If there’s anything serious movie fans know about Steven Spielberg’s personal history, it’s that his parents divorced when he was a teenager and it effected him immensely, informing several themes and parallels throughout his films. Many a Spielberg movie deals with complicated relationships between parents and children and either overtly or in the background with the subject of divorce. It’s one of the critical experiences in the life of the most renowned popular filmmaker of the past fifty years. And The Fabelmans was always going to happen because of it.
I’ve noted before how every great successful filmmaker is destined to eventually make a movie of their own life story. It’s an ego thing or a longevity thing or even just a nostalgia thing; but whichever applies here, Spielberg had apparently been thinking about it for twenty-odd years. Obviously it’s a touchy subject and required him to be in the right emotional state to take it on -that as it happened was COVID and the aftermath of finishing West Side Story. He and Tony Kushner, one of his most valuable creative partners of late, hashed out the script then -and it’s notable in being the first screenplay Spielberg has had a hand in writing since Close Encounters of the Third Kind over forty years ago. It could not have been authentic any other way. Nor could it have had the power it does -as a genuinely compassionate reckoning with the situations of his youth and his family, and an introspective memoir on how it met with his love of movies and filmmaking.
But of course there must be aliases. Spielberg’s alter ego is Sam Fabelman, played for most of the movie as a teenager by Gabriel LaBelle, an Orthodox Jewish kid growing up in the immediate post-war period. We first meet him as a six year-old in New Jersey being spellbound by The Greatest Show on Earth, and in particular its’ famous train wreck scene in which a car is propelled over a locomotive. He obsessively spends the next several weeks trying to recreate it on the train set at home -the first real instance of the power of film in his young life. His parents are computer engineer Burt (Paul Dano) and pianist Mitzi (Michelle Williams), and through his dads’ job, they and his three sisters are uprooted throughout his adolescence first to Phoenix and then northern California -each a distinguished chapter of his life, his artistic ambitions, and his relationship to his parents’ slowly fracturing marriage.
One might expect that to take precedence in the film in a very dramatic and heavy formula way, but Spielberg in being honest with himself depicts it as a process of slight dysfunctions and disagreements that build over time and wear away at the couples’ relationship. In addition, there is a subplot to do with Mitzi’s clear infatuation with Burt’s friend, the kids’ Uncle Bennie (Seth Rogen), and the fallout of Sam discovering their closeness. But still the movie keeps its’ emotional eruptions to a minimum, it casts this family drama in terms easy to resonate with, and yet no less painful than those stories that deal more emphatically in the heartbreak of such a situation. One might argue that there’s nothing terribly unique in this -that the story of Spielberg’s family and his parents’ gradual break-up (mostly amicably) isn’t interesting or dramatic enough to warrant such attention. His was a reasonably normal experience. But the drama of his family is deeply effective precisely for that reason.
Sam is the main character of the piece, but The Fabelmans is often dominated by his parents and their effect on him, as Spielberg interrogates his own relationship to his folks all these decades later. And Burt and Mitzi Fabelman are extraordinarily compelling portraits. He is a mild-mannered technician and, alluded to in the background, a war veteran. Smart, somewhat introverted and dull, but caring -a man whose connection to his children we see only in spurts, but who will take young Sam to his first movie showing or give him a camera as a gift -though still refuse to see the interest as anything more than a hobby. Paul Dano plays him really well as the kind of guy who blends into a crowd, an intensely average 1950s/60s American career man who keeps certain personal issues repressed -and yet in that indistinct character finds a beating heart. The movie rarely lets him explain himself directly, and yet through Sam’s eyes, and Spielbergs’ decades of subtle storytelling craft, we understand him and his motivations even as they confuse the kids in the moment.
Mitzi on the other hand is far more open, more generous with the children and especially in the early goings more of a constant star in Sam’s life. She’s the one who secretly lets him film his fathers’ model train crash and as an artist herself is immensely encouraging of his passion for making movies. She has the warmest smile and keenest enthusiasm, that love of spontaneity that is a real blessing for her children -in what’s surely the movies’ highlight scene she dances in front of the headlights at a family campfire while Sam films it (Spielberg perhaps subtly suggesting where his penchant for lens flares comes from). She is an ideal mother-figure, until she suddenly is not. And even though her “betrayal” amounts to the mere idea of infidelity, you still feel the blunt weight of its’ meaning on Sam. Spielberg though, looking back, has nothing but love for Mitzi in all these respects -even with her mistakes. And Michelle Williams is utterly magnificent at encapsulating the soul of this challenging character, who endures a hell of a lot of mental strife as the family situation evolves -but who always comes back to a beautiful, tender image that you can’t help falling in love with. A surefire Oscar nomination I predict.
But of course the movie belongs to Sam and while there’s certainly some romance with which Spielberg envisions his adolescence it doesn’t have any whiff of disingenuousness to it. Spielberg of course loves his objects of wonder and here that is the movies themselves -he gives us a new great movie-watching moment as the young Sam stares transfixed at a big-screen technicolour marvel. But also the craft of moviemaking is treated with a unique reverence, Sam finding no greater joy than when he is shooting movies on his little 8mm camera with friends and family. His love of the form is palpable as it becomes his go-to mode of expression. When he needs to confront his mother he does so through showing her unedited footage, when he needs to prove himself at school he does so by shooting a school function that frames one of his bullies in a Grecian light. To that end there is a coping mechanism to it from the harassment he encounters at school as the one Jewish kid in the community. It’s intriguing how much Spielberg focuses on his family’s faith and Jewish culture as a vital part of his upbringing -one of the earliest scenes depicts their observance of Hanukkah in relation to the Christmas festivities happening on their block. We see relatives who directly fled fascism, an unexpected figure of significance for Sam becomes his estranged uncle Boris (Judd Hirsch), who joined the circus. His Jewish roots are as integral a part of him as his love of film, Spielberg acknowledging here what he by his admission often refused to do then.
Sam Fabelman is perhaps more interesting as director alter ego than as a character in his own right -the moments when Spielberg’s filmmaker instincts are glimpsed in him are some of the most charming, like when he gives an actor motivation. Indeed Spielberg includes meta references in this movie for maybe the first time, though he’s earned them by now. But LaBelle does ensure that Sam is more than a mere avatar, or at the very least an avatar who feels human. He acts the hell out of those scenes that must have been the hardest for Spielberg to write and relates the emotional turmoil of both his artistic and personal passions.
For someone who’s been out of that game for a while, Spielberg’s screenwriting isn’t bad -though probably it is helped along by Kushner. As usual, it’s his direction that shines most brightly though: his captivating oners, his strong sense of framing and lighting, his tendency to draw out the best of his child actors (Julia Butters and Keeley Karsten are great as Sam’s younger sisters). Spielberg dots the film with references to movies of his childhood, one nicely involving him shushing his friends trying to talk during a showing of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. But the movie never utilizes their signatures -it is all Spielberg and very very lovingly so. As usual Janusz Kamiński’s work is impeccable -his signature lighting techniques emanating an often warm glow, compliment this world of the 1960s almost as much as West Side Story’s. And so many moments of just quaint suburban family life are rendered beautiful. This of course also comes from the work of Spielberg’s other longtime collaborator John Williams, reuniting for the first time since The Post for a subtle but lovely score that does well to evoke the complexities of youth.
Ultimately The Fabelmans feels like an exercise in beautiful catharsis. Obviously it ends with Sam off to pursue his film career; the last few scenes of the movie are a complete delight due in large part to a wonderful cameo by David Lynch and easily the greatest meta reference Spielberg hits us with. He gets to give his avatar a classic movie ending, but before all that he allows Sam a pair of very touching scenes with each of his parents. It’s demonstrative of his understanding and love for them, of the peace he’s made with their divorce sixty years later -punctuated by his dedication in the credits “For Leah” and “For Arnold”. A lifetime went into this movie from a man to whom movies are life. And it is the sweetest, most glorious tribute to both.
The Fabelmans releases November 11th.
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