130 — Jason Anderson- 'The Fabelmans' and What It Means To Be An Artist.mp3 - powered by Happy Scribe

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This is Dr. Marcia, Sirota, with the Ruthless Compassion podcast. And I'm here today with Jason Anderson, a film critic and programmer, and we're going to talk movies today. Welcome to the podcast, Jason.

Hi, thanks for having me.

It's such a pleasure. This is so much fun because we're sort of doing a little something different, talking about the intersection between psychiatry, mental health and media. And today we're going to talk about the film, The Fablemans, which we've both seen. And before we start, I thought maybe you could just say a little bit about who you are and what you do and then just launch into your dissection of the film.

It was great. Thanks so much. And yeah, my name is Jason Anderson and I've been a film critic for many years and film journalists for places like Biweekly and The Grid in Toronto. I wrote for this for a long time, places like The Globe and The Star. And currently I write for a couple of magazines, including Broadview and Cinema Scope and Sight and Sound. But a lot of my practice now is about film programming, which I do for festivals like the Toronto International Film Festival, for whom I do short films. Also Kingston Canadian Film Festival, which is coming up in March, and Aspen Shorts Fest, which is in April. So I see a lot of movies. I kind of always have seen a lot of movies as a film critic, and now I see a lot even more as a programmer. But it's a great gig. I mean, I certainly love movies and I think that any opportunity to sort of get into them and I think my interest is always just finding what's interesting movies and whether or not I like them particularly fit with my taste. I think there's plenty of movies that I've really appreciate over the years that were even if they were deeply flawed.

And as for The Fatal Men's, I think it's actually a very strong film. And I think it's one that was a very significant film over the last few months and had a big impact at TIFF in Toronto when it played in September. And I think it's obviously it's a big deal because it's by Steven Spielberg, who was probably the preeminent blockbuster director of the last 40, 50 years. And it's an unusual film for him because it is so deeply personal. And he's described the film as semi autobiographical, but it's actually probably more accurate than many biopics or historical dramas actually are in terms of how they correspond with the facts of someone's life. He has changed details, and it's not about the Spielbergs. It's about a fictional family called The Fablemans. But it otherwise quite closely mirrors aspects of Spielberg's early life growing up first in New Jersey and then in Arizona and California. And this sort of it's very much a reflection on not just his kind of original immersion into art and creativity as a filmmaker, as this sort of budding director who makes Westerns with his fellow Boy Scouts and things like that.

And really, it's amazing because the film starts with the sort of originating incident of his life which is going with his parents to see The Greatest Show on Earth and being, I think, profoundly disturbed by a train crash in the film which is totally pretty much straight from Spielberg's own life. Like it wasn't something it was something that really affected him as a kid. It's such a fascinating script just in terms of the film as writers. It's Spielberg writing with Tony Kushner who is one of the greatest writers alive by any standard as the author. It's a very rich piece and we sort of see how they kind of have quite clear intentions throughout the film about what they're trying to portray. And certainly starting with this moment of Spielberg as a young boy being kind of just freaked out by this thing he sees on screen and then replicating it. Kind of creating his own version of it in a way of kind of interesting commentary on what art is to people artistic expression. How that is something that artists do in order to sort of maybe exert a sense of control over things in their lives or memories or their experiences that are affecting them deeply and that they assert a mastery over it.

And the film is quite clear about that. Just in terms of what movie making means to Spielberg a young Spielberg alter ego is a means of kind of exacting control over his life and that continues throughout the film. It's certainly one theme of the film. There are many other themes of the film too. But as a sort of preamble, certainly it's kind of the familiar what's the term? I love the buildings run on where you kind of have these sort of experiences and incidents in terms of how a young person is developing. And this one does take this sort of boy fableman from quite young to sort of the brink of adulthood. But a lot of it's about art and a lot of it's about family. And I think it gets at a lot of very kind of core things. And I think it's, like I said, an unusual film in that it's a kind of reflection on this major, major artist and man who's had a major impact on cinema and culture more widely for decades. For him to kind of look back on this part of his life and take stock and really delve into it which is, I think, pretty significant and pretty courageous.

It's interesting. You were talking about his initiation which was this awful scene of this train crash and how he got a train set and then he recreated it on film over and over again. And they even said out loud in the film he has anxiety. And so this was his way to manage his anxiety. And I'm a writer too. I write screenplays, I write novels. And somebody asked me, Why do you write? And I said, because I get to play God. I get to create a universe that I can control and I can move all the characters around. And I have power. It's the only place I actually have power in my life. And I have control in my life. I can create the world and it follows my rules. Right. And it's such a funny thing because I see and little Steven played by little Sammy, doing exactly the same thing.

It's amazing. And that idea, it's certainly something that will pop up or artists and writers will talk about at times. But it's been a really surprising kind of incarnation of that idea. I think one person who sort of talked a lot about that in recent years is Bruce Springsteen. And about sort of Bruce Springsteen's, you know, sort of early experiences in the family and the sort of dynamics that kind of made him feel very uncontrolled and insecure. And I mean, I think actually there's probably you could probably do a Springsteen Fablemans and it's probably quite similar maybe to the Italian Catholic as opposed to the Jewish American version of this story. Was certainly complex relationship with his parents. And Springsteen talks a lot about how he does these for decades he's done these sort of epic long concerts and is this sort of incredibly charismatic and garrulous, this amazing showman. But he's talked about how that's the only time of his day, he's like that. And the rest of it, he feels like to think about people who are performers are going on stage and making art that is a way of kind of being controlled or being something for themselves that they are unable to at other times of the day. So that's why maybe he wants to be on stage for three or 4 hours because when he feels good that day.

Yeah, it's fascinating. I think they got that right in the film, right? They got that piece very correct.

Very much. I think it's great. I think it's certainly something just in terms of what it's sort of saying about living a creative life or choosing art. That's a theme that kind of very much comes to the fore both in regards to Sammy and relationship with his mother, Mitzi, who's played by Michelle Williams, but also this, like this uncle who sort of shows up in the middle of the movie, played by Judd Hirsch.

I wanted to ask you about that because that's such a pivotal scene, right?

Yeah. And he says it quite outright. And I think some people have sort of criticized the script because it's kind of like it's one of those scripts where it doesn't actually there's not a lot of subtext because a lot of what the film actually has to say about this is straight up text. And the people say these things point blank. And certainly in that scene, he says point blank to Sammy, like, well, we're artists, we're creatives. And that's going to put you in conflict with family and with other relationships because you are going to choose your art over people a lot of the time, and you're going to sort of sacrifice relationships in order to sort of fulfill yourself. And that is, as the Judd Hirsch uncle notes, it can be a curse. It's not necessarily I mean, I think a lot of films will sort of valorize that, but there is a cost to living like that, to being committed to creative life, and they may come at the expense of other parts of your life. And that's something that is quite clear in the Fablemans. And in regards to Mitsy, who's played by Michelle Williams, Mitsy definitely emphasized that she was kind of I'm not sure she had been a concert pianist.

I think she I mean, yeah, they very much deserve she had devoted her life to becoming a concert pianist this is the real Spielberg's mother to becoming a concert pianist and had put that aside in order to become a mother and homemaker. And Spielberg's father is an electrical engineer. And so there is this sort of frustrated creative, this sort of abandoned creativity that haunts Mitsy. And there is one of the themes is her kind of tentative sort of return to the piano. But she is this artist and an artist who was unable to live a creative life because of other choices or expectations. And that is something that I think the film suggests quite clearly as a source of her sorrow and sort of the depression issues that she fights, is that she was going down a life path that was maybe against her nature or against what she wanted.

Yeah. It also makes me wonder because there was a scene toward the end where Sam's younger sister comes to talk to him right after the parents have announced that they're divorcing. And and she says to him, you know, it must have been really hard for mom living with this, you know, man who was a genius and never feeling like she was as smart as him and as good as him. And I was just thinking how, you know, as a thwarted artist, that was bad enough, but to be with a thwarted artist who was living with a man who was fulfilling all his dreams was very hard. And Benny was much more of a regular guy and not going to rub in her face her own failures or her own lack of courage to pursue her dreams.

Right, yes, and that's true. Like, I mean, certainly we kind of like that from it's hard to live with people. I mean, there's certainly a challenge when, you know, in terms of in a partnership, it's kind of like who gets to fulfill what they want because it's very hard for both of those things to happen or at least happen at the same time. And I think that's something that becomes attention here because, as you said, Benny, which is a character played by Seth Rogen, who's close to the family and a close friend of Sammy's father, comes clear that there is more going on, at least an emotional affair between Mitzi and him. And that what kind of version what kind of version of herself is possible with Benny versus what's possible with Sammy's father becomes a starker as the film goes on. And it's really, I think, one of the kind of painful and authentic things about the film is it doesn't villainize anybody. And in fact, Spielberg's talked about that, about how he kind of blamed his father and resented his father because his parents really did break up and divorce at the same around the same time as Sammy's parents do in the film.

But he realized that I think some things, like in the film, his father was giving a particular version of events to the kids in order to protect his mother. And that's something that I think that Spielberg took a long time to understand, that basically his mother did leave his father for another man, but that his father wanted to protect his mother. He didn't want that was the sort of sacrifice the father made in order to protect the kids. But obviously, when your parents break up, there's a lot of fallout for children and a lot of blame and a lot of misunderstandings. So I think that certainly senior colors the film as well.

So I want to ask you about two parts of the film which I thought were very important. So the one part of the film is when Sammy is forced by his father, basically to edit this footage of their camping trip because his mother is very upset because her mother has died, Sammy's grandmother has passed away. So in order to cheer her up, Burt wants Sammy to make a little film of their camping trip because she was happy there. But when Sammy edits the film, he sees things that he wasn't supposed to see. And then there's a whole scene with mom. So why don't you talk about that?

Well, certainly there's this certainly a couple of things going on. I mean, there's this sort of thing that I think many creative people, artistic people are that sort of pressure where it's like, do this thing because maybe the hope that the artist has or somebody else has that you're going to provoke a particular reaction, make someone feel better or whatever. Like you kind of just show them and do this home movie or what have you to kind of cheer somebody up. But what's interesting in that to me is that really exactly what happens is that he sees his mother in a way and he hadn't expected. It's very painful to him to see his parents see his mother because I think that's something we don't all of us, especially in terms of our family members, we see what we want or we see what we always do. We often don't see them in terms of any kind of outside perspective or kind of more neutral perspective because we're just sort of looking at them through this lens of memory and emotion and everything else that we're not particularly observant. We're just sort of seeing what we always do or to actually see clearly is difficult and often very upsetting, as it is for him in the film, because he realizes what's going on and that this sort of emotional affair and this connection to Benny is sort of happening before his eyes and always has been.

But that's not what he chose to see. And I think that's something that I think is a story that I always respond to and always think is really interesting. And the fact that I noticed that with a couple of short films, great short films that program this year, it is a kind of common thing, especially when it's stories about young people. There's a whole kind of sub-genre category of films where it's really about seeing your parents and sort of understanding them or sort of first flickers of understanding of who they are as people as opposed to your parents. And that's something that sort of comes up quite a bit. And there's another film that's been very, I think a very much smaller film that been very critically acclaimed from the UK called After Son, which is very small scale story of a girl who's maybe eleven or twelve on holiday with her father, who's still quite young. But it becomes clear through the film that the father is dealing with some mental health issues, and there is a fragility about him that the girl sees and really is just sort of starting to kind of just probably just starting to see who her father is and what he carries in a way that's really beautiful and again, really kind of empathetic.

Like it isn't like there's this sort of sense that people are being vilified and certainly that's not the case. That dynamic between Sam and Mitzi and the Fabelmans is really complex because he does react with anger. But then I think there's that scene where he's made the film and there's sort of like I think there's maybe like maybe two versions of the film because he shows a version of the film with the family and everyone's like, oh, wait, we had this great time with this trip. And then there's this outtake reel and he shows his mother and like, hey, here's you. And this is what I saw you with Benny and he plays that to his mom, and the mom just breaks down completely. She sees it, too. I think that he maybe I don't mean his motivation in sort of showing her the film is maybe more of a jack whose kind of moment of kind of like, I caught you, but she just falls apart. And I think that's a beautifully played scene by the actors, because it's like he doesn't really know what he's messing with. He doesn't really have any clue.

He doesn't know what he's sort of bringing about by doing this and compelling her to see it as well, or compelling her to see it the way he's seen it. And I think that really crushes her. And I think it's a beautiful moment that really kind of gets to that relationship and for him to sort of kind of really he's not exactly entirely accepting of it. And the movie goes on for another hour and a half, so he's got a lot to process. But it is that act of seeing the parent and then kind of showing them that you see them, too. This is a very sort of profound thing that I think the film gets at really well.

And I find it very interesting because then he gives up making movies, right? He just abandons it because something about doing his art has revealed to him truths that he didn't want to see. And I think the film got it very right in that sense, because there's another dilemma of artists, aside from the dilemma that Judd Hirsch posited, which is that you'll choose your art over your loved ones, and that's going to be a wrench. There's another dilemma, which is art will show you things that you might not want to see, and you have to be willing and able to face these things. And Sammy was not willing and able to face the truth about his mother and her extracurricular emotional affair. And so he abandoned his art, and it was like, no, I don't want to see. And that's very typical of a teenager to a teenage boy, especially. I don't want to see those things about my mother. The only reason I showed her was because she wanted to know why I was so angry. So I said, fine, here, this is why. And it's kind of a typical teenage kind of behavior.

But then he abandons his film filming for quite a long time, and he's really having to wrestle with, do I want to make art and see the truth? Because when you're an artist, it's all about seeing and revealing the truth. And that was his kind of major conflict, I think. I wish in the movie they had made it a little bit more overt because this was more subtle. So the Judge Hirsch scene was, like, completely, like you say, text, no subtext. But this was a little bit, I think, too much subtext and not enough text. I wish they had made it just a little bit more overt. I wish we could have seen a little bit more like maybe a scene with his father saying oh, I see that you've given up film that's good. And then Sam is like, no, it's not so good, or something like that. To show his ambivalence, to show his being torn and wanting, not wanting. And then he just kind of takes it up again and you don't really get a sense of the anguish. And I wish we had gotten more of a sense of that. I think that would have been more meaningful.

But I think it was important. And I think they did get that right in terms of the way people become ambivalent about their creative process. Because when they're faced with a shocking truth that their creative process has revealed it's like, oh, okay, so this is what it means to be an artist.

Yeah, further than that, that's all really good points too. And I think there's something that kind of connects with some of the criticism the film has had especially when it relates to this sort of next big film that he makes later in sort of the last film he makes inside the film. But I think there's something else to it which intrigues me, which, again, maybe it's funny because there's things that are the film is quite explicit about but there's some of the things the film is more implicit about. And one of the things is I think Sammy's also freaked out about power, freaked out about the power he has in the manipulation of the film. The creativity reveals there's a revealing of truth but there's also, like, a manipulation of things as well. And I think that maybe what you see in the moment with his mother is like that's, like, straight up. Like, he's kind of I mean, what he's shown her, what he's seen is just crushing and sort of devastating to his mother and then by to him. But he's also kind of getting more and more experimenting through his filmmaking with his Boy Scouts about kind of manipulating the movie magic the sort of molding of reality to what you want it to be or just maybe not what you want, but just because you can.

And that becomes over with the sort of stuff that happens in the last stretch of the film where he's in California and he's being bullied at school and is very much the outsider as the one Jewish kid or pretty much the one Jewish kid amongst all these, like, mean, perfect, piece Wasp kids who are often antisemitic. In that case, he kind of is enlisted to shoot the kind of big beach day out that graduating class has. And he makes this movie and he basically just turns his sort of chief bully. I mean, he's got a complex relationship with the other teenager but the other kid is just as devastated as Sam's mom is to sort of see what Sam has created of him or based on his image within this film. But it's not the truth. It is like, actually the opposite. It's more like Sammy has kind of made him out to be some kind of like Lenny Reef and Stalling kind of Arian God, and the kid freaks out at that. And that's like, wow. And that's sort of like Sam, whether or not I think there's potentially an interesting thing that I don't think Sammy gets that yet.

I think Sammy maybe the adult Spielberg understands this, but the teenage Sammy doesn't really know what he's doing yet. It may be more instinctive. And I think that's something, like I said, that people have criticized the film. It's kind of like because it is certainly a lot of thoughts about and certainly Anti-semitism is never far from the news and this year especially. But that reaction that sort of like to take this sort of Anti-semitic character and the kind of come up and that he gets from Sammy is very complicated. It's certainly not something like it's sort of easy, like, oh, I'm going to ridicule and expose this kid's racism. And it's like, no, he does something very different to the kid and it messes with his head in a big way. It's a great scene. And I think that's maybe the most kind of complex operation within the film. And I think it's something that people have been grappling with in reviews because a lot happens in that. And I think some of it happens without Sammy necessarily knowing what he's doing or what he's intending to do.

Absolutely. I totally agree. When I think about it from the psychiatric perspective, from people's motivations, this guy was this tall, blonde, athletic, I guess he's the football captain, whatever, you know, the typical jock, bully, cheating on his girlfriend and, you know, just harassing Sammy because he can. And he's got his little friend who's also harassing Sammy, like his kind of sidekick, who's probably harassing Sammy more. And interestingly, the piece that you didn't mention is that in the film, the camera also follows around the little friend, the sidekick, and shows him to be a total loser. Like, at one point, he's like, stealing beers behind two people who are sitting. Another time, he's, like, taking the beer to a girl and she's ignoring him. And then he's wandering drunk on the beach like he really does to the sidekick what you think he's going to do to the other one. And then so he splits the two friends as well. So the one guy, he completely denigrates. The other guy, he idealizes. He shows him. And even the guy says, you showed me as some kind of golden something like so he's really a golden god, right?

So he denigrates the sidekick. He idealizes the athlete. And then at the end, the athlete is freaked out because he says, I can never be that person that you made me. And everyone's going to expect this of me and I can't fulfill it. And so you set me up. And he cries. And then he says, you better never tell anybody that I broke down. And then his friend comes along, the sidekick, and wants to beat the crap out of Sammy because of the way he was portrayed. And interestingly, the golden god beats the friend and the friend scurries away. And so that relationship has ended. So he's actually broken.

I don't think Sammy knows what he's doing. No, I agree, because I think Sammy's reactions throughout that scene, sam is just kind of bewildered. Like, what I don't really but what he's done is a very sort of most sort of psychologically, sort of tactically, brilliant thing that he's actually done because he's kind of ruined both these kids without necessarily understanding how he did it, intending to do that to them.

Yeah, he said, the camera just shoots what it sees. But that was kind of I think you're right. I think as an artist, his instincts, like you were saying, his instincts, his intuition were just following things and just taking it to where the gut was telling him to take it. And his head was not following. So his gut was going, do this, do this, do this. And his head was not even catching up until probably later on in life. But as his instincts were rolling with the film, he was capturing this sort of false idealization of one and this accurate denigration of the other which would, number one, destroy their friendship, which, you know, divide and conquer. And number two yeah, ruin them both, but in in their own particular different ways so that they couldn't even come together in the way that they were both ruined. So it's like this brilliant psychological thing that he had no idea, like you said, that he was doing.

And that's something I think there's really certainly thinking about Jewish American creativity. This was a lot of amazing writing and thinking on that very topic in terms of, like, Hollywood, sort of classical era Hollywood and the sort of construction of these sort of very kind of Waspy ideals that were engineered by a lot of Jewish American sort of writers and directors and studio bosses. There's something in that scene, I think, that really kind of connects with this wider history of American cinema and about how the Jewish creatives have created these templates for these very complex reasons. But it's all there. And I think that's something that certainly has been talked about a lot, about Spielberg. And this is like, certainly there's been films that have touched on Jewish themes and stories. Certainly Munich is a film about the massacre of the Israeli athletes at the Olympics. But this is like, by far and away the sort of most Jewish movie that he's made, or most explicitly. And I think that's. Kind of that connects because people start writing about the history of sort of Jewish creatives in Hollywood. This is a big thing, kind of, because they kind of work like they were erased from a lot of American culture and sort of erased from sort of Hollywood.

There were very little presentation representation of Jewish people on screen but they kind of created so much of that which they kind of created a lot of these golden gods that no one could live up to. So there's a lot going on there. And I think very much the Spielberg and Kushner are very aware of this too, I think.

I thought that scene was really fascinating because he walked out and he was devastated and I think he was just confused. I think he looked at his piece of art and he knew he had done it, but he felt kind of alienated or confused. He didn't know what he had done. And I think that's another kind of very accurate portrayal of a psychological truth about an artist. When you've made a piece of art and then you have to figure out what you've actually made, right? Because a lot of times while you're making it, you're just making it. And then afterwards, you sit back and go, what the heck did I just do? And am I okay with it? Right? And sometimes it's shocking what you've made because you're pulling from something very deep within you and then you look at it and you're even a little horrified. And I think he was a little horrified. He was a little shocked, and he was a little confused. So I think that's a really wonderful portrayal of a psychological truth about what it means to be an artist, especially a young artist who's just who's still catching up with himself and his brain is catching up with his instincts.

I think that's very true too. And I think that's something in my experience, I've done many, many interviews over the years with people, writers and filmmakers and musicians. And there is this thing that happens which I find there's a point where when people are doing interviews and Spielberg he's done gazillion interviews over the years and so he sort of knows the score. But there's this moment where when a work is too fresh and people have just finished it. They've just finished the movie, they've just finished the book or whatever, and they have no clue what it is anymore. Maybe they don't in the first place. And it just sort of goes into the world and people start to sort of get different readings of it or sort of understandings of it and they all come back to the journalist will come back to the creator and be like, what about this and this part? And they'll be like sometimes it'd be like, oh, I didn't see that. And sometimes I've actually had experiences where they were just, like, upset. Like, they were like, oh, I didn't because they haven't had any chance to sort of have any kind of outside perspective.

They've been lost in the weeds and the thing forever. So they don't know. I think that's something that doesn't like I think that you do, and maybe you start off with particular ideas about what's going to happen and then other things emerge in the work that you didn't know about. Surprising and maybe disturbing to the creators themselves.

Absolutely. And I think so much of art has to do with revealing the truth, like I said, but revealing parts of our own self that we don't want to acknowledge or face in our day to day life. But as we do our art, those things emerge, that shadow part of ourself emerges. And I think Spielberg, I think the character of Sammy wanted to think of himself as a nice boy. A nice boy. But he was not a nice boy in this movie. Right. He was a very devious and talking about power, he was wielding his power in quite a maybe unconscious, but quite deliberate way with very powerful effects. And this nice boy that he believed himself to be could not be reconciled with what he did with this movie.

Yeah. No, I think it's a really good point, too. I think there's actually there's something unsettling and unattractive about his artistic drive because he's ultimately, like the Judd Hurst uncle said, he's going to choose the art over people. He's going to choose art over he's going to he's going to sacrifice relationship. He's going to do that. And it's because one thing I was thinking about that because I've been thinking about the movie and there's interesting choices all the way up through. But why does the film end with the scene that it does? Because there's certainly points before where you're like, oh, it's going to end with him and Mitzi, or in with the mother, in with the father, or whatever. But it actually ends with this incredible, quirky, very funny scene in which Sammy meets one of his heroes. He doesn't even know that he just kind of is trying to get a job in the movie business. And he ends up getting this audio or getting this time in the office of the legendary John Ford, the director of Some. It was actually an echoes because he's very early in the film, he sees The Man Who Shot Liberty Balance, and that's obviously one of his favorite movies.

But this year Ford made that amongst many other classic films. And Ford was a notoriously sort of cantankerous. And especially in his later years, he was just kind of a monster. I mean, a brilliant genius. And there's this play, John Ford, Spielberg casts another one of the greatest and most influential filmmakers of the last 50 years, which is David Lynch. Lynch is actually a really funny performer and he's really.

It was amazing.

And I think the kind of message that movie. That is kind of the end note to that theme too. Spielberg has always had a reputation for being like a really nice guy and not like this monster that Ford was or many other sort of filmmakers of that generation. Like certainly a lot of sort of spurious stuff about Alfred Hitchcock and any number of people who were like these sort of revered film filmmakers and Oturas who were beastly people and quite cruel. I don't think Spielberg has had anything like that reputation. But there is this kind of like, leaves you with John Ford is this kind of extreme version of the artist. The absolutely kind of selfish and cruel and callous and still very funny but brilliant and that's sort of like that scene and you're left with the sort of note of like, Sammy.

And maybe that's it. Maybe in this alternate universe, the Sammy Fableman that grows up to be this famous filmmaker. Maybe he doesn't become nice guy Spielberg. Maybe he's sort of just become this sort of monstrous John Ford. I mean, maybe that's sort of there's certainly that potential certainly could go he could go become sort of crazed Ford as opposed to maybe the nice, thoughtful Spielberg who was making The Fabelmans. Maybe that's not a sort of final joke.

Or to show like that when you're an artist. Again, I think he's good at broad strokes and text versus subtext. So maybe the text here was being an artist reveals your shadow and being an artist reveals your drive for power and your drive for control. And here is the epitome of this in the form of John Ford. And yes, he's a genius but look how being an artist can manifest all this darkness. Right, right.

And it's also a bit of a joke too. It's like, what has he got for all his amazing films? He's in this office and nobody comes to see him and he's just, like, smoking cigars and being a jerk.

Having lipstick wiped off his face by his secretary after lunch.

Exactly. He's just a mess. And certainly he could make great art for decades and still end up in this sort of alone and unhappy. And certainly John Ford, he had this sort of afterlife which was fascinating too because he really was like a lot of these amazing, incredible directors of the generation. They were just kind of kicking around Hollywood trading on past glories and having lunch. And occasionally it took a while for there to be people like Spielberg or like Peter Bogdanovich who were these sort of like movie nerd kids who saw them out and just gave them a lot of hero worship at a point where nobody else in the business cared. They weren't getting gigs. I mean, they were just kind of like relics. But then they're all instead of that generation of sort of kids who grew up in the 50s who just kind of found these kind of withered carcasses and were like, you're a genius. I just told them again and again. And they really like that. As you would.

Yeah. I think this film psychologically and again, I don't even know if Spielberg maybe Kushner, because Kushner I would expect more, but I don't know if Spielberg really even himself at this point in his career, really understood how much deep psychology he was infusing in this picture. But there's a lot of very interesting thinking underlying the choices of the characters. The father who is trying so hard to escape this so called friend and he keeps moving and his wife keeps dragging this guy along and then finally he succeeds in moving and then she leaves him. The poor guy. And he never says it out loud, right? He's this nice guy. He doesn't confront. But he's, like, so devious himself, right? He's like, making sure he gets promoted in order to get rid of this excess baggage. And poor guy, he fails, right? He just cannot, for the life of him, escape until he finally does and then it backfires on him. So that's so brilliant that it's never spoken about and you see him struggling so hard to do it. And I love the fact that they never talk about that piece. And the mom, this poor woman playing dirges when she leaves Benny, she's playing funeral marches.

And again, nobody talks about why she's playing funeral marches. So I love the fact that there's all this stuff going on that is not spoken about, but it's so true. And then how she takes the girls but leaves the boy with the dad. And then in California, of course, where he can pursue his career. So, yeah, I think psychologically they got it right. Whether they did it on purpose or by accident. Again, as art, that wouldn't be surprising. But yeah, as a film that really talks about a lot of very deep personal and emotional and psychological themes, I think they got it right whether as a piece of art, it's completely successful. I think it's partially successful. But I think the psychology they totally got right.

Yeah. And I think that's a great way to encapsulate it because I think certainly as a critic program and certainly a lot of people think that, oh, it's supposed to be like films supposed to be good or not. I don't really care if a film is good or not. I kind of care whether something is interesting. If there is that sort of it feels like there's stuff there's questions in the work people are trying to process because I think there's certainly people who would rather see films where things are all kind of settled or neat or whatever. I'm sort of always sort of fascinating by whatever I'm watching, is kind of like what is the artist or the creator or creators trying to figure out? What's the sort of personal seed or nut or what are they trying to get at. And I think that there's a lot that's going on in Feabelmans and I've heard different critiques of it. And some people think it's simplistic or reductive because that's the thing is I guess there's stuff that is very clear and overt and explicit for sure, but then there's a lot of other stuff which is people.

And I think that's good to land on. I think it's Bert, like the Paul Daniel father character who is there's stuff going on with him. He's trying and he seems like a sort of very sweet, gentle, somewhat tormented and again, they don't necessarily get those flickers really until quite late in the film when you're like where he starts to break down and he starts to really kind of come apart and you're like, oh, this has been there all along. This sort of maybe kind of sweet suburban kind of sitcomy dad that was a facade. I mean, there's all kinds of facades happening here. You realize people and again, people unable to see themselves because that's painful and disturbing a lot of the time.

Yeah. So I think it was a fun film to watch and a very fun film to talk about. I think it's the kind of film that you actually have to talk about with another film lover and really chew on because there's like a lot of material there to chew on. And I think that's what makes a successful film. Ultimately, when a couple of people can get together and really have a good conversation about it, then it's done its job right

For sure. We should do this again.

I would love to. Well, where can people find you, Jason, if they're looking to see your work, your reviews and your programming and things like that? Where can people find you?

Certainly checking out CinemaScope and Sight and Sound and I like writing for print magazines because I like getting magazines in the mail. I'm pretty happy to have those. And recent winter issue of Broadview, I've got a piece about holiday movies and Hallmark and Hallmark movies and things like that. I was really happy with that piece too. So that's one that's out. And then and then just please come see short films and the Kingston Canadian Film Festival in early March and Kingston is also something really excited about. So yeah, I'm around.

That's wonderful. Well, Jason Anderson, thank you so much. This has been really a wonderful pleasure chatting with you today about one of my passions, which is art and Happy New Year.

You too. Thanks so much.

This is Dr. Marcia, Sirota. Thank you for listening. Please leave a review and your comments wherever you listen to podcasts. And don't forget to sign up for my free newsletter at Marcia SirotaMD.com where you'll learn about upcoming online events as well. Also, we love getting referrals from our listeners about future podcast guests. So please email at info@marciasirotamd.com.