The Fabelmans, Steven Spielberg’s semiautobiographical film about coming of age as a filmmaker in a loving, fractured family in mid-20th-century suburbia, has every element in place to be a cozy cinephilic nostalgia trip. Filmed in burnished, buttery tones by the director’s longtime cinematographer Janusz Kamiński, this chronicle of boomer adolescence includes multiple trips to the movies by the wide-eyed junior Spielberg stand-in. Later, there will be scenes where the precocious director wows his family and his Boy Scout troop alike with his homemade 8-millimeter Westerns and war movies. But embedded in this seeming valentine to the movies is something pricklier, sadder, and smarter: a portrait of the artist as a young manipulator, the very criticism that has been leveraged against his sometimes maddeningly seductive movies for decades.
The Fabelmans’ script, written by frequent collaborator Tony Kushner (Munich, Lincoln, West Side Story) is both insightful and refreshingly straightforward about the way young Sammy Fabelman (played as a small child by Mateo Zoryon Francis-DeFord) uses film as a way to master his most primal fears and desires, and the way his mother Mitzi (Michelle Williams)—a would-be concert pianist whose career was sidetracked by stay-at-home motherhood—serves as both his most encouraging cheerleader and his problematic muse. When he sees his first movie in a theater—the 1952 circus melodrama The Greatest Show on Earth—the sight of a train going off the rails terrifies Sammy into stunned silence. It’s only when his mother affirms his need to reenact the crash with a toy train set, and suggests filming it with his father’s camera, that Sammy overcomes his fear and discovers what will become his lifelong passion for making movies.
Like the real-life Spielberg’s father, Sammy’s dad Burt (Paul Dano) is an electrical engineer involved in the research that will one day lead to the development of the personal computer. Because of Burt’s work, the family moves in Sammy’s late childhood from Cincinnati to Phoenix, accompanied by his father’s colleague and best friend, Bennie (Seth Rogen). With her husband working long hours, Mitzi becomes isolated and depressed in this new desert environment, her charming eccentricity veering toward mental illness. But the teenage Sammy (now called “Sam” and played by the appealing newcomer Gabriel LaBelle) takes advantage of the wide-open spaces to flourish as a filmmaker, casting his friends and his three younger sisters in homemade versions of the Hollywood extravaganzas he obsessively returns to in the theater. The film camera becomes an extension of Sam’s developing consciousness: documenting his family’s life is at once a filter that protects him from the pain of his parents’ fracturing marriage and a magnifying glass that helps him see it more clearly.
At a slightly padded-out 151 minutes, The Fabelmans is epic in length, but the scale remains intimate, with most of the action occurring in the domestic space of the Fabelmans’ homes in Ohio, Arizona, and, later, Northern California. A late stretch dealing with Sam’s experiences of high-school bullying—he’s beaten up by one antisemitic jock, and enters into a more psychological showdown with another—at first feels more generic than the earlier, family-centric scenes. But this portion of the film ends in an extraordinary encounter that comes very close to advancing the same criticism of Spielberg that his detractors have over the years: that his skill at wringing emotion from audiences makes him an untrustworthy narrator, that his films’ very beauty somehow undercuts their truthfulness. Kushner’s screenplay is finely attuned to this moral ambivalence at the heart of the filmmaking enterprise. Like Jordan Peele’s Nope earlier this year, The Fabelmans is a Hollywood spectacle that contains its own critique.
As played by the always-extraordinary Michelle Williams, Mitzi Fabelman is a bundle of contradictions. She is troubled but charismatic, impulsive to the point of recklessness (when the kids point out a tornado on the horizon, she piles them into the car to drive in its direction out of sheer curiosity), and sometimes repellently self-absorbed. At the same time, she is an adoring parent, warmly engaged in her children’s lives and unstintingly supportive of her son’s artistic ambitions. A central scene in which Mitzi watches a film made by Sam for her eyes only—a silent home movie that the viewer experiences only in the form of flickers on his mother’s face—is a tour de force of both acting and filmmaking. Spielberg has spoken before, in a 2017 documentary, about the damage inflicted on his family by his parents’ dramatic divorce, which took place under circumstances very close to the version of events shown in The Fabelmans. Now that both of Spielberg’s parents have passed—his mother in 2017 at age 97, and his father in 2020 at age 103—he seems at last ready to reenact the pain of their separation, train-crash-style.
Lest that last paragraph make The Fabelmans sound like a maudlin sobfest, it should be said that, for the most part, this is a comedy, full of sparkling supporting performances: Jeannie Berlin as Sam’s dry-humored grandmother, Judd Hirsch as a visiting uncle with terrifying stories from his life as a lion tamer, Chloe East as a devout Christian teenager who insists Sam pray on his knees with her before they make out. Spielberg captures the texture of Jewish family life in scenes that are affectionate while remaining attentive to this family’s specific style of dysfunction. When the Fabelmans’ marriage finally dissolves, we are sympathetic both to Mitzi’s need for freedom and self-expression and to Burt’s deep sense of betrayal.
On the level of craft, The Fabelmans is predictably impeccable, with a soaring score from longtime Spielberg collaborator John Williams and beautifully detailed costume design (Mitzi’s Peter Pan collars alone!) by the great Mark Bridges (Licorice Pizza, Joker, Phantom Thread). For all its focus on the intimate space of domestic life, this film ends, like any good Bildungsroman, on the image of its protagonist ready to make his way in the larger world. After an encounter with a Hollywood legend that’s too funny to spoil, this prodigy walks alone through the empty backlot of a studio, excitedly pondering what movie he’ll make next. The last shot ends on a tiny cinematic joke, a playful shift in perspective that will have you wondering the same thing. Sam Fabelman is still figuring out where to place his camera, but the 75-year-old Steven Spielberg knows exactly where he wants you to look.
