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Don’t come to The Fabelmans expecting to see how Spielberg created Jaws or what inspired Close Encounters of the Third Kind (although we kind of wish we had seen a little of Sammy making his/Spielberg’s 8mm UFO epic “Firelight,“ made when he was just 17 years old). We do see Sammy making movies all along, and we marvel at how proficient he gets every time out and how he becomes a commanding presence to both his ad hoc crews and casts. Even as a teen, he knows what he wants to see and how to get it. But this is about the circumstances and dynamics that led him there, and it’s much more of an intimate family drama that a treatise on the power of cinema.
But it’s absorbing and moving nonetheless, even if the script (penned by Spielberg and Tony Kushner in their fourth collaboration following Munich, Lincoln, and West Side Story) is a bit rambling and episodic, as pics of this general nature tend to be. Burt’s work forces the family to keep relocating until they finally settle in northern California where a now-teenage Sammy encounters antisemitism, bullying, and his first kiss, ironically delivered by a rather randy Born Again Christian girl named Monica (Chloe East). It’s also in northern California where Sammy’s unresolved issues with his mom—triggered by of all things a film he makes to comfort her after her mother’s death—come to a boil, leading to confrontations that feel painfully raw and real.
It doesn’t feel like Spielberg is pulling his punches here, and in fact the entire film is frank about each member of the Fabelman family while not casting judgment on anyone. Even Sammy has his moments of selfishness and pettiness (Spielberg doesn’t come anywhere near canonizing his screen self). In the end, each member of the little clan has to find their way forward through disappointment and hurt. “Sometimes you can’t fix things,” Sammy is told late in the movie. “You just have to suffer.”
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While Williams as Mitzi is the gravitational center of the movie—as in real life, the mom is the sun around which all the other family members orbit—LaBelle is affecting as Sammy, and Dano is excellent as Burt, a decent, compassionate man who swallows his emotions to be the unyielding rock of his family. His sacrifices throughout the film are quietly heartbreaking. The two other striking appearances in the film are that of a scene-stealing Judd Hirsch, as a visiting uncle who has worked in the film business and has some poignant remarks to Sammy, and one of our most free-spirited real-life directors as a crotchety filmmaking legend who dispenses a kernel of wisdom to Sammy at a crucial moment.
Technical mastery and human emotion have always been the driving forces of filmmaking. Perhaps no one has personified the push-and-pull between those (as well as, frankly, heavy-handed sentiment) than Steven Spielberg, the filmmaker of one astonishing masterpiece after another, and with few failures in between. The Fabelmans shows us where it all started, and whatever forces did end up shaping one of our greatest filmmakers, we’re glad that he shared them with us through his long, legendary career.
The Fabelmans is out now in nationwide release.
