Steven Spielberg has apparently been trying to make a semi-autobiographical film for over twenty years, but waited until his parents died before producing it. He finally did so with last year’s The Fabelmans, a thinly-veiled rendering of his childhood and teenage years with a particular eye on the relationship between his parents. I don’t think Spielberg is capable of making a bad movie, but he is capable of missteps within his movies, and the way he depicts his parents here through their surrogates detracts from the movie’s overall power. (It’s available to rent on Amazon, iTunes, etc.)
Mitzi (Michelle Williams) and Burt (Paul Dano) Fabelman are Jewish couple living in New Jersey, near Philadelphia, in 1952, when they take their son Sammy to see his first film, Cecil B. DeMille’s The Greatest Show on Earth. Sammy is entranced, especially by the movie’s train-crash scene, and this sparks what becomes a lifelong love of the movies. The young Sammy’s burgeoning interest in filmmaking is set against the drama of his parents’ failing marriage, his mother’s apparent connection to his father’s best friend and colleague Bennie (Seth Rogen), and his mother’s mental health issues. The story takes us through the family’s moves to Arizona and then California, while Sammy makes films, often involving his younger sisters, dates the most comically Christian girl you could imagine, and encounters antisemitic bullies at his WASPish high school.
By far the best parts of The Fabelmans are the movies within the movie. There’s incredible care taken to depict the results of these efforts by Sammy, but also how he combined the ingenuity he inherited from his engineer father with the artistic sensibilities of his pianist mother to create and improve the sort of illusions he loved so much in Greatest Show. These track with the actual film projects from Spielberg’s youth, short films up through the longer documentary-style movie he made of senior skip day at his high school. It’s a little behind-the-scences peek at old-school moviemaking, and often quite joyous.
Sammy’s parents are so strangely drawn, however, that the scenes that center on either or both of them all feel too sharp-edged, bordering on caricature. Burt, who is based on Spielberg’s highly successful inventor father Arnold, is a milquetoast who does basically nothing while his wife openly flirts with his best friend, and just generally seems oblivious to most of what’s going on in his own house. There are hints about his ambitions at work, but it’s oddly unbalanced, especially since Spielberg has said that his father was a major influence on his own career, something that is completely absent from the film. Dano plays Burt with a simpering affect that makes the character seem sad and pitiable, but not interesting or complex. Mitzi is depicted with somewhat greater depth, although there’s still something hollow about the writing (not the portrayal), as if this is Spielberg’s visualization of his mother rather than an attempt to write and depict her as a complete person. It’s more sympathetic than empathetic, and while I suppose it’s not my place to tell a writer how to portray his mother on film, it doesn’t read well to me as a viewer.
There are several supporting performances here that stand out, not least of them a brief turn from Judd Hirsch as Mitzi’s uncle, who appears unannounced, spends a few days with the family to sit shiva after Mitzi’s mother dies, and then leaves after imparting some essential wisdom to Sammy. It’s the standout performance of the film, reminiscent of Judi Dench’s Oscar-winning turn in Shakespeare in Love (“Have a care with my name, you’ll wear it out”), which parlayed about 13 minutes of screen time into an Academy Award. Hirsch might have even less time in The Fabelmans, but it’s by far the best performance of the movie. Rogen gives a very solid turn as Bennie, further underscoring his shift as a serious actor after his excellent work as the carpenter-cum-thief in Pam and Tommy. Gabriel LaBelle is excellent as the teenaged Sammy, even when he’s more observer than participant in the action; there are a couple of scenes with Sammy and Mitzi where Sammy is the more interesting character, and LaBelle pulls these off well. (Also, he kind of looks like a younger Barry Keoghan.) And there’s a cameo later in the film that I won’t spoil but that involves someone known better as a director than as an actor and who is clearly having a blast in a tiny role.
Spielberg’s best work usually revolves around Big Things. His most critically acclaimed films rely more on broad brush strokes in plot and character, while he’s had more difficulty when he’s trying to work small, whether it’s nuance in story and theme or characters who require more three-dimensional depictions. The Fabelmans falls into the second category. As a love letter of sorts to the movies, and a memoriam to his parents, it’s fine, but as an actual film, it’s lacking. The story is thin and the two main characters are just too two-dimensional.
The Fabelmans picked up seven Oscar nominations this year, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress for Williams, Best Supporting Actor for Hirsch, and Best Original Screenplay for Spielberg and Tony Kushner, the latter marking Spielberg’s first-ever Academy Award nomination for screenwriting. I won’t be surprised if it goes 0 for the awards this year; it’s not the favorite, nor should it be, in any of those five categories, at least. Hirsch might be the most deserving, but Ke Huy Quan is better and he’s the favorite. Williams gives a good-not-great performance, limited by the way the character is written, although the scene at the campsite is sublime. (I do want to know why she can’t move the top half of her face, though.) This is a movie about how great movies are, so I can’t rule it out even for Best Picture, but the odds are against it. Perhaps there’s a sop to Spielberg in the Screenplay category, but that could easily be the place the voters honor Tár, assuming Everything Everywhere All at Once remains the favorite to win the whole thing. I can’t see picking The Fabelmans anywhere it’s nominated, though. It’s a perfectly adequate film, but it’s not Spielberg’s best, and I think highlights what he does well because so much of this film is about things that he doesn’t.