“The Fabelmans” and Hollywood’s Self-Obsession

Steven Spielberg’s “The Fabelmans” is the kind of film Hollywood loves. A veteran director at the helm delivering an intimate family story in which a young man discovers the power of cinema. Surely destined to sit among films like “Singin’ in the Rain” and “La La Land” as a standout tale of life in Tinseltown.

The trailer tells you everything you need to know. Michelle Williams breathily declaring “Movies are dreams,” as a young Sammy Fabelman looks on in awe at the silver screen. At home, Sammy excitedly films his train set crashing on his Super 8 camera, movie magic already unlocking something inside him.

Just one problem: that’s not what “Fablemans” is, not really. That evocative trailer is more or less the first 15 minutes of the film, the opening act to a story that often intersects the movies but is decidedly not about them. At its heart, Spielberg’s quasi-autobiography is about a young man finding his place in the world in the midst of the dissolution of his parents’ marriage. Sure, Sammy wants to be a filmmaker, but that’s not the point. His search for identity would have played out more or less the same in any other vocation.

So where’s the disconnect? How did this movie get a trailer that is hyper-focused on this one aspect of our main character’s journey? It is, at least to me, a combination of two aspects of Hollywood ideology and “policy,” for lack of a better word.

The policy is not a hard and fast rule, but a trend in recent years. As smartly explained by Vox’s Alissa Wilkinson, movie trailers today don’t necessarily represent the movie they’re promoting, but the movie the studio thinks will get people in seats. Much more could be said, and Wilkinson’s piece is worth a read, but suffice it to say it is not entirely unexpected to see movies in general, including “Fabelmans”, having misleading trailers in an effort to meet the bottom line.

And if Hollywood has decided trailers don’t have to adhere to the movie, it’s also no surprise why “Fabelmans” got the magic of cinema treatment. Hollywood loves stories. In particular, Hollywood as an affinity for stories about itself, about the craft and art of storytelling. Through all four (or five, depending on how you count) iterations of “A Star is Born,” to modern flicks like “Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood,” if there is a tale in, about or even around Hollywood, it’ll make its way to screens, sooner or later.

When faced with a movie that often features, to whatever degree, the type of inside baseball that Hollywood so loves, they made the usual choice, to highlight all the things that make movies special, because for Hollywood as an industry to exist, they must be special. It’s the easy button, conveying a familiar emotion to the audience that will get them intrigued, regardless of if that emotion is actually in the film.

 “Fabelmans” in particular, suffers from Hollywood’s desire to validate its specialness, to prove that film can convey what no other medium can. Unlike similarly marketed films, which are either actually about the movies (“Babylon”) or support themselves with strong core performances (“Empire of Light”), “Fabelmans” is almost entirely supported by the meta-context of knowing this is Spielberg’s fictionalized autobiography; without that knowledge, it is only a Michelle Williams showcase and a decent if not particularly distinctive coming of age story.

While it would seem easy enough to somehow snap Hollywood out of its reverie and disprove its specialness, there are hurdles to that, not the least of which is that, for all its faults, Hollywood is kind of right. Movies can be and often are profound and revelatory, and there is something special about seeing them in a theater, bound together in the dark with strangers all feeling the same emotions.

The misstep the trailer for “Fabelmans” and others like it takes is thinking that being self-referential somehow makes those films inherently better. Watching any movie can be an experience and audiences don’t need to be lured in by the promise of tales of Hollywood. Simply sell strong, well written stories, and audiences will come. No tricks required.