An overtly autobiographical Steven Spielberg film would seem, on the face of it, unnecessary, given that the illustrious director’s canon is full of features—led most pointedly by Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial—steeped in highly personal childhood and familial issues. That notion is confirmed by The Fabelmans, a two-and-a-half-hour therapy session in which the auteur imagines his own origin story in frustratingly literal fashion. Earnest to a tee—and, frequently, to a fault—it’s a drama about the magic of the movies that itself is far too often lacking in that department.
Co-written with his Munich, Lincoln and West Side Story collaborator Tony Kushner, The Fabelmans—premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival ahead of its November 11 theatrical debut—is a story about Spielberg proxy Sammy Fabelman, who as a 1950s New Jersey kid (Mateo Zoryon Francis-DeFord) is transformed by his first trip to the theater to see The Greatest Show on Earth, whose train-wreck centerpiece is the spark that ignites Sammy’s imagination. “Movies are dreams,” declares his mother Mitzi (Michelle Williams), a once-promising piano prodigy who’s now traded in her own aspirations for dutiful domesticity, and Sammy is enraptured by those 24-frames-a-second reveries of light, shadow and sound, such that he’s soon recreating the train crash with his own Hanukkah-present toys—the first of many instances in which art and life reflect each other in mesmerizing and destructive ways.
While Sammy is a budding creative type like his mom, he also has the logistical problem-solving know-how of his dad Burt (Paul Dano), a computer scientist who’s going places, and bringing along his best friend and colleague Bennie (Seth Rogen). Given her excessively boisterous laughter at his mediocre jokes, it’s patently clear that something is going on between Mitzi and Bennie. Nonetheless, that thread is for a time left in the background so Spielberg can focus on Sammy’s initial enchantment with moviemaking, which Mitzi helpfully explains to her husband is the boy’s attempt at exerting control over the chaotic world. Mitzi does this as well, albeit not through art but, instead, a mantra—“Everything happens for a reason”—which provides her with comfort in the face of escalating turmoil of her own design.
The first third of The Fabelmans is captivatingly attuned to its protagonist’s budding cinephilia, especially once the clan relocates to Arizona in the early 1960s and teenage Sammy (Gabriel LaBelle, in a charismatic turn) begins staging larger productions with his sisters and his boy scout troupe, the latter of whom double as his first enthusiastic audience. One need not peer too closely during these passages to spy the seeds of Raiders of the Lost Ark, War of the Worlds and E.T., the last of which is potently evoked in a nighttime campfire scene that finds a nightgown-wearing Mitzi twirling and smiling in car headlights for Sammy’s camera—and the two adult men in her life—like a translucent angel portending both bliss and doom. It’s a moment of bewitching beauty and peril, and before long, the Fabelmans’ domestic situation is collapsing, due to a move to California, Mitzi’s depression (and ensuing decision to buy a monkey to soothe her broken heart), Burt’s repressed suffering, and Sammy’s tumultuous high school experiences being tormented by anti-Semitic bullies and dating a devout Christian girl (Chloe East) who likes him because he reminds her of another cute Jewish boy: Jesus.
The Fabelmans is rife with details that are so specific that they feel ripped from Spielberg’s memories, be it the sight of a throbbing vein in Sammy’s dying grandmother’s throat, or Sammy selling baby scorpions for money to buy reels of film. Such particulars, however, embellish a tale that never gets beneath the surface. Rather than layering the material with conflict and contradiction, Spielberg and Kushner spell out every idea either via italicized pronouncements (“You can’t just love something—you have to take care of it”) or through self-conscious compositions. Save for a few early close-ups of Sammy and a late low-angled one of Burt, there’s little evidence of the visual imagination that Spielberg brought to his prior musical remake, much less the soft-lighting glow of his seminal ‘70s and ‘80s Amblin output. His polished but ho-hum aesthetics, from Janusz Kamiński’s cinematography to John Williams’ score, mirror his drama’s interest in playing things as straightforward and obvious as possible.
In a brief, scene-stealing performance, Sammy’s visiting great uncle Boris (Judd Hirsch) warns him about the potential dangers of commingling art and reality, and The Falbemans repeatedly returns to the notion that Sammy’s movies are proof of cinema’s capacity to amaze, celebrate, horrify, and—most important of all—reveal truths about the world. Sammy’s work is a vehicle for confronting Mitzi about her and Bennie’s relationship as well as for neutralizing a hateful jock, but its transformative power doesn’t quite come through, since Spielberg drains the action of any prickly complication. The result is a lightly fictionalized fable (hence the film’s, and family’s, name) about the circumstances that gave birth to his consuming cinematic passion and lifelong vocation.
Spielberg’s latest is a sincere and compassionate attempt to reckon with his parents’ strengths and failings, and the role that the movies (and this movie) played in helping him better comprehend them. The problem is that The Fabelmans comprehends them too well, by which I mean, too neatly. There’s nothing mysterious about these figures or this endeavor; rather, it’s just an alternately sweet and meandering recap of the director’s formative early days, sprinkled with the occasional easily digestible nugget of wisdom. Aiming for Fanny and Alexander-grade depth and nuance, Spielberg comes up with something more akin to an informative explainer for his superior genre gems and their recurring fixations on suburban dysfunction, absentee fathers, and tormented single mothers.
Of the accomplished cast, Williams does most of the heavy capital-A acting, emoting like crazy as a woman trapped in a figurative cage not unlike the actual one she builds for her pet monkey. Yet despite the actress’ showiness, there’s only so much to be done with a cheery and morose character whose every thought and feeling is written across her face, and who’s prone to saying things like, “You do what your heart says you have to.” At least a late David Lynch cameo as one of Spielberg’s idols delivers a few chuckles—although like the proceedings as a whole, it’s largely cine-nostalgia for cine-nostalgia’s sake.
