The Fabelmans (2022) vs. Catch Me If You Can (2002) - Film Balance (2024)

The Fabelmans (2022) vs. Catch Me If You Can (2002)

Steven Spielberg is, by all accounts, the most beloved and acclaimed American film director working today, and last year’s The Fabelmans is perhaps the most heartfelt and personal movie of his illustrious career. Taking a writing credit for the first time since the hilariously named A.I. Artificial Intelligence back in 2001, Spielberg attempts to tell his own story, recreating his childhood as he plots the events that precipitated his current notoriety. The result is a critical darling and awards show behemoth hailed as one of the major entries of Steven Spielberg’s extraordinary filmography.

It’s a shame, then, that it’s such a bland and inconsequential film. And not only bland and inconsequential, but incompetent to the degree that I would have believed impossible of a film from the director of Jaws, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and countless other classics were it not for Spielberg’s evident decline over the past several decades from one of the best directors in Hollywood to a sometimes okay, never brilliant, but always inexplicably lauded dime-a-dozen craftsman.

When viewing The Fabelmans in isolation, it’s difficult to see just how low Spielberg has fallen or to recognize the filmmaking brilliance he once possessed; it’s only through direct comparison with his earlier work that we can really see what we’re missing. Enter Catch Me If You Can. Made twenty years before The Fabelmans, Catch Me If You Can is often unfairly placed among Spielberg’s minor efforts; that alone demonstrates the track record of unadulterated excellence to which Spielberg once laid claim. Catch Me If You Can may not be the greatest film he ever made, but it’s likely the last great film he ever made. Let’s see if The Fabelmans can stack up in our film-weighing scale.

(Spoiler alert: it definitely can’t.)

Let’s compare John Wick and Nobody based on their plot, acting, cinematography, and sound.

Plot – (50% of total score)
John Wick – 48/50

The Fabelmans is based on Spielberg’s life growing up in New Jersey, Arizona, and California, and right off the bat, we run into a basic flaw that will haunt the film: nothing very interesting happened in Spielberg’s life growing up in New Jersey, Arizona, and California, and as such, nothing very interesting happens in the movie, despite the laughably thin veneer of fiction that Spielberg ensures by rechristening himself Sammy Fabelman. Sammy (Gabrielle LaBelle) is an imaginative child who loves movies. He then grows into an imaginative teenager who loves movies and is plagued by the standard slate of teen angst and a home life of quotidian unhappiness.

Of course, you don’t need extraordinary situations to create compelling drama onscreen; all you need are rich, complex characters, and/or a privileged insight into the human condition, both of which The Fabelmans utterly lacks. Spielberg’s screenplay, a collaboration with Tony Kushner, provides his characters with no depth and no subtlety; lacking anything interesting to talk about, they resort to describing their own one-dimensional personalities and paper-thin motivations aloud to each other and spewing inane, self-righteous platitudes in scenes that tumble endlessly into one another with no clear sense of movement or separation. The film feels simultaneously overstuffed and curiously empty: each scene is trying to accomplish a dozen different things and showcase at least two unrelated formative moments in Sammy Fabelman’s life, and yet one feels that the runtime could easily be cut in half without losing anything.

The burden of a witless screenplay could perhaps be alleviated by some visual dynamism, but, crushingly, Steven Spielberg has lost his once-unrivaled command of the cinematic language, and has apparently also lost all of his respect for his audience. Consider how he crafts the (long, long, so absurdly long) sequence wherein Sammy Fabelman gradually discovers that his mother Mitzi (Michelle Williams) is having an affair with family friend Benny (Seth Rogen). First, he lingers over all of their interactions with a knowing languor that will immediately clue in the more savvy audience members; then, he films Benny staring hungrily at Mitzi as she inexplicably dances in a surreal sequence that was probably meant to be iconic but ends up just kind of creepy and strange (almost everyone watching at this point will not only know that Mitzi and Benny are having an affair but not understand how Sammy could fail to pick up on it as well). Then, he indulges in a lengthy scene where Sammy reviews footage that he filmed of the family on a camping trip and realizes that Mitzi and Benny were making moony eyes at each other the whole time. Furthermore, we get to watch the exact same camping footage again when Sammy confronts his mother about it, and, for good measure, explains aloud what he and Mitzi and everyone else in the world already knows, whereupon we are treated to one of countless maudlin sequences between Sammy and his mother where she begs him not to say anything to his father.

My point is, Spielberg takes about twenty minutes of screen time (and it feels like much longer) to clumsily, ham-fistedly communicate a plot point that he eventually gives up and says in dialogue anyway. And this kind of thing happens throughout the entire film, leaving it overstuffed and inconsequential, a boring, pointless, unenlightening slog.

Catch Me If You Can (35/40)

Right around the time that Sammy Fabelman was doing inane things with Super 8 cameras, Frank Abagnale, Jr. (Leonardo DiCaprio) found his life falling apart. His father Frank, Sr. (Christopher Walken), once a successful storeowner and fixture of the community, made some questionable business practices and got into deep trouble with the IRS; their slide into poverty and the resulting domestic tension causes his mother (Nathalie Baye) to lose interest in the family and begin an affair with a much older and wealthier colleague of her husband’s. Divorce proceedings are underway immediately, and, pressed to choose whom to live with between his parents; Frank Abagnale chooses the third option: run away and begin a life on the run, fast-talking, forging, and seducing his way through half a dozen careers and into fabulous, illegal wealth.

Now that’s more like it! Both The Fabelmans and Catch Me If You Can are based on true stories, but The Fabelmans shot itself in the foot by telling the least interesting part of its true story (what a surreal treat it would have been to see Spielberg’s attempt to recreate, from memory, the legendary filming of Jaws with the malfunctioning shark; but alas, such a sequence would have deprived us of the opportunity to endure more lachrymose domestic drama) while Catch Me If You Can tackles its stranger-than-fiction tale with wit, heart, and an undisguised glee at the improbability of it all. The screenplay isn’t perfect—there’s a nonlinear framing narrative that doesn’t really add much, and several characters tell this recurring story about mice falling into buckets of cream that comes across as forced and silly—but the characters have real depth and personality, and any deficit in the dialogue is made up for via superb visual storytelling.

This is Spielberg working at the top of his form. Consider a plot point in Catch Me If You Can startlingly similar to the one I lambasted in The Fabelmans earlier, where Frank Abagnale, Jr. discovers that his mother is having an affair. He comes back from school one day, chatting amiably about school trivialities as he enters the apartment; he stumbles in on his mother serving tea to a man he knows vaguely as a friend of his father. There is forced conversation; it’s awkward for reasons that no one is willing to name. The friend leaves (Frank shakes his hand when proffered but won’t look him in the eye, which I thought was a really nice touch), and his mother starts scrambling desperately to pretend that nothing out of the ordinary happened. She makes Frank a sandwich; she improvises wildly about threatening to sue the IRS for their investigations. Finally, desperately, she asks Frank whether he’ll tell his father. He shakes his head. “Good,” his mother says. There’s nothing to tell—she tries to pretend that she was asking him not to tell his father about suing the IRS, but without any real conviction that he’ll be fooled. She nervously gives him some money for no real reason and lights a cigarette. Frank leaves, plucking the cigarette from her mouth and saying, “you said that you’d quit.”

I know it sounds like a lot when I describe it blow-by-blow like that, but the whole thing takes less than two minutes onscreen—it’s a testament to Spielberg’s cinematographic skill that he’s able to pack so much relevant detail into the scene without it ever feeling cramped or exhausting. Most of it is filmed in a static long take that makes extraordinary use of deep staging and excellent period production design. Everything important is left unsaid, and yet nothing is left unexpressed.

This is the type of filmmaking that Spielberg became famous for; twenty years later, he seems to no longer care.

Acting (30% of total score)
The Fabelmans (10/30)

With The Fabelmans, Spielberg is granted yet another opportunity to demonstrate that he has long since forgotten everything he once knew about working with actors, resulting in two-and-a-half excruciating hours of watching talented performers flounder aimlessly in tasteless, underwritten roles, forced to work so hard to make something out of abysmal material that the result is worse than if they hadn’t tried at all.

While the onus is on the actors to ensure that their portrayals are believable and effective, it is the director’s job to conduct an ensemble into a coherent performing unit, and at this, Spielberg drastically fails. Take, for example, Judd Hirsch’s performance as Sammy Fabelman’s uncle, who is meant to be charming but comes across as clinically insane and possibly dangerous. This character appears in all of two scenes, and is completely inexplicable in both of them. Every choice that Judd Hirsch makes is surreal, uncomfortable, and ineffective, chewing scenery with maniacal abandon, standing completely at odds with the more staid, dramatic tone that the rest of the film is trying to go for. Hirsch was nominated for an Oscar for this travesty; I speak no exaggeration when I say that his nomination might legitimately be the most embarrassing gaffe in the history of the Academy, comparable to How Green Is My Valley beating out Citizen Kane or Bohemian Rhapsody winning best editing.

The Academy sometimes likes to equate “best” with “most.” Bohemian Rhapsody certainly had the most editing of all of that year’s nominated films, in the sense that it had to cut to five different camera angles just to show someone sitting down at a table, resulting in an unwatchable mess; similarly, there’s a large quantity of acting going on in The Fabelmans, almost none of it good. Michelle Williams is particularly ill-used here—made to cry in about 70% of the total scenes in the movie, Spielberg ruthlessly exploits her grief with interminable close-ups of her tearstained face as she shrieks unintelligibly. It’s very easy to play a character constantly amid a meltdown, and almost impossible to empathize with one. I hate these kinds of performances; I hate it when (usually male) directors make their (usually female) leads to break down on camera over and over and over—it’s such a cheap, borderline exploitative play for awards show acclaim, giving into every gross and reductive Madwoman in the Attic trope in exchange for a Best Actress nod.

Gabrielle LaBelle is excellent in the lead role and manages to make even some of the worst-written scenes almost tolerable. For every other actor involved, this is decidedly the low point of their respective careers.

Catch Me If You Can (29/30)

Conversely, Catch Me If You Can is a career highlight for everyone involved—legends like Christopher Walken, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Tom Hanks have never been better, while near-perfect performances are eked out of lesser-known actors like Nathalie Baye and then-newcomers like Amy Adams and Jennifer Garner.

Each performance is an extraordinary credit to the actor, replete with distinct, memorable, and effective choices; but again, let’s focus on how Spielberg treats his actors onscreen. In The Fabelmans, he pushed his camera in towards Michelle Williams during her multitudinous moments of grief and despair with an almost intentional lack of taste. But watch how he films DiCaprio’s Frank Abagnale after his character has just received some tragic news from Tom Hanks’ Carl Hanratty while aboard a plane. Frank gives Carl a single look of disbelieving panic, then jerks his head forward, hitting the seat in front of him. He lets loose a howl of misery—but Spielberg does not show his face, focusing instead on the pitying, uncomfortable glances of Carl and the other passengers. Wishing to avoid a scene, Carl rushes Frank to the bathroom and ushers him inside. There, Spielberg locks us into a long aerial shot, showing Frank from directly above as he fruitlessly, weakly pounds against the walls of the tiny room in which he is so heartbreakingly confined, sobbing and screaming. We see his face only once, and then only partially, as he stares at himself, wild-eyed, in the dirty bathroom mirror. We are not underwhelmed voyeurs to his suffering, but sympathetic observers who know Frank well enough by now to know when he’s thinking of running away again. Now that’s how you win an Oscar.

(Although ironically, neither DiCaprio nor Spielberg were even nominated for Catch Me If You Can—yet another embarrassment for the Academy.)

Cinematography (20% of total score)
The Fabelmans (1/20)

The very last shot of The Fabelmans—coincidentally, the only shot where it permits itself to have fun or show any sort of personality—is my least favorite moment of the movie. Young Sammy Fabelman has just been advised by legendary director John Ford (in an intensely annoying scene) that, when filming exteriors, it is more interesting to keep the horizon line at the top or the bottom of the screen rather than the center. We see Sammy Fabelman walking down the street away from the camera, the shot perfectly symmetrical, the horizon line right smack-dab in the middle. The camera then tilts flamboyantly downward, so that the horizon line is at the top, then upwards, with the horizon line at the very bottom and a vast expanse of sky above. Cut to black.

Not only is this a completely unsatisfying moment from a narrative perspective (much of the plot is left unresolved, and the cheekiness of this self-reflexive camera movement feels like adding insult to injury), but it’s wrong at the most basic level: the shot looked better before, with the horizon line at the center, striking and distinctive in its symmetry and with less negative space. It’s a particularly egregious instance of cinematographic incompetence, but the rest of the film is just as bad; Spielberg clearly had no idea what the scenes were supposed to look like until the day they were to be filmed, and his choices of camera angles are clumsy, distracting, and nonsensical, all adding up to arguably the worst-shot movie of the year.

Catch Me If You Can (16/20)

True, Catch Me If You Can cannot lay claim to anything on the level of Spielberg’s most iconic images—there is no equivalent here to the famous dolly zoom in Jaws, for example, or the shot of the bike flying across the moon in E.T.—but honestly, what films can? Great cinematography isn’t all about flashy, beautiful shots, but about using the language of cinema to express themes and tell compelling stories, and we’ve already seen how masterfully Spielberg once commanded that language to communicate ideas and facilitate great performances.

Sound and Music (10% of total score)
The Fabelmans (8/10)

John Williams can always be trusted to provide an exceptional score, and the sound design here deserves particular praise; there’s something intensely relaxing and satisfying about listening to the gentle whirring of an old projector or Super-8 film editing machine. The soundscape of The Fabelmans, at least, is more than up to the standard of quality one would expect from such a film.

Catch Me If You Can (8/10)

John Williams is best known for his sweeping, anthemic orchestral themes, and it’s fun to hear him try (and succeed brilliantly at) something a little different here—more smooth and unobtrusive than normal, the score perfectly underlies and facilitates all of the film’s deft mood swings and weaves in the occasional needle-drop seamlessly. Neither The Fabelmans nor Catch Me If You Can rank among Williams’ most iconic works, but their relative lack of notoriety is far from a slight against the scores in particular, but only a credit to the unparalleled career of the composer.

Overall Score
The Fabelmans (24%)
Catch Me If You Can (88%)

Verdict

The comparison is so obvious, and the weighing so one-sided, that it requires no further elucidation. I couldn’t possibly spell it out any clearer that Catch Me If You Can is significantly heavier than The Fabelmans in our film-weighing scale. Bring back the old Spielberg.