The Fabelmans Movie Review: An exuberant culmination of everything Steven Spielberg stands for 

Few can claim to be the most commercially successful filmmaker of all time. Fewer still can continue to be a relevant storyteller after over five decades in Hollywood. At 76, Steven Spielberg is both these things — a perceptive artist whose craft remains bolstered by the textures of his personal identity, grief, and memory. In Spielberg’s world, cinema leads to both escapism and exorcism. It feels poetic then that in The Fabelmans, Spielberg — a consistently precise and personal filmmaker — bares himself on camera, lovingly inviting the audience to witness the perils and pleasures of being an artist no longer scared to look at the viewfinder of his own life.

Cast: Michelle Williams, Paul Dano, Seth Rogen, Gabriel LaBelle, Judd Hirsch

Director: Steven Spielberg 

Spanning 20 years, the film, which marks the storyteller’s 36th feature and is nominated for seven Oscars, sees Spielberg revive his childhood memories to craft a honey-tinged paean to the euphoria of falling in love with movies as well as a graceful acknowledgement of parental failures. Both these tracks brim with sight and hindsight. To call the film an “autobiography” or even a “memoir” then feels considerably insufficient simply because Spielberg isn’t just pouring himself into The Fabelmans as he does in every other film he helms. Rather, this is a film where Spielberg confronts himself — framing and reframing the memory of himself as a heartbroken member of a fractured family to conceive a richly-detailed, tender snapshot of a wide-eyed kid who found his calling as his family was falling apart. 

Written by Spielberg and his long-term collaborator Tony Kushner, The Fabelmans opens at the movies. The year is 1952 and a young Sammy Fableman (played first by Mateo Zoryon Francis-DeFord and then by Gabriel LaBelle), the Spielberg stand-in, has just watched his first film at a theatre — Cecil B. Demille’s The Greatest Show on Earth. Over the years, Spielberg has widely spoken about this exact moment as a formative childhood memory, articulating the profound impact that the eye-popping train sequence had on him. In The Fabelmans, the filmmaker immerses us into the moment by letting us exactly measure its reverberations. We see Sammy ask his parents for a new train set and proceed to recreate the sequence in his own home, ramming it against one of his toy cars. When his pianist mother Mitzi (a sensational Michelle Williams) tells him that he can immortalize the moment by capturing it with a hand-held camera, Sammy learns about the powers of the medium to the stage and conceal reality. In that, this opening sequence is a clever bit of foreshadowing, considering it outlines the filmmaker’s intentions of implicating the medium of film itself. 

Despite The Fabelmans’ dreamlike quality, there’s something singularly bittersweet about how Spielberg approaches his past — as if simultaneously honouring his upbringing and mourning it. It’s most evident in how the filmmaker sees the fissures in the relationship between his parents (Paul Dano plays the father) and the romantic feelings that his mother develops for his father’s best friend (Seth Rogen in an ingenious bit of casting). Mitzi, alternating between being distraught and exuberant, is arguably The Fabelmans’ most rewarding character and Williams renders her in all her complexity. Much of the film’s melancholy stems from the sadness that Spielberg locates inside his mother, articulating the kind of deep loneliness that can arise in a stable, devoted marriage. In revealing the pangs of longing his mother tried hard to withhold, Spielberg affords Mitzi a sense of dignity and agency, as if releasing her from the trappings of caregiving. 

Even more fascinating is the filmmaker grappling with his own selfish impulses — in one painful sequence in which Burt and Mitzi father their four children to tell them some news for instance, we remain focused on Sammy looking at himself in the mirror and dissociating, imagining himself tracking the scene with his camera rather than actually being a part of it. It’s the film’s confessional nature, so emotionally raw in its startling honesty and wisdom, that rankles the most. It helps that this tone is delicately caressed by Janusz Kaminski’s glowing lens, John Williams' gentle score and a knockout final scene. 

In that sense, The Fabelmans, at once a spectacular coming-of-age movie, a fraught family drama, a passionate artistic manifesto, and a romance, feels like a culmination of everything Spielberg stands for. Imbued with context, we start seeing the larger picture — much like the movies, Spielberg, born to an artist mother and a computer engineer father, is also a product of art and science. As we see the director retrace his own inventiveness and attentiveness with the medium, frequently interspersed with nods at his own filmography, The Fabelmans elegantly transforms into a record of the film itself. “Movies are the dreams that you never forget,” Mitzi tells Sammy in the film at one point. Spielberg runs with that idea in The Fabelmans, ensuring that it transforms into a spectacle that doesn’t forget the truth of living.