The Fabelmans (2022)
Six-year-old Sammy (Mateo Zoryon) takes magic in his hands in The Fabelmans
How does the young life of Sammy Fabelman, the stand-in for Steven Spielberg, help to explain the celebrated 75-year-old director’s drive and his remarkable career?
The family made the man, we’re told in Spielberg’s new movie, The Fabelmans. It’s not just the pull of the magic of movies that accounts for him.
But there’s a paradox. The skill – the power – of making movies, however crudely at first, can illuminate dark secrets within one’s own family.
And others outside the family can be startlingly exposed, too. Moviemaking, young Sammy learns, isn’t merely “magical”. It can also be dangerous.
Today’s Spielberg, the canny director of The Fabelmans, understands that we want to see his child counterpart’s first, really close, encounter with the big screen.
In New Jersey in 1952, Sammy Fabelman (Mateo Zoryon), age 6, is taken by his parents one cold January night to a theater showing Cecil B. De Mille’s extravaganza The Greatest Show on Earth.
A reluctant Sammy doesn’t even want to go in. He’s frightened at the prospect of being swallowed up in a dark, crowded room with giant people on screen glowering down at him.
His computer engineer father Burt (Paul Dano) patiently explains how still pictures can be made to move and assures the boy he’ll be astounded. His mother Mitzi (Michelle Williams) tells her son that movies are like dreams, the good kind, not the scary ones.
Burt (Paul Dano), a wonderstruck Sammy (Mateo Zoryon) and Mitzi (Michelle Williams)
And shortly we see how the boy isn’t just fascinated by movies but entranced by their mysterious exertions. On that fateful first movie night, Sammy is most bedazzled by Greatest Show’s train wreck sequence. When for Hanukkah he’s given a toy electric train set, he artfully replicates the movie crash in miniature. Over and over again.
Mitzi wonders why. And suddenly she realizes: Sammy wants to control the movie’s train pileup. Forcing it to recur makes the disaster, on a tinier scale, his. Not a mishap. A creation.
When, secretly borrowing Burt’s small home camera, Mitzi lets Sammy film his handiwork, it’s captured permanently, ready now to be watched over and over again. That’s real control, Sammy intuits. Mere random events can say what he, in his own devising, makes them say.
What’s revelatory and finally moving about The Fabelmans is that it isn’t entirely a story of what formed the artist, but also of how persistence paid off and luck, both the good and the scary kinds, fell into place to keep him chugging toward his destiny.
When Burt is offered a better-paying job in Arizona, he and Mitzi pack up Sammy and his three sisters and move west. With them comes Bennie (Seth Rogen), Burt’s best friend, a less gifted technocrat, unmarried, and devoted to the Fabelmans. The children warmly, familiarly call him “Uncle Bennie”.
The teenage Sammy (Gabriel LaBelle), still furiously making home movies, isn’t certain there’s any sort of career to be wrangled from his fixation. But he insists that Burt stop downgrading his fascination with the camera by calling it a “hobby”.
Mitzi, a frustrated pianist who gave up a possible music career to raise a family, explains why Burt may be shortchanging his son. She declares that she and Sammy are alike, “artists”, and Burt’s scientific mind can’t fully comprehend the two of them.
That range of reactions is precisely what Sammy can’t control. And will never be able to. Movies have a way of turning the camera back on their fashioner. The director becomes not just a maker, but a target.
But being an artist turns out to be more than a notion and demands more than wide-eyed zeal. Unexpectedly, the family gets a visit from Mitzi’s Uncle Boris (Judd Hirsch), a grizzled circus and movie journeyman who never rose to any prominence. Over the years he’s loved making magic but came to realize that the pursuit was double-edged.
He sorrowfully informs Sammy that the boy, too, is cursed with this contradictory gift, and warns the young man that making art, which he surely will do, could imperil his connection to his family.
Hirsch, in less than 10 minutes’ screen time, shrewdly depicts the way the twin desires to make art and to escape one’s family can stifle the artist. In order to be his moviemaking self, with his talent and its dangers now inextricably linked, Sammy, with Boris’ help, decides not to be deflected from his dream.
The other reckoning Sammy faces is what his camera, including on camping trips with Bennie and the family, has quite inadvertently captured over the years: clandestine moments of physical affection between Mitzi and Bennie.
When Mitzi’s mother dies, Burt demands that to lift his mother’s spirits Sammy cut together a film from some of those lighthearted family pastimes Bennie and the Fabelmans shared.
Gathering together bits of film, Sammy discovers that he’s captured, without intending to, discrete, on-the-sly moments when Bennie and Mitzi couldn’t help expressing their deep physical and emotional attraction.
Does this amount to a betrayal of Burt? Sammy fears yes. And when he can no longer hide his fury at his mother’s deception, he assembles those indiscreet bits into a single short movie, locks Mitzi and a projector in a dark closet, and beams his discovery onto a screen in front of her.
Seated alone, she’s forced to watch her disloyalty to Burt unspool right before her eyes. Captured.
Thus, Sammy learns that movies can not only entertain, but they can also indict. Movies have power. Does that mean he does, too?
The teenaged Sammy (Gabriel LaBelle) struggling to master both images and emotions
Spielberg directs this movie about his vexed, rollicking origins with a surprisingly cool hand. I’ve never seen his distinct eye for composition, his crystallizing of details that matter while omitting distractions, any sharper.
His focus here on the personal hasn’t in the least weakened his grasp on the sometimes formidably, even chillingly, objective requirements of the medium. He doesn’t go easy on himself or others, refuses to let the camera prettify or deceive.
His equally pragmatic cinematographer and frequent collaborator Janusz Kaminski lights the movie with sparkle but a marked sense of detachment. He records both dark and light emotions without, we sense, having been asked to spare his director’s feelings.
The script, by Spielberg and another frequent collaborator, Tony Kushner, is nostalgic, funny and just painful enough to let us know that it has hurt to become Steven Spielberg, gifts and all, and his journey didn’t begin with a lot of promise.
I was especially taken with a couple of brief homages to Spielberg’s E.T., the Extraterrestrial. A boisterous band of boys on bicycles sweeping around a corner and a silhouette of Sammy’s hand against a rain-soaked window, recalling the space creature’s yearning to phone home, are trim, thrilling mementos.
The actors tackle the script with shocking directness. Michelle Williams gives a vivid, irritating, irreducibly sad poignancy to Mitzi. A woman trying to give all to her husband and children, she also harbors a need for affection that her noisy, needy brood just can’t envision.
Paul Dano does equally well by Burt, a brilliant technician and devoted father whose scientific imagination is held against him by his own family. Trying everything to keep them together, he finally has to surrender his hold. And no one, not even Sammy, properly sees or sings his loss and pain.
LaBelle’s silken performance anchors the movie, and at age 20 this open, unaffected young craftsman is already a compelling lead actor. Maybe most surprisingly, we can’t miss what he writes across his face as Sammy battles ghastly antisemitism in Northern California.
But LaBelle smartly keeps his focus on the incipient artist. His young Spielberg holds himself steady while shooting a movie, splicing it on a viewfinder, then dispassionately watching the result unfold before enraptured – willingly deceived – viewers.
That’s a mature performing strategy. Spielberg knows how to shoot not just action but, even more importantly in this movie, stillness. And LaBelle understands with his body that stillness is the artist’s truest, most restorative, stance. You have to quietly take in chaos before you can usefully put out anything resembling art.
This sort of bewildered calm is what comes over Sammy, and implicitly Spielberg, whenever he’s intently splicing film in order to touch an audience.
An enthralling 360-degree shot with Sammy at his viewfinder gave me particular chills. It so clearly shows us a dreaming director bent to his technical task, marveling at results of his work that even he may not have foreseen.
The Fabelmans’ final passages show Sammy learning how those near to him, specifically his high school friends as well as adversaries, can both enjoy and profoundly resent what he’s put up there about them on screen for everyone to see.
That range of reactions is precisely what Sammy can’t control. And will never be able to. Movies have a way of turning the camera back on their fashioner. The director becomes not just a maker, but a target. Admired and scorned, sometimes for the same movie.
This is the takeaway for us and, it would seem, for Spielberg. Sammy's brief, hilarious meeting at the movie’s close with his idol, director John Ford (David Lynch), shakes the young filmmaker and sets him on track to find his place in the moviemaking world which can, Ford warns him, “destroy you”.
We know it didn’t. So, is this movie in any sense a summing up? Of course not. It considers only Spielberg the youthful upstart, shaking in his boots. And to its credit it does so in candid detail.
Still, I think further exploration would be welcome. Here we meet the prodigy. And we learn that, indeed, there was something unstoppable about this kid with eyes as relentless as a camera lens.
But how can we help wondering what social and artistic options have been presented to, or pressed upon, Spielberg in the years since?
Maybe movie historians, not the director himself, will eventually address that question.
Artists owe no one any explanations.
You're kind. I knew, given Spielberg's large body of work, that people would look for little hints of it in this piece, particularly since it's a movie about Spielberg's own life, how he got his start to become the director whose movies so many have seen.
Glad you like the writing. I try to pull people in. My main goal is to get people to watch a movie for themselves, in a theater or online, and then go TALK about it with friends, family and coworkers. Reading MovieStruck is, I hope, a catalyst.
I want readers to develop their own opinions about a movie and build up in themselves a capacity to both think about a movie and talk to others ABOUT their thinking. That way both people get better at watching, then thinking and talking about movies. Put another way, I hope readers will become more confident about their own judgments. And you do that, of course, by seeing MORE movies! That's what, every week, I'm trying to encourage readers to do.
Your comments are spot on and reflective of what a movie critic looks for in all types of movies.
I liked how you used most of Spielberg's titles and words from his films in your analysis. I wondered how you were going to get ET in there, but you did! I'm still looking for your words from the Color Purple and Schindler's List (I'll have to read the critic again). Raiders of the Lost Ark was ingeniously placed in the write-up. Ivan you are an amazing writer! You haven't lost your edge my friend.