Reviewer David Leninhawk returns with a look at Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans, nominated for seven Academy Awards.
The Fabelmans feels like a movie entirely built around Steven Spielberg forgiving his parents.
It’s been evident throughout Spielberg’s filmography that he’s been in a state of arrested development his whole life, and never was that more on the nose than when he made Hook, fully embracing the Peter Pan syndrome that critics diagnosed him with based on his films. In the years since Spielberg has made plenty of “grown up” features, but every adult walking around is a product of the shit they went through in childhood.
I don’t know how much of this film is true versus fictionalized, but it seems Spielberg didn’t have a traumatic childhood or anything, just one where his parents were two people too different to have been together for as long as they were, and too wrapped up in their own shit to fully embrace their children as individual persons. His parents were loving, and not necessarily inattentive, and to various extents both supportive…but even the best of parents fuck up their kids.
I think this film is Spielberg’s catharsis in showing that he understands his parents as their own unique people as opposed to simply “mom” and “dad”, and he forgives them for their parental shortcomings.
The film takes place over some parts of the 50s and 60s, initially with young Sammy (Gabriel LaBelle as a teen, Mateo Zoryon Francis-DeFord as a young child) going to his first film and being entranced by it, and later as a teen making short films with his friends and learning the techniques of direction and editing. His father (Paul Dano, in his most “grown up” and least boyish role I’ve seen him in and completely convincing) is an engineer and practical minded and, while supportive of his son’s filmmaking endeavors, never sees it as more than a hobby, hoping Sammy will turn his attention to more utilitarian efforts going on.
His mother (Michelle Williams, who disappears in this role, one that feels unlike anything I’ve seen her in before) is more of a stulted free spirit, an artistically-inclined woman who plays the piano really well but apparently gave up aspirations of a career in it to become a mom and homemaker. She also seems to have some slight symptoms of a mental illness, though the film never explicitly diagnoses her with anything more than anxiety and depression.
Sammy also has 3 sisters, but they largely get the short end of the stick with the film barely focusing on them, perhaps because they simply aren’t the point of the story. This film is about Sammy’s coming of age, and his relationship with his parents.
There’s also a major adult figure in his life in the guise of Uncle Bennie (Seth Rogan), who is not a blood related uncle, but rather a colleague and best friend of Sammy’s father. Bennie is jovial and seems to combine the tech know-how of the engineer father with the sense of humor and art-inclinations of the mother.
The film carries us through moves the family makes as the father gets better and higher paying jobs, and Sammy graduating from shooting home movies to staging fictional films on his silent Super 8 camera, and then learning to edit them by hand and later with the aid of a machine. We also see Sammy face antisemitism in high school, and also obtain his first love (there’s an incredibly funny scene surrounding Sammy’s first kiss, in a film that surprisingly has numerous very humorous moments).
Going in I expected the film to be a lot more melodramatic than it is, with the parents being exaggerated caricatures of the types we turn people into in our memories or that we’re used to in awards-bait films. Just a few weeks ago I saw Armageddon Time, a film I really liked and similarly an autobiographical film by its director, and the parents in that film were much more broad and arch than they are here. Spielberg treats his proxy parents with as much realism as the medium will allow, and perhaps a sense of fairness to them keeps them from playing things too dramatically, even when there are somewhat outrageous moments like when the mother adopts a pet monkey. You sense the film treating both parents with tenderness, but not sentimentality or whitewashing their rougher edges.
The truth is, even the best people trying to be the best parents will fuck up their kids in ways great or small, and in this case since we know they will get divorced if we know anything about Spielberg, sometimes people wind up together that just aren’t a good match, no matter how hard they try to make things work. In cases where those couples have children, the kids are collateral damage to the parents’ mistakes, and I think much of this film is Spielberg saying he understands that, was hurt by that, and forgives his mom and dad.
If Spielberg spent much of his earlier career directing films with a child-like eye, it was likely part aspirational toward a childhood he didn’t have, or because his emotional development was stunted by the events of his childhood and the choices of his parents, for which he had no control. What is a director if not the creative controller of their own little fictional universe.
There are a lot of little moments in this film that are wonderful. The moment when Sammy first gives an actor, a fellow kid, direction, and learns that being a director isn’t just setting up shots and storyboarding. I loved pretty much everything with Sammy and his first girlfriend (Chloe East), a Christian girl who seems to almost fetishize Sammy’s Jewishness. There’s also a scene where David Lynch cameos as director John Ford, which made me wonder if Lynch should get a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for less than 5 minutes of screentime just because the scene is excellent, and because seeing Lynch act in a Spielberg film felt like a wonderful fever dream.
If you’re not a movie person, or don’t care about Spielberg, I don’t know how much people will enjoy this just as a family drama. But I am movie person, one who felt the magic of movies at a young age just as Sammy did seeing The Greatest Show on Earth in the film, and like Sammy has used movies as a vessel to cope with real life trauma for all of my existence. Plus seeing a director lay his life and soul bare in a film like this one is somewhat remarkable. Every writer/director puts a piece of themselves in their work, but not always as explicitly as this. It’s kind of an act of bravery, and while I’ve seen some people deride this film as schmaltzy or sentimental, I didn’t find it that way at all. I found it tender and sympathetic, sure (he doesn’t put his parents out to the woodchipper or anything), but there’s a sense of genuineness to this film that those critics are either overlooking or not finding. In any event, I thought the film was wonderful, but if you’re not as into film or Spielberg as I am your miles may vary.
Guest writer David Leninhawk sees a LOT of movies. Check out Letterboxd for more reviews.