There’s a nasty case of Misleading Trailer Syndrome going around this season, with symptoms particularly pronounced among the spate of memoir films piling up as the year winds down.
The spots for James Gray’s Armageddon Time and Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans sell us a pair of rosy-cheeked coming-of-age pictures about young, Jewish auteur-avatars navigating the travails of 20th-century boyhood, their partial comprehension of their families’ class and ethnicity nurtured by a loving, wise older relative. They’ll both face a little more than their fair share of antisemitism, but that’s just the penumbra cast by the good ol’ days, a fondly remembered era recreated as a portal to a more innocent era. In the ad for Gray’s latest, the shimmying disco groove of Good Times by Chic soundtracks afternoons spent scampering around Central Park or sneaking a joint in the bathroom. For Spielberg’s, a soaring score confers that blockbuster feeling as our junior cineaste learns that “movies are dreams that you never forget”.
