I remember the first time I saw the trailer for The Fabelmans. I saw it was from Steven Spielberg, and it was about a young Jewish boy who grows up enamored with movies to the point where he starts making them. I didn’t exactly need to be told anything else to realize Spielberg was probably making something semiautobiographical. Now, I don’t much about Spielberg’s life beyond, well, what I just recounted up there. How much or how little the movie would depict Spielberg’s actual life, I couldn’t say.
Given this is Spielberg, I am a bit surprised it took me this long to see it, but I probably figured because it was Spielberg, I wouldn’t need to rush out to see it either.
Young Sammy Fabelman (Mateo Zoryon Francis-DeFord as a child, Gabriel LaBelle as a teenager) finds out he’s enchanted by the movies from the moment his parents Burt (Paul Dano) and Mitzi (Michelle Williams) take him to see Cecil B DeMille’s The Greatest Show on Earth, most notably a train crash scene. To that end, he borrows his father’s movie camera and recreates the crash with his electric train set. From there, Sammy finds himself with a passion for using the movies to tell stories. The trailer suggests that his father would discourage such a habit, but that’s not quite what’s happening. He just thinks of it as his son’s odd hobby. Burt is an engineer, and a genius one at that when it comes to the nascent field of computer science. Mitzy, meanwhile, is a frustrated artist who may be having some mental or emotional health issues of her own. Also, generally along for the ride, there’s Sammy’s three younger sisters and family friend Benny (Seth Rogen), who spends a lot of time with the Fabelmans.
The movie doesn’t have a central conflict. It’s more about Sammy’s maturation as an artist. Though his father doesn’t seem to have any artistic impulses of his own, he’s also endlessly encouraging to his entire family in his own way. For all that Burt is an electrical engineering genius from the looks of things, he’s also a very simple man who loves his wife and kids, but his work ethic rubbed off on his son and he finds joy in some of Sammy’s technical innovations. Mitzy, meanwhile, is a far more emotionally complex figure, one whose smile never seems to last very long and is inclined towards more impulsive behavior. Sammy himself will deal with his parents’ relationship, antisemitism at school, and his first high school love before maybe finding his goal. The movie isn’t really about Sammy/Spielberg’s breakthrough. It’s more like a love letter to parents and the influence they each had on him growing up.
And for that, the movie works. True, it didn’t grab me as much as many Spielberg movies do, but what it does well is show life. Dano’s Burt may or may not be aware of everything happening around him, but there’s a sweetness to the character that makes him lovable. Likewise, Williams is a master of the sort of emotional range Mitzy goes through, someone who loves her kids but is intensely frustrated where she ended up, even with Burt’s general encouragement for much of what she may want to do. It helps that, at the center, LaBelle provides a grounded performance as a young man who gradually realizes some hard truths about himself and his family, making some youthful mistakes along the way, but never really spelling out exactly what the problem is. He finds both his parents by turns frustrating and endearing.
And that may be why the movie didn’t grab me quite as well as other Spielberg movies: it’s emotionally mature and complex. It’s not the sort of movie to maybe grab the audience so much as look at Spielberg’s own childhood and see what shaped him to be the man he is, even though I am sure there are some liberties taken with his story. A late appearance by David Lynch as another famous director is the closest the movie comes to a conclusion. It’s not really the sort of thing where the main character has a great emotional arc. It’s more like the story of growing up, finding out how complex life is, and becoming an adult. And, on reflection, few could have pulled that off as well as Spielberg does here.
Grade: A
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