Director: Susan Lacy
Cast: Steven Spielberg*
Have I Seen it Before: Never. Had been on my HBOMax to-watch list (or whatever the hell they called it) for years. Now that HBOMax is dead (long live, Max, apparently), and I’ve now watched The Fabelmans (2022) three times in as many months, the urge to finally view it became near overwhelming.
Did I Like It: Even that proved to be a several days long project. Not because the documentary is tough to get through. Quite to the contrary. I saw two minutes of this thing and it was so immediately beguiling that I felt guilty continuing without Lora.
Normally I view a documentary with a very specific list of criteria. First, is it professionally made? Does the sound all go together, and was it filmed with equipment indicative of someone trying to make money off of the endeavor, or someone with home video equipment who didn’t know any better. (It is sometimes more challenging for a film to clear this hurdle than one might think.) This certainly clears that, with HBO’s money backing it up and what appears to be a modicum of cooperation from the subject, one would imagine that the filmmakers wouldn’t deign to cheap out.
Does it have an unusual or surprising level of access to the subject? As mentioned earlier, Spielberg does sit down for some talking heads, although they appear to be taken over time and very well could be pulled from electronic press kits from any number of movies, but we also have footage of Spielberg blocking scenes from Bridge of Spies (2015)… which, now that I think about it, very well could have come from that film’s EPK. Might give this one an incomplete on this front. It isn’t like the movie dwells on any of Spielberg’s relative missteps. 1941 (1979) is given a moment to show Spielberg’s fallibility, but Hook (1991), and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008) are given the briefest of b-roll appearances, although I’ve always felt that a very honest documentary about the fourth Indiana Jones entry would be worth its own feature length documentary.
Does the film remember it is trying to tell a story? Here is where the film truly shines. Is a lot of this also covered by The Fabelmans, sure, but depicting Spielberg as a gifted man with a fair amount of doubts and insecurities about himself—to say nothing of giving the production of Schindler’s List (1993)—is where the film becomes truly fascinating, and more than worth a recomendation.
*Normally, I would put the first four billed stars of a film. This usually makes listing documentaries a little difficult. Here, where the is only a single central figure, and brief talking heads by everyone else, it is doubly so.