Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans is not a love letter to the magic of the movies. It’s a nice note to more tactile matters of craft—how to thread a reel of film into a projector, for instance. And yet, in the process of paying attention to such details, The Fabelmans manages something even more specific than love: a deeply personal ardency for both how and why movies are made.
Indeed, to talk about The Fabelmans as a “movie about movies” is to somewhat bury the lede. Like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, A.I. Artificial Intelligence, and War of the Worlds—to name just a few—The Fabelmans is a domestic drama, one based more directly than each of those titles on Spielberg’s actual experience. Co-writing the script alongside his recent collaborator Tony Kushner (Lincoln, West Side Story), Spielberg plunges into his past to paint a portrait of a Jewish family on a professional, artistic, and emotional journey across mid-century America.
Beginning in New Jersey, where their suburban house is the only one on the block without blazing Christmas lights, The Fabelmans follows father Burt (Paul Dano) as his computing career takes him, his wife Mitzi (Michelle Williams), and their three kids first to Arizona, then eventually California. The divisions—between the Fabelmans and their increasingly WASPy neighbors, but also among the Fabelmans themselves—widen with each stop, chronicled by son Sammy (Gabriel LaBelle) and his ever-present camera.
Sammy has been obsessed with cameras since coming home from a showing of The Greatest Show on Earth as a little boy (Mateo Zoryon Francis-DeFord, whose blue eyes could give the colored alien beams in Close Encounters a run for their money). Terrified by a scene of a train crash in the 1952 movie, he tries to control his fears by restaging and filming the sequence with a toy train and his father’s camera. (Cinematographer Janusz Kaminiski employs striking shafts of light to lend the moment an appropriately Spielbergian sense of wonder.) By the time Sammy is a teen, however, his father dismisses the movies he makes—Westerns and war epics populated by siblings and friends—as a hobby. But Sammy needs them—not for fun, but survival.
Without ever fully admitting it, Burt comes to acknowledge the value of Sammy’s artistic pursuits. After Mitzi’s mother dies (an event Spielberg marks with a gut punch of a sequence in which Sammy watches as the pulse in his grandmother’s neck subsides), Mitzi slides into depression. Where does Burt turn? To his son, imploring Sammy to make a movie from the footage Sammy took on a recent family camping trip. Instinctively, he knows Sammy’s art will raise Mitzi’s spirits.
Sammy’s construction of that home movie is The Fabelmans’ bravura sequence, a master class in cinematic storytelling by way of editing and image selection. (Sarah Broshar and Michael Kahn are The Fabelmans’ credited editors.) As we watch Sammy closely inspect the images he captured on an editing machine in his bedroom, Spielberg cuts away to Mitzi playing a classical piece on the piano downstairs. Then there are also shots of Burt, in the same room as the piano, blissfully swaying to the music as he attends to paperwork. It’s a multifaceted composition of domestic bliss that takes a turn when Sammy notices something in one of his frames. Suspense builds, the parallel editing among the three family members increases, and the cameras—Spielberg’s and Sammy’s simultaneously—reveal something that can’t be unseen or undone.
If that makes it sound as if The Fabelmans takes a turn toward tragedy, I should also point out that this might be Spielberg’s funniest film. (Yes, funnier than 1941.) There are moments of levity in the family dynamics throughout, as well as a riotous section in which Sammy, now in California, negotiates being Jewish in a bizarrely Christian subculture. Invited to a girl’s bedroom after school, he finds her wall plastered with two kinds of pictures: portraits of Jesus and pinups of celebrity men. Over her bed is a crucifix encircled by candles in the shape of a heart. When Sammy expresses incredulity, she simply offers, “Jesus is sexy!”
As Monica, the Jesus freak, Chloe East has a vibrantly comic effervescence that somehow avoids complete caricature. It’s a wonderful turn. LaBelle, as Sammy, is a generous presence opposite her, as well as in every scene he’s in. He manages to evoke the demeanor of an observer—in other words, that of an aspiring filmmaker—while still being compelling enough as an individual to convince us to invest our attention in him. Dano and Williams provide sturdy support in the parental parts, even as the domestic lives of their characters begin to slip through their fingers.
If The Fabelmans is a family portrait, it’s also something of a confession about letting the family down. Just as Burt and Mitzi, in different ways, make choices that sacrifice the Fabelman unit in some way, so does Sammy, especially as filmmaking becomes a priority in his life. During a moment of family crisis, Sammy imagines himself filming the scene with his camera—an act of disassociation, perhaps, but also a hint that he recognizes this as good “material.” At one crucial point, Mitzi tells her son, “You don’t owe anyone your life.” If that’s true, does it mean a shared life isn’t possible—especially for those who have a passionate “hobby” of some kind?
The Fabelmans doesn’t answer that question, at least for us in the audience. But for Sammy—and perhaps for Spielberg—the need to make movies can’t be suppressed. The boy heads to Hollywood, where The Fabelmans finds a perfect (and quite funny) ending that I don’t dare spoil. Suffice it to say, the finale has little to do with fulfilling a dream and more to do with where to place the horizon within the frame. You know, those details from which movie magic is made.
(11/27/2022)