The crypto-antisemites and useful idiots experts on foreign policy and international law must have gotten bored with giving a shit and knowing everything about the war. Almost without exception they seem to have moved on to sharing their Spotify end-of-year stats. I can’t tell if this is a trend in the right direction or not.
I’m not sure I’m much better. I’m speaking up privately to all of my erstwhile “friends” and colleagues, suggesting as politely as one can through gritted teeth that it should trouble them deeply to have strong opinions on a subject about which most of them can’t cite a single historical fact or verifiable assertion. And here in this newsletter I’m riffing about books and movies for fun and practice. Because I like writing. I’m nowhere near expert on the modern state of Israel or the phenomenon of antisemitism, just an interested amateur. I don’t feel it would be appropriate to reorganize the writing project you are currently reading around geopolitical topics, even ones the implications of which spell very serious trouble for me and my family and everyone of our stubborn, defiantly dignified and ever-beleaguered ethnic heritage.
Jotting down thoughts about what I’m reading and watching is something I like doing. And: it feels hollow and selfish to do it while sentiments favorable to genocidal antisemitism are boiling over, including among people I have cared for and/or respected. There’s a moral knot here that I don’t know how to cut or untangle. I want to write more regularly and more interestingly in this space and I have very mixed feelings about just what that is worth right now.
Not coincidentally, both pictures I recently watched are by Jewish writer-directors and have to do with growing into one’s identity as an American Jew. Homicide is a favorite film that I have seen several times but this was my first viewing in over a decade; The Fabelmans was released in 2022 and this was my first look at it. Be advised I’ll be getting into a few ending-compromising plot points in the following notes.
Homicide, directed by David Mamet, 1991. Of the ten films Mamet has writer-directed I have disliked three, missed three and loved four. The dour, two-fisted cop tragedy Homicide is in the latter grouping. This is strong in the running for Mamet’s best work on film.
Homicide is a tragedy in the truest sense of the term. Its protagonist, an exhausted-looking, heavy-smoking homicide detective and hostage negotiator named Bobby Gold, played by Mamet’s regular collaborator Joe Mantegna, stumbles into a case which awakens a new understanding of his Jewishness. He is also assigned to a politically sensitive parallel case that ultimately reveals to him the depth of the decay to his soul that years of difficult work and internalized self-loathing have wrought. Through his own hubris and myopia he gets himself into a scenario where he refuses to choose between the two most important parts of his identity and ends up losing both.
Photography is by the gifted legend Roger Deakins, demonstrating a subtle touch for gently-lit interiors and cloudy daylight settings on the streets of the unnamed city where Homicide is set.
Gold is played by Joe Mantegna. His Irish American best friend and partner Tim Sullivan is played by William H. Macy. The best time I ever had at the theater was one night in Manhattan years ago seeing Macy perform in Mamet’s play Speed-the-Plow, playing a role that Mantegna had originated in the play’s first-ever staging.
As befitting a genuinely tragic figure, Gold, while a likeable, charismatic and empathetic protagonist, is not an altogether good character. A relatively harmless anti-gay joke in an establishing sequence (“How’d ya like to be Queen for a day?”) portends much worse to come in the film’s climax when Gold will expose the full extent of his own self-immolating moral hypocrisy. A minor character promises Gold earlier in the film that he will help Gold to “solve the problem of evil,” but it turns out Gold doesn’t need much help with that. His failure to choose when he must between being Jewish and being a sworn officer, which ends up effectively costing him both identities, gives him an opportunity to redirect the bigotry he’s received back out toward others and to indirectly cost his best friend Tim his life. His self-destruction over the course of the film is thorough.
Mamet is always great at suggesting a lot while saying relatively little. Artfully subtle story components in Homicide involve what Gold suspects is a conspiracy on the part of some kind of unreconstructed Nazi cabal to assassinate prominent Jews and his encounters with an underground insurgent cell of Israeli and Jewish warriors and intelligence agents. The implication is of these two forces circling one another warily with Gold caught in the middle.
I once heard Mamet remark of Harold Pinter that Pinter had, if I remember Mamet’s phrasing right, “taken the narration out of drama and put the poetry back into it,” and it seems clear that Mamet has always been out to do much the same. The results are notoriously mixed; his characters sometimes speak in ways so peculiar and inside baseball that they simply fall flatly into corniness or rank implausibility. With its self-serious noirishness, moral weight and thriller-machismo premise, Homicide is one of his soaring successes as a filmmaker and a writer of hard bop dialogue. It has a succinct, tightly-structured screenplay with nothing wasted and settles on a disquieting, complicated and profound denouement.
The Fabelmans, directed by Steven Spielberg, 2022. Spielberg co-wrote this movie with his frequent collaborator Tony Kushner. It’s a fictionalized but clearly heavily-fact-based retelling of Spielberg’s own upbringing and burgeoning childhood obsession with filmmaking, charting the growth of a Spielberg-like character named Sammy Fabelman from a preadolescent kid seeing his first-ever movie in 1952 in New Jersey through a family move to Arizona where the teenaged Sammy starts making his own cowboy and war films to a high school relocation to Northern California and post-high school move to Los Angeles where he gets a toe in the door of the film industry. Along the way he deals with stereotypical-but-real Jewish traditions like overbearing grandparents, scary elder relatives, intense and passionate family rows, heated intellectual debates and the striving to make a mark and be accepted in postwar America. Sammy also encounters antisemitism from bullies and a bit of horny philosemitism from a beautiful and vivacious Christian broad who gives him his first indication that being smart and creative can be a good way to score chicks, even though that’s by no means why Sammy (or presumably Steven) originally set out to become a filmmaker.
Like Mamet in Homicide, Spielberg worked with one of the all-time greats of film photography for The Fabelmans, his regular cinematographer Janusz Kamiński. And as with all of Spielberg’s pictures these days, for all their many flaws, one thing you have to say is that they look incredible. The guy is a dazzlingly brilliant visual filmmaker and he can afford to hire the best team of designers, photographers and effects people in the business to realize any vision he dreams up. As an aesthetic confection, The Fabelmans is a non-stop joy to imbibe.
This picture is about a kid who has an artist for a mother and an engineer for a father. In between these two parental influences he flourishes as a filmmaker, a skill that requires the balancing of technical bravado and creative talent. It’s Spielberg’s fictionalized account of how he learned to fine-tune that balance with support, advice and consternation from his folks before turning pro.
Without squinting you can see a lot of Spielberg explaining his own origin myth, like for example on a family camping trip where Sammy’s mother, played by Michelle Williams, starts dancing ballet while backlit by car headlights. One of Sammy’s sisters is embarrassed that a vague impression of the mom’s body can be discerned through her nightgown, but in capturing this eerily beautiful and unsettlingly intimate moment on film Sammy becomes fascinated with the potential of silhouetted images within his camera frame, a recurrent motif throughout Spielberg’s career. It seems evident that this sequence like most everything else in the film is likely based on real experiences in Spielberg’s life.
Another key theme is that those of us cursed with the need to make art will inevitably feel our undeniable compulsion pull us away from our families. Jewish culture tends to produce a lot of highly creative and headstrong individuals…who also often come from very close and tradition-laden families. Confronting the implications of this contradiction is how this character begins to grow up and assume his own individual identity as an artist.
The Fabelmans would have no chance of working as well as it does if the central role wasn’t so well-cast and well-performed. A young actor named Gabriel LaBelle, a complete natural with a precociously well-developed talent, is outstanding as Sammy.
The other performances are quite good too. The most enjoyable one is a delicious and rewarding bit of stunt-casting in the film’s last scene with David Lynch devouring the role of cantankerous director legend John Ford.
That last scene is a winner, which is a relief since Spielberg is known for poorly-written endings that go on one scene too long. This time he nailed it and put the best part, or one of ‘em anyway, at the very end.
I struggled a bit with a few dangling story components that felt crammed in alongside one another, mainly having to do with Williams’s character carrying on an emotional love affair with a close family friend. And there are several distended moments of cringe-corn Teenage Feelings. But while the film’s dialogue and transitions get a bit choppy at significant points, the acting and design are so great that I was able to just roll with it and enjoy at least one or two things about every scene. Overall it’s a pretty good movie and never a boring one.