Nostalgia Ain't What It Used to Be (Patreon)

In a time of all-encompassing irony, it's hard to know whether sincerity as an antidote or just another pose. Two of America's leading auteurs decided to go back in time with their latest films, offering their own Freudian origin stories on the assumption that their personal memories might resonate more broadly, giving us some historical explanation for How We Got Here. The results are suitably mixed.

The Fabelmans (Steven Spielberg, 2022)

As you might expect, Steven Spielberg's autobiographical foray is much more playful than James Gray's. But it's also more blatantly self-mythologizing. Uncle Boris (Judd Hirsch) warns out budding director Sam (Gabriel LaBelle) that there can be no reconciliation between the demands of art and family, and Spielberg seems to answer that challenge by turning is own family history into film. But, Spielberg being Spielberg, he has to make sure we fully appreciate his sacrifice.

The Fabelmans is almost comically Freudian. Sam loves and respects his father Burt (Paul Dano), a computer engineer, but he has a much more complicated relationship with his mom Mitzi (Michelle Williams), an artistic spirit who domesticated herself too early by starting a family. As a mom, Mitzi has no hopes of becoming a concert pianist, as was her dream. But Sam is blessed with the camera-phallus, an extension of his manhood into the social realm. And while one late scene -- Sam's parents announcing their divorce -- displays Sam's conflict over his role as observer (he dissociates and sees himself filming the moment, fully detached from his family's pain), he waivers only temporarily. The fact that Sam's fancy new equipment was a gift from Benny (Seth Rogan), the man he believes destroyed his parents' marriage, only slows him down for a little while. After all, it's not where your manhood came from. It's how you use it.

It's all here. The Fabelmans ploddingly explains Spielberg's primal wounds, the reason he's hung up on daddy issues, and why childhood, before the fall, is one of his obsessive topics. When one of Sam's sisters asks him if he'll even have room for women in one of his films, Spielberg isn't so much poking fun at himself as suggesting that never needed to see women onscreen because Mitzi was his very first manic pixie dream girl, and no one else could ever come close. Finding male imagos was a much more pressing dilemma for him.

In exploring this problem through a senior-year class assignment, The Fabelmans comically offers us the roots of Spielberg's love-hate relationship to the gentiles (one of whom he frames like a Riefenstahlian golden god, another of whom will make out with him as long as he promises to let Jesus into his heart). These himbos, the film suggests, have always been the possessors of a kind of sleek, undiluted masculinity that he could only approximate. So when he is making his Max Fischer Players rendition of Saving Private Ryan, or uncovering his mother's affair in the camping-trip rushes, Sam is abandoning the idea that the camera never lies. Documentary truth is simply too unpredictable for him, so it's best that he meticulously direct everything around him. Only after meeting John Ford (David Lynch) is Sam's familial crisis overcome, because he is whole now, having found it (his lineage) at the movies.

One big complaint: Williams' performance, which was just too broad for my tastes. She's doing a Judy Garland riff on A Woman Under the Influence, and the fact that Spielberg elicited this performance from her makes it clear that he can only process his own life through cinematic reference.

Armageddon Time (James Gray, 2022)

Like Sam Fabelman, Paul Graff (Banks Repeta) is a precocious little twerp, but unlike Little Spielberg, Young Master Graff is on both the giving and receiving end of racial animosity. By 1980, Jews have the option of aligning themselves with the oppressor class, since they were white enough to pass and Reagan's neocons had certain strategic uses for the Jewish demographic. Armageddon Time is a thuddingly obvious allegory for this historic moment when the urban liberal consensus was being ripped asunder, and Black people were going to be pretty much on their own from here on out.

After all, Paul's friend Jimmy (Jaylin Webb) is being rejected in favor of the middle-class security state, at exactly the same time that American voters are rejecting Jimmy Carter in favor of Reagan and, by extension, the Trumps. Paul's wise old grandfather Aaron (Anthony Hopkins) works to instill in his grandson the importance of being a mensch for Blacks, Puerto Ricans, and anyone else in the cross-hairs of the conservative mob, but Aaron dies along with this age-old imperative.  In the final scene, Gray almost excuses himself for having failed to do so. (I couldn't help remembering the last line from The Death of Louis XIV: "gentlemen, we will do better next time.")

Gray does a fairly good job of limiting our perspective, using Paul's blinkered privilege as the dominant heuristic of Armageddon Time. But this comes at a price. Many critics, especially critics of color, have angrily objected to the fact that Jimmy has no function outside of the lesson Paul learns from his downfall. On the one hand, viewers in 2022 fully recognize the fact that Jimmy has been shunted down the school-to-prison pipeline, that he is the perfect victim for the Reagan / Giuliani "tough on crime" agenda. But is that enough?

As we and Paul see him, Jimmy is a sensitive boy with hopes and dreams, someone dealt a bad hand in life. But this reduces him to a symbol, if not an outright stereotype. And while Gray provides us with the image of the Bad Jew, the racist Mr. Turkeltaub (Andrew Polk), he mostly lets the Graffs off the hook for their own liberal-racist biases. Well before the high school robbery scene, Paul has disavowed Jimmy in order to fit in with the right-wing monsters at his new private school. It's a blatant denial-of-Jesus moment, and it's then and there that Armageddon Time seals his fate. While Gray's own liberal viewpoint is painfully clear -- suck up to the Trumps at your peril, because they are coming for you next -- the film separates Jimmy from any history other than Paul's, and this rejection of historical circumstance ends up implcitly confirming the "we are all just individuals making choices" ethos of neoliberalism, the exact ideology Gray means to refute.

One big complaint: other than Hopkins' shaky, Yiddish-by-way-of-Wales accent, I did not appreciate Gray having the school bully brandish the n-word. It was too easy to put that in the mini-Trump's mouth to make him a lowlife, and the fact that it's this, rather than the racism per se, that troubles Paul makes the kid seem beatifically blinkered, and therefore kind of off the hook. Also, I know age was a factor but still, don't send Jeremy Strong to do a David Straithairn job.