Commentary: 'The Fablemans' allows us as children of divorce to feel that the world that broke apart can still find its way back together.
Paul Dano, Mateo Zoryan Francis-DeFord and Michelle Williams in a scene from"The Fabelmans."
Like so many kids of the 1970s and ’80s, I’m grateful for the hero just out of the frame. And it’s not because Steven Spielberg launched “Indiana Jones” and “E.T.” and wrote about a Mikey just like me who finds the treasure to save his family. It’s because nobody mines the heartbreak and alienation of the dual citizen that is the child of divorce any better than Spielberg, and I’m guessing nobody ever will.
Two photographs carry all I can remember of my parents parting ways when I was a year old. My father, shirtless and smiling broadly through his Bee Gees beard, lounging with me on the couch. I’m not on his lap but squirming away, repelled, as if I already knew it was over.The other print shows me clutching my Winnie the Pooh and my 36-year-old mother’s hand in the spring sun, her auburn hair ablaze against the black robe she wears while bobbling her newly minted social work diploma.
Much like Spielberg’s fictional parents Mitzi and Burt in his latest Oscar-nominated movie, “The Fabelmans,” my mother was the poet-soul and my father the numbers guy. A refugee from Egypt by way of Paris, my father made his way through school to become a hospital administrator managing multimillion-dollar budgets, while my mother, a literature student who emigrated from Panama, reveled in jointly revising the stories that make up a life.
And for many years, I’ve believed what lion tamer Uncle Boris — played magnificently in the film by Judd Hirsch as a wise old borscht belt man — says to warn and enchant the young Sam: There’s no way to honor your art without betraying your family, and yet there’s no way to live without art either.
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