The Fabelmans (2022)
dir. Steven Spielberg
Rated: PG-13
image: ©2022 Universal Pictures
As you might imagine, a semi-autobiographical movie about one of the most respected and revered filmmakers ever produced by the Hollywood system is itself paying homage to the art form that birthed it. The pivotal sequence of The Fabelmans, in which the young protagonist Sammy Fabelman – based loosely on director Steven Spielberg’s own formative years – uncovers a family secret, is straight out of Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 arthouse sensation Blowup. In that film, a photographer becomes convinced that he has captured a murder with his photography.
In The Fabelmans, Sammy has captured, through his obsessive moviemaking, his mother’s infidelity. As Sammy scrutinizes each frame, each stolen touch between his mother and Bennie, the man he thinks of as an uncle, he realizes that his idyllic family life is built on a lie.
Sammy’s mother also owes something to film history. The concert-level pianist Mitzi, a surrogate for Spielberg’s own mother, Leah, struggles with what might at the time have been called emotional problems or manic episodes, what might now be called bipolar disorder or depression. The performance from Michelle Williams, who plays Mitzi, is evocative of Gena Rowlands’s equally unbalanced portrayal of Mabel Longhetti in John Cassavetes’s 1974 film A Woman Under the Influence.
It's not surprising that Spielberg, who wrote The Fabelmans with longtime collaborator Tony Kushner, would lean so heavily on iconography culled from the art form that has obsessed him since his adolescence. What is surprising – although, perhaps it shouldn’t have been – is just how touching and inspiring Spielberg’s kinda/sorta retelling of his own story often is.
Spielberg and Kushner, who worked together on Munich, Lincoln, and Spielberg’s 2021 remake of West Side Story, begin in 1952 with the release of Cecil B. DeMille’s The Greatest Show on Earth. It’s the fearfully and wonderfully realized train crash in the movie that sets little Sammy on his path. He becomes obsessed with staging a train derailment with his own Lionel model train set. Mitzi tells her son that he can use his dad’s 8mm home movie camera so that he can watch the carnage over and over again without ruining the model train.
It was only three weeks ago that I used this space to praise the music biopic Weird: The Al Yankovic Story for lampooning, repeatedly, the exact sort of scene I describe above. Every scene in these sorts of movies reinforces the protagonist’s dedication to their craft. The formula is so easy to parody because it boils down every life event of the hero to be absolutely formative in terms of his or her art, in a way no one’s life actually works.
What exempts The Fabelmans from being ripe for the same kind of lighthearted teasing – more likely, nothing exempts it, as I’d probably laugh the loudest at a filmmaker biopic in the style of Weird or Walk Hard – is the emotional sensitivity and heartfelt pathos that Spielberg invests in his picture.
At its heart, The Fabelmans is a slice-of-life movie that happens to use the world’s most famous movie director’s experiences as its template. Millions of children watch their parents go through divorce. Millions of kids are uprooted when their parents move for work – the Fabelmans, in an echo of their real-life counterparts, move from New Jersey, to Arizona, to California because of father Burt Fabelman’s computer and electrical engineering career. The movie works as well as it does because of the universality of the experiences Spielberg is documenting.
There are also events covered in the film that are unique to Spielberg and people like him. After the family moves to Northern California, Sammy experiences the ugliness of antisemitism at the hands of two classmates who make the budding cinephile’s life a living hell. (I truly hope that the names of the bullies, Logan and Chad, are a way for Spielberg to settle a few half-century-old grudges.)
Spielberg and Kushner should be praised for their restraint in bringing the director’s life to the screen. One of the worst moments in the 2018 Freddie Mercury/Queen biopic Bohemian Rhapsody involves Mike Myers – who brought a new generation of fans to Queen with Wayne’s World – winking at the camera by playing a record executive who hates the song Bohemian Rhapsody.
The cowriters for The Fabelmans never fall into the same cliché-ridden trap. In their movie, you won’t see someone frightened in a bathroom stall, giving Sammy an idea for a dinosaur eating a lawyer while sitting on a toilet. You won’t hear Sammy lamenting that the new California neighborhood he lives in makes him feel like an alien who only wants to escape back to his real home.
Part of that is down to Spielberg and Kushner being wise enough to tell a story that’s 30° off from the real one. Sammy Fabelman didn’t direct Jurassic Park or E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, after all. That makes moments that are likely more based in truth all the more impactful. In the final minutes of the film, Sammy, now a college student on the verge of dropping out, gets to meet one of his heroes, legendary director John Ford. (Don’t get too worked up about spoilers, The Fabelmans is a wonderful example of an it’s-the-journey-not-the-destination kind of movie.)
The moment is made all the more special because of who Spielberg coxed into playing the famously cranky director: David Lynch. (It seems all you have to do to get the famously aloof Lynch to agree to show up is to promise that Cheetos will be available at the craft services table.) Lynch and Spielberg aren’t mentioned in the same breath very often, although the two began making movies at roughly the same time and are both seen as luminaries – albeit in very different ways – in the world of moviemaking. It was exhilarating to see one great director honor another great director, one of Spielberg’s heroes, by casting yet a third great director for the role.
Besides the inspired casting of Lynch as John Ford, Spielberg assembled a wonderful ensemble to bring the ghosts of his past to this screen version of his life. Michelle Williams continues to prove that she is one of our best working actors as Sammy’s mother, Mitzi. Countless times throughout The Fabelmans, Williams is asked to hit multiple emotional notes at once. Mitzi is raising four kids, supporting her husband’s ambitions and career (at the cost of her own), and nurtures a clandestine love affair, all while struggling with what appears to be depression and other undiagnosed mental illnesses. Williams makes Mitzi a whole person. She is someone, in her best moments, who rises above her limitations to be the best, most supportive spouse and mother she can be.
Paul Dano is Sammy’s father, Burt. Dano plays the strong, silent late-50s/early-60s father type with a secret sensitivity that he hides under an analytical, no-nonsense façade. The fight of the movie, the one raging within Sammy, is the fight between the artist (represented by Sammy’s mother) and the scientist (represented by Sammy’s father). It’s telling that Spielberg, following in his artist mother’s footsteps, left his first wife, actor Amy Irving, after falling in love with one of his leading ladies, actor Kate Capshaw.
Seth Rogen turns in a moving performance as Bennie Loewy, Burt’s best friend and Mitzi’s secret lover. Rogen shines in the scene in which Sammy confronts Bennie – at least as much of a confrontation as the two men are willing to have – about his discovery of Bennie and Mitzi’s true feelings for each other. Rogen delivers an understated sadness about betraying not only his best friend, but also his best friend’s kids, whom he considers family.
Relative newcomer Gabriel LaBelle, as Sammy, has the fresh-faced, wide-eyed optimism that perfectly captures the sentimentalized version of postwar America in the late 1950s and early 1960s. LaBelle wonderfully sells his character’s obsession with the movies, a feat likely made easier because the person he is essentially embodying was directing and guiding his performance.
Rounding out the excellent cast is the legendary Judd Hirsch as Mitzi’s uncle – Sammy’s great uncle –Boris. Hirsch sinks his teeth into the role, offering up comic relief and inspiring in Sammy the realization that the art in Sammy’s life will forever be in conflict with his loved ones. The two will always be in competition for Sammy’s attention. That is the great struggle in an artist’s life, the sage Boris, who was a circus lion-tamer before working in the movies himself, tells the aspiring young filmmaker.
There are plenty of lighter moments within The Fabelmans, too. Jewish Sammy’s budding romance with an ultra-devout Christian fellow student offers some particularly funny asides. The inventive technique of 16-year-old Sammy re-using his war-dead extras in the same shot in one of his first productions is resourceful and charming. Spielberg also gives us plenty of his signature movie-magic moments, only, this time, they are used in service of celebrating the movies themselves.
The image of 8- or 10-year-old Sammy capturing the moving images coming from his projector onto his cupped hands will most likely be used as a shorthand for the power of movies – in Oscar broadcasts, for example – for decades to come. Steven Spielberg has dedicated his life to the movies. With The Fabelmans, he’s created a monument to that dedication that is a fitting tribute to both his own legacy and the artform on which he has left an indelible stamp.
Why it got 4.5 stars:
- This Spielberg kid is going places. Honestly, The Fabelmans is such an achievement, it would make complete sense if the director decided to go out on top and announce his retirement. There is exactly 0% chance of that happening, though. Spielberg seems determined to prove he can still make ‘em as good as anybody no matter how old he gets or how many movies he’s made.
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- There is a book, published in 1941, titled What Makes Sammy Run? by Budd Schulberg. From Wikipedia: “What Makes Sammy Run? (1941) is a novel by Budd Schulberg inspired by the life of his father, early Hollywood mogul B. P. Schulberg. It is a rags to riches story chronicling the rise and fall of Sammy Glick, a Jewish boy born in New York's Lower East Side who, very early in his life, makes up his mind to escape the ghetto and climb the ladder of success by deception and betrayal.” I’m desperate to know if Spielberg named his onscreen counterpart Sammy as an homage.
- According to Mitzi Fabelman, movies are “like dreams.” You said a mouthful, Mitz.
- In a few scenes, the Fabelmans wrap up their family dinner by rolling up all the paper plates, paper towels, and plastic utensils into the paper tablecloth and throwing it all in the trash. Burt tells a dinner guest that they do this to save Mitzi’s delicate hands, because of her concert pianist-level abilities. But it reminded me of a brief sequence in an episode of Mad Men, where Betty picks up the blanket underneath a Draper family picnic and flings all of the disposable picnic items into the grassy area where they were eating. The proximity in time period brought it to mind. The late 50s and early 60s were a time when people of a certain economic class treated the world like it was their personal garbage bin. Oh wait, that’s still happening…
- There is a fantastic cinematic moment when Spielberg (with the help of his editors Michael Kahn and Sarah Broshar) holds on Michelle Williams’s face as she watches little Sammy’s first attempt at moviemaking. We don’t need to see the footage, so it’s a subtle and effective trick to keep the camera on Mitzi’s stunned reaction. It’s one of the best moments of the movie.
- My wife is a fan of Dawson’s Creek (I’ve never watched an entire episode). It was explained to me that young Dawson Leery is OBSESSED with Steven Spielberg. Rae has shown me a few clips. I did my absolute best to gush over this movie while not coming off sounding like the sycophantish Dawson. “I don’t wanna wait…”
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
- Saw this at a press/promotional screening that was PACKED. The olds are continuing to prove that no matter how much they talk about “kids these days,” they are every bit as rude and oblivious as the younger generations. One guy (he had to be at least 70) ANSWERED HIS RINGING CELL PHONE DURING THE OPENING MINTUES OF THE MOVIE. Thankfully, he kept it to a whispered, “Sorry, I can’t talk right now, I’m at the movies.” I’m appreciative of that, but goddamn. The Fabelmans opened in wide theatrical release on the day before Thanksgiving.