The Fabelmans

An emotionally complex, sentimental journey through the joyful and equally tormented memories of iconic filmmaker Steven Spielberg’s artistic origins and formative years, Spielberg’s latest film, The Fabelmans, is his own Amarcord about a Jewish-American teenager who discovers his love for movies and passion for filmmaking even at a young age. The film possesses arresting technical work and an impressive cast. The veteran filmmaker delivers a deeply personal vision that not only pays tribute to the powers of filmmaking (and art), but also boasts some rich ideas about how art and the creative process can also be a dark place that taps into deep human emotions and complexities that consist of loneliness, familial displacement, and finally catharsis. While slightly overlong with some melodramatic detours, beneath the missteps lies a very polished and piercingly honest film about Spielberg’s past traumas and his creative psyche.

The film is episodic by design, unraveling into some interludes of various characters that fade in and out throughout the course of the film, similar to Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza (though not as energetic or peculiar), but it’s certainly Fellini’s Amarcord and every bit as self-autobiographical. Though far more accessible than Amarcord and crowd-pleasing than Licorice Pizza, Spielberg’s film is a cohesive collage of his young memories of cinema, which consist of watching Cecil B. DeMille’s Oscar winning The Greatest Show on Earth, staging the train scenes with a train station he gets as a gift, all the way to staging and directing his own home movies and having productions at Boy Scouts, and memories of him encountering John Ford at his office at Paramount Studios. It’s not all charming nostalgia and happy memories, though, as Spielberg and co-writer Tony Kushner delve into some dark territory of Spielberg’s own painful traumas, including anti-Semitism, bullying, and witnessing his parents’ separation and divorce.

Throughout the course of Spielberg’s career, there have been some recurring themes about the relationship between parents and children. Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Spielberg’s 1977 masterpiece, explores the heartbreaking collapse of a family after the emotionally distant father, played by Richard Dreyfuss, becomes obsessed with UFOs and even abandons his family to pursue his obsessions.This has carried on throughout the course of Spielberg’s films, including E.T., Empire of the Sun, Hook, Catch Me If You Can, A.I., Artificial Intelligence, and War of the Worlds. Each of those films explored family complications and emotionally distant parents that left the children in a crisis from both internal and external forces outside of their control, where they had to heal, reconcile, and reconnect.

Here we finally get a glimpse of who Spielberg’s parents are. Spielberg’s life and childhood and his relationship with his parents are covered in the HBO documentary Spielberg. This time, we’re introduced to his parents and other family members, whose names have been altered from the Spielberg’s to the Fabelmans. We’re introduced to the father character, Burt (Paul Dano), who is a computer engineer who constantly moves his family across the country wherever the job promotion lands him. Then you have the mother, Mitzi (Michelle Williams), who is a concert pianist, and sacrificed a lot of her career to be a stay-at-home wife and mother who occasionally plays live piano on local radio stations. She is certainly more in tune with Spielberg’s younger alter ego, Sam Fabelman (Gabrielle Labelle). Mitzi also has manic anxieties and endures states of depression that take a toll on her marriage to Burt. Outside of a love letter to cinema, Spielberg’s latest film is also a sincere ode to his mother, who, while very flawed, did deceive her husband and bring some demise to the family, but she certainly always supported Sam and his creative vision and passions, while Burt constantly wrote it off as a hobby.

We can tell right away how perceptive and attuned Mitzi is to Sam’s artistry. Being an artist, herself certainly helps, while Burt is more of a man of science and book smarts. In the very opening of the film, we open with young Sam (Mateo Zoryon Francis DeFord), who is completely in awe of the train wreck sequence in Demille’s The Greatest Show on Earth. Like most kids who know they are filmmakers, he acts out the scenes with the train station that was bought for him as a Hanukkah gift. With its elaborate set-pieces, The Greatest Show on Earth was a sheer spectacle at the movies at the time. It’s no surprise how this played into the scope and vision of Spielberg’s own filmmaking. While reenacting the scene, the model train set keeps getting destroyed. Mitzi comes up with an idea to film the scene with their 8mm camera, that way his trainset doesn’t get destroyed and he can watch the scene at any moment. Young Sammy films it, they watch the reel, and Spielberg’s origins as a filmmaker are born.

We cut to Sam’s (Labelle) teenage years, where he embarks on other projects, including a mummy short, and uses the family’s toilet paper to wrap his young sisters to act out as the Mummy. At this time, the Fabelmans are now residing in Arizona, and Sam goes to the local cinema to catch John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Vance, in which Sam eventually buys his own 16mm film camera and shoots his own western at his Boy Scout Club titled Escape to Nowhere.

Commendably, Spielberg prevents his from getting overly sentimental and schmaltzy. It delves into some dark territory with his experiences with the constant moving that benefited Burt’s own self-interests, the death of his grandmother, and a very powerful moment in the film of Sam editing some home footage of a family camping trip where the image picks up obvious affection between his mother and “fake uncle”/family friend, named Bennie (Seth Rogan), which has quite a devastating impact that echoes Brian Pe Palma’s Blow Out. The film’s second half explores the Fabelmans’ time in California, where the community and Sam’s fellow classmates are more anti-Semitic and not as inclusive as his classmates were in Arizona.

Spielberg sets up the family’s dynamic between science (his father) and art (his mother), which echoes Malick’s memoir of nature in The Tree of Life. After all, Mitzi sacrificed her own music career to raise the children, and she was far more supportive of Sam’s filmmaking than Bart. In a few standout scenes, we are introduced to Uncle Boris (Judd Hirsh), who is retired from big name circus shows as a lion tamer, who squeezes Sam’s face hard and lectures Sam on just how much pain and disconnect artistry creates in the ones you love. Both Hirsh and David Lynch as cigar-smoking, eye-patch wearing John Ford are absolute scene stealers that echo the many standout performances we saw last year in P.T. Anderson’s Licorice Pizza that also fondly captured the past with bittersweet nostalgia.

While the last hour is its strongest, the second half suffers and feels a little sluggish as the drama tends to feel more inert. It mostly consists of more family drama that hits a lot of the same notes but comes off more dramatically inert. The material of Sam enduring anti-Semitism and bullying where he’s called “Bagelman” ignites the most in the second story. Even more bizarre is Spielberg’s exploration of a relationship with his first girlfriend, Monica (Chloe East), which offers laughs with her over-the-top love for Jesus and where she believes Sam just needs some conversion, but it felt like it was out of a completely different film. The strongest suit in the final act is when Spielberg portrayed just how weaponized and redemptive the image can be. Both the senior ditch day sequences at the beach where Sam documents his classmates, shortly followed by the screening of it at his senior prom, are standout moments. like the editing sequence, it really is an emotionally stirring revelation in the film. Of course, the final scene which I won’t spoil is absolutely brilliant. Let’s just say the ending feels like it was lifted straight out of Licorice Pizza and it’s certainly a scene stealer.

Like Licorice Pizza, the film is polished and technically accomplished film that becomes a nostalgic pastiche of Steven Spielberg’s own joys and traumas. Visually and technically, Spielberg captures the period well and uses some impressive crane and moving camera shots in which the film is elegantly shot by longtime cinematographer Janusz Kaminski and the narrative is enhanced longtime composer John Williams’ subdued score. While the film does meander and the narrative does suffer a bit with the family melodrama scenes during the last hour, the film is still emotionally vulnerable and amusing for sure. The film is also a sweet ode to youth, the power of filmmaking, and finally a love letter to the parents who raised us.

THE FABELMENS is now showing in theaters.