of them sleeps with the father and the son, although not at the same time. The other talks herself into a gig as a piano player and singer in the bar.

In the first season, the characters did not get away from the hotel. Here they do. The grandfather, father, and son track down the house where their Italian relatives live, one of the reasons the grandfather wanted to make the trip. The family reunion does not go well.

Tanya begins to hang out with a bunch of rich gay men and spends time in the grand old Italian villa one of them owns. That plot line has all kinds of threads too, some of which you may see coming, and some you may not.

Yes, there is a body discovered in the first episode, just as in the first season. In the first season, it turned out to be whom I thought would make it impossible to do a second season without. I was wrong. You may think the same thing when you find out who the body is this time, but by now I am trusting Mike to make do without that person in season three.

Speaking as we Were of John Ford.

Yellowstone (2022. Written by multiple writers, but mostly by Taylor Sheridan. Fifth Season, 14 episodes)

If you have read this column long enough, you know I am a big fan of Taylor Sheridan. I started writing about him and his writing with Sicario (2015), which I had reservations about, and Hell or High Water (2016), about which I had no reservations whatsoever. In 2018 he co-created the series Yellowstone, the first season of which I wrote about here.

It took a couple of seasons to catch on with audiences and tastemakers, but in the last two seasons, it has turned into a massive hit. TV Guide is even doing special issues on Rip and Beth, the hot couple in the show. OK, Beth is the hot one, but Rip is man enough to deal with her. At least most of the time.

I am writing this halfway through the fifth season, but it is so far a terrific season.

John Dutton, the owner of the Yellowstone Ranch (named after the river, not the National Park), has gotten so fed up with people trying to take his land and develop it into hotels and airports that he ran for governor and won. Dutton, as played by Kevin Costner, has been a feisty but sympathetic character, but you may have trouble with him as governor. He does not appear to be particularly interested in being governor, but just his own interests. Hmm. He sort of reminds me of a certain former president without the bombast.

He is still spending more time on the ranch than in the governor’s office. One thing he did do is commute the sentence of a hippie protestor Summer…and move her into his ranch house under house arrest. Yes, they are doing what you think they are doing, and Dutton’s daughter Beth is not happy about Daddy shagging a hippie.

Which brings us to one of the best scenes so far in the season. In episode five, “Watch 'Em Ride Away,” which Sheridan wrote, we have a dinner scene at the ranch. In addition to Dutton, Beth, Rip, and Summer, we have Kayce, Dutton’s youngest son, Kayce’s wife the Native American woman Monica, and their son Tate. Beth is getting snippier and snippier about Summer, Monica gets the giggles, and Beth invites Summer to go for a walk. Outside they get into a fight, Not a catfight you usually see in movies between saloon girls in westerns. Rip goes out and tells them just to stand up and trade punches, which they do. Beth wins the fight, but begins to develop some respect for Summer.

Now that is the kind of outcome you usually see in fights among men in John Ford’s westerns, which may be why some misogynist souls complained on the internet that women don’t fight like that. I had reservations about Sheridan’s women characters in some of his earlier films, but now in both his films (Those Who Wish Me Dead [2021] and television shows he is writing some great female characters. Beth, Summer, and Monica are only three of them.

Later in the same episode, the men, and Beth, saddle up in the early morning to ride out to round up their cattle for branding. Beth is going because, well, she’s Beth, and she wants to shag her husband out in the wilderness. Monica and Summer stay behind and watch them leave. How many times have we seen a variation of that scene in one or more of John Ford’s cavalry, or even non-cavalry, films? And it is just as moving here.

I am not sure when Sheridan has time to eat or sleep. In addition to writing all of the first seven episodes of the 5^th season, he is creating a new spin-off prequel 1923, about the early Yellowstone ranch in the 20s. Yellowstone itself appears on the Paramount Network, which is available to anyone on cable. 1923 will show its first two or three episodes on the Paramount Network, then move the show to their streaming service Paramount+. They did the same thing with another series earlier this year that Sheridan created, Tulsa King. Talk about leaving money on the table.

Or did you not hear that Disney lost one billion dollars in a recent quarter because of all the money and shows they were sending to their streaming service? I almost never agree with Wall Street, but I think they are right about becoming suspicious about all the money streaming services are losing and all the money they are not making.