Mark Reviews Movies: THE FABELMANS

The Fabelmans, Universal Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | November 22, 2022

Somewhere between the wide-eyed wonder of nostalgia and the reality that such a notion is a deceit exists The Fabelmans, co-writer/director Steven Spielberg's fictionalized memoir. Spielberg, whose presence on the short list of our greatest living filmmakers makes any kind of autobiography worthy of attention, is both celebrated and occasionally criticized for putting his heart on the screen. In its self-reflective and self-referential way, this film shows the director wrestling with why that's such an impulse in how he makes movie.

All of this is probably of more interest to the filmmaker than anyone else. When it comes to an artist as famous and prolific and iconic as Spielberg is, though, it's easy to forgive a bit of self-indulgence—just this once.

The story, written by Spielberg and his oft-collaborator Tony Kushner, is more than some navel-gazing affair, too. One doesn't need to know the full or even a basic biography of the director for the tale here to seem authentic. When an artist is as forthright—knowingly or unwittingly—with his feelings as Spielberg is, some kind of biography is often reflected in that artist's work.

Some of that is again reflected here in recognizable images: the look of awe on a child's face as he watches his very first movie (One of the character's sisters later mocks him for so frequently featuring someone staring off at something in his own movies), a group of kids riding bikes through a suburban neighborhood, the way in which unnaturally bright light floods through the windows of the kid's multiple homes over the course of his childhood and teenage years. Such things are trademarks—for the generous—or clichés—for the less so—of Spielberg's work. For those in the know, they take on the weight of legend in this film.

It's often difficult to separate the art from the artist. This story, which is both a coming-of-age tale about a kid learning to do what he loves and a domestic drama about a family slowly breaking apart, serves as confirmation and a confessional that certain ideas and themes from Spielberg's oeuvre do point to some very personal things. Those who have followed the director for any number of years or decades will surely identify those connections, whether it be the importance of family, the scars of divorce, or just the broader, child-like notion that there's adventure to be had anywhere one makes it.

The narrative follows Sammy Fabelman (played as a young boy by Mateo Zoryon Francis-DeFord and primarily by Gabriel LaBelle throughout the character's teenage years), the eldest child and only boy (just as with Spielberg) in a Jewish family. The family moves a few times over the course of the story, because Sammy's father Burt (Paul Dano), an engineer in the ever-growing field of computers (just as with Spielberg's own father), keeps finding better work opportunities. The kid's mother is Mitzi (Michelle Williams), a pianist, and at this point, it would be more productive to point out the dissimilarities between Sammy and Spielberg.

In the 1950s, a young Sammy sees his first movie, and a spectacular but frightening train crash sequence gives him nightmares and a desire to re-create the spectacle, using a model train and his dad's home-movie camera. Right away, this kid uses movies and making movies as a way to control that which is too scary, too uncertain, and too confusing to understand in the real world, and to see Spielberg admit as much, by way of this fictionalized biography and this increasingly apparent stand-in of a character, certainly makes the entire enterprise feel like a bold, exposed confessional on his part.

Making movies becomes an obsession for Sammy as he matures. He invests any spending cash on reels of film to make increasingly complicated movies with his friends, much to the encouragement of his mother and to the doubts of his father, who doesn't want his son to put so much stock of his future into this "hobby."

The lengthy second act juxtaposes Sammy's innocent flights of adventure with the mounting realization that his parents' marriage isn't as simple as it seems to a kid. While on a camping trip, Sammy inadvertently captures some private moments between Mitizi and her friend Bennie (Seth Rogen), an "uncle" to Sammy and his sisters.

The result is a rather insightful pair of scenes. In one, Sammy edits together a camping movie that excises those private moments, controlling how everyone, including himself, will remember the trip. In the next, the boy shows his mother the footage he edited from the final product. It's a lovely but painful lesson in storytelling—how much perspective matters—and in the power that movies can have to help us see the people we really are—or, perhaps, want to be.

It's little wonder that a film by a master filmmaker about learning how to and why one should make movies would feature such transcendent moments. The early material with the young Sammy is genuinely wonderful, but another, far lesser moment of attempted revelation comes when Sammy shows an antisemitic bully what he could be. Even the film itself offers a big wink about the result, since this is, after all, a story about the way things could be, too.

The family drama and, once Sammy reaches sunny California, high school complications—a young romance and the bullies—aren't nearly as convincing or engaging as the more blatant depiction of an artist coming into his own. Spielberg might admit as much, too, if the very final moment of The Fabelmans (following an ingenious cameo of one director playing another) is any indication. It's a funny and self-aware joke of a camera move that suggests learning and coming into one's own are never truly finished, and such insights, communicated by Spielberg about himself via the very craft he adores, make the film worthwhile.

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