OnScreen Review: "The Fabelmans"
Ken Jones, Chief Film Critic
There are few people who have had the cultural influence in movies that Steven Spielberg has had, crafting the beloved entertainment of collective childhoods for several generations. His latest film, The Fabelmans, is Spielberg turning the camera back on himself and his childhood to tell a story that is largely shaped by his own autobiography. While the film is not a 1-to-1 autobiography of Spielberg’s youth and adolescence, it follows the broad brushstrokes of it in the form of the Fabelman family and their slow migration across the country in the 50s and 60s.
Sammy Fabelman (initially portrayed by Mateo Zoryan and eventually by Gabriel LaBelle as a teen) is our stand-in for young Spielberg, bitten by the movie bug when his parents, Burt (Paul Dano) and Mitzi (Michelle Williams), take him to see The Greatest Show on Earth while they are living in New Jersey. Burt’s savvy with computers makes him in demand, and soon they are moving to Arizona, and in a few years, Sammy is making moving pictures for his Boy Scout merit badge, casting his fellow scouts in his short film. Sammy’s love for creating movies only grows, as does the dysfunction of his family as their journey eventually moves them from Arizona to California, and there are strains put on the family, both from without and within.
It could be very easy for this film to be sweet and treacly, something I worried about when I first heard Michelle Williams utter the words, “Movies are dreams” in her most earnest voice possible in the trailer for the film. And Spielberg has sometimes dipped too far into sentimentality in the past, but far more often than not he tends to find just the right balance. The story he puts on screen here, with the aid of frequent co-screenwriting collaborator Tony Kushner, feels unvarnished and honest, or at least as honest as a fictionalized version of one’s early life can be. It is easy to picture a young Steven Spielberg, as Sammy does here, trying to recreate the car-train collision in The Greatest Show on Earth with his toy train set, or, later on, figuring out how to make gunfire look real when you’ve filmed your actors with toy guns.
The family dynamic of the Fabelmans is more wrought than Sammy’s aspirations as a filmmaker. Michelle William’s Mitzi has a little bit of Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique to her, having given up her dreams of piano playing to be a suburban mom. Because of that, she is very supportive of Sammy’s creativity and love for filmmaking; more so than his father, who is impressed by what his son creates but sees it as little more than a hobby that will need to be put away someday for the more tangible things in life.
Whatever the family dynamics may be, it is ultimately Sammy’s story and Gabriel LaBelle shines as our Spielberg avatar. Spielberg has been so good at coaxing great performances out of young actors, and LaBelle is another name to add to the list. It has got to be unimaginably daunting to be cast in a role that is so largely based on the director’s real-life experiences, let alone Steven Spielberg. LaBelle is up to the task, embodying a passion not just for the magic of filmmaking, but the work of it. And the sacrifice for it.
Judaism is also an important aspect of the film, established early on when the Fabelmans are driving home from seeing The Greatest Show on Earth at night and Sammy points out that theirs is the only house that is not lit up with Christmas lights. Sammy later faces antisemitism in high school, another added layer of difficulty in the move to California. How he chooses to respond and try to be above it is through filmmaking.
And that is what The Fabelmans keeps coming back to, this almost unexplainable pull that movies can have. And that is what Spielberg is really showing us by pulling back the curtain. Yes, he is saying that movies are dreams and magic, but movies are also work and it takes investment of blood, sweat, and tears to make them. There is power in moving pictures. People will react to what they see on screen. They will jump in fear, laugh, cry, and experience a whole range of emotions. Movies can illuminate the world around us, showing us truths hidden in plain sight, even in recording simple family outings. The camera can also lie, making someone look like a hero or a fool, just based on what the person behind the camera chooses to show and how they show it. The power of storytelling in a visual medium is a great power with great responsibility.
When you boil it down, The Fabelmans is an ode to the desire to create. It is a unique peek behind the curtain of one of our greatest directors and vulnerable in a way that is purely Spielberg. It also shares some hard truths about the difficulty of family life without being too judgmental and finding a way to show grace to all parties without being overly sentimental.
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars