THE FABELMANS Is A Minor Key Masterwork
Spielberg's film à clef is beautiful and wise.
The cinema!
Watching the trailers for The Fabelmans you might think the film was going to be a gloopy homage to the movies, a film featuring scene after scene of slackjawed audience members staring enraptured at the big screen as the magical white light of the projector blooms above their heads. As Vin Diesel so famously said: “The movies.”
But it’s not that. The Fabelmans is deeply interested in the power of cinema, or more generally the power of art. It’s the portrait of the artist as a young man, the story of a family that is falling to pieces and how that drives him to try and control what he can, which are the images that play out across a movie screen. It’s the story of coming to terms with just how destructive and how healing art can be - the sheer power that is in the hand of the artist, a power the artist often uses without even thinking about it.
The Fabelmans is a film à clef; this is the barely disguised story of the youth of co-writer/director Steven Spielberg. It is not hagiography, and it is not entirely mythmaking; what I find fascinating is that if this were a novel no one would blink twice at how thinly veiled the autobiographical elements were (in fact the category of “Autofiction” is pretty much the most popular one at the moment), but in the movies it feels… weird? I think Spielberg and co-writer Tony Kushner are very aware of this, and they endeavor to tell a version of this story that feels largely fair, and that honestly isn’t really about Spielberg himself. It’s really about his mother.
In the film Spielberg is Sammy Fabelman, a young Jewish kid whose first experience at the movies changes his life forever. It’s the first scene of the film, and it sets the thematic stage for all that is to follow - Sammy, maybe six years old, is bundled up in line for a showing of the The Greatest Show on Earth, but he’s afraid. He’s afraid of the dark theater and he’s afraid of the giant people he’s been told will be in there. His father, a sensible and mathematical man played by Paul Dano, reassures the boy by explaining all of the mechanics and physics of the cinema, about the persistence of vision and the way the projector magnifies and brightens the image. His mother, played by Michelle Williams, assures him that it’s all a dream; the movies are dreams brought onto a screen, and there’s nothing to be afraid of. These two perspectives - the technical and the artistic - and these two personality types - the reserved and the effusive - will battle within Sammy for the rest of the film. And, we understand, define the cinema of Steven Spielberg for the past 50 years.
But Sammy isn’t the center of the film. It’s all about Mitzi, his mother, who explodes off the screen in a stunning performance by Michelle Williams. I am not sure it’s possible for me to overpraise her here; this is just an example of next level acting, a fearless and large performance that swings hard and connects even harder. Mitzi is one of the most complicated characters to ever grace a Spielberg film, and she’s a more complicated female character than 99% of Hollywood films allow to exist.
It’s a tough role because you have to love Mitzi even as she is often hard to love. At the beginning of the film we fall for her energy, her joie de vivre that stands in stark contrast to her husband, Burt, and his good-natured stolidness. She is a blast of fun and light, but as the movie goes on it becomes clear that there is another side to her. Mitzi is a gifted musician, and in another world she would have been a top-tier concert pianist, but in this one she is a housewife and a mother. While she never achieves her artistic dreams, she still has her artistic temperament; I am reminded, weirdly enough, of Robert E. Howard’s description of Conan, with “gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth. She has that, and when Mitzi is up the whole family is elevated, levitated and bathed in sunshine. When she is down, though, she is like a millstone around the Fabelmans’ necks, and she drags them into the murky depths with her.
Mitzi’s story - Spielberg’s mother’s story - is the Rosetta Stone to Close Encounters of the Third Kind; (and it adds to the bittersweet quality of the ending of AI) as the movie goes on she needs to make a decision that will break her family to pieces in order to protect her own needs and happiness. Is it selfish? All artists are, we’re told by Uncle Boris (Judd Hirsch in an almost film-stealing sequence where you think he’s going to be a funny curmudgeon and ends up being a life-damaged artist who tells Sammy all of the pitfalls and pain awaiting him on his road to glory), and she is, but we love her, and we feel her pain, and we do want her to be happy.
It could be argued that Williams is too big as Mitzi. I fundamentally reject this. Her enormous performance takes up all the space in the movie, just as I imagine Spielberg’s mother Leah took up all the space in the family. If you have known a person like Mitzi, and I have known my fair share, you understand that they have a gravitational power within the relationship dynamic that makes them the absolute center of everything at all times. But you don’t resent this person until it’s too late; that gravitational pull is one you submit to happily, because it brings you into the orbit of this incredible, luminous celestial object. It’s only when you realize that the orbit is decaying that you understand just how bad things can get.
Her hugeness is vital; it’s vital so that when the family is on a camping trip and she does an impromptu freeform dance in a sheer nightgown backlit by the headlights of the family car, you understand it as an explosion of grace and beauty and internal longing and not a weird nervous breakdown. Williams isn’t playing camp, but perhaps she’s a zip code next to it; her Mitzi is infused with the wounded soul of late-period Judy Garland as well as the driving, unfiltered needs of a child. You understand that everyone in this family wants to be loved by her and to take care of her. Were Williams any smaller it wouldn’t work.
In fact, because it’s so much Mitzi’s show I found the ending of the movie - Sammy goes to Hollywood - to be weird. This movie shouldn’t end with Sammy, even if it is supposedly his story. It needed to end with Mitzi.
Which isn’t to say Sammy doesn’t exist in this autobiographical film. We watch Sammy grow up and we come to understand the influences that shape and mold him. What’s interesting is that Spielberg, who is so well-known for telling stories about American children of suburbia, finds Sammy’s younger years to be less interesting. Gabriel LaBelle, who plays Sammy in his teenage years, has an almost uncanny resemblance to Spielberg (the bravest thing Spielberg does in this film is cast an actor who is not particularly tall to play himself), only gets a chance to blossom in his role in the third act. Before that Sammy is very passive; he is active in the world of home movies, but surprisingly The Fabelmans doesn’t spend a lot of time there. You might expect that this movie would be all about Spielberg valorizing his backyard cinema projects, but aside from some fun sequences that offer key understanding into the art of cinema* and the scrappy nature of kids making their own movies, all of the filmmaking stuff in The Fabelmans is really about either Sammy’s family or Sammy’s relationships. Every time Sammy shows a new film the focus is on his family and how they respond - it’s all about trying to get his father’s approval, basking in his mother’s joy, or, later in the film, understanding that the way two people share a motion picture experience can tell you everything about their relationship.
*I have long held that Spielberg is a savant. He sees the world in cinematic terms, but because it’s so ingrained in the way he experiences everything I am not sure he could teach it to anyone else. Spielberg, I suspect, could not get in front of a class and explain the secrets of his method, because to him they’re not secrets - they’re simply the things you have to do to get the shot, get the emotion, get the moment. But here, dramatizing himself at work (even as a kid), he gets to show us his secrets in a way that he could never tell us. There are segments of The Fabelmans - especially the final Beach Blanket Bingo film he makes - that feel like master classes in filmmaking (seriously - the seagull shitting sequence in that film tells you everything you need to know about both tension and comedy on film). Sammy’s reply to a bully about that film - that he doesn’t know why he put certain things in it, only that he knew those things would make his film better - sounds to me like a bit of a confession.
The movies in The Fabelmans are not the real focus. This isn’t one of those biopics where Sammy is reading a book about sharks or deeply interested in Lincoln. It’s not about the premises of the movies Spielberg makes, it’s about Sammy coming to understand just what kind of power an artist can have. It’s about Sammy, whose home life is absolutely out of control, coming to understand the kind of control he can exert when the camera is rolling or when he’s editing; a small, frightened boy can suddenly become God when he sits in front of an 8mm editing machine. He can make jerks into heroes and he can see the secrets that his mother tries to hide. He learns that the way he cuts a movie together can elevate someone or bring them down, can celebrate someone or reveal their greatest weaknesses. And he learns that doing these things can put an audience in the palm of his hand, that he inherently and instinctively understands how to get people laughing and screaming and crying and cheering.
It’s about the art, and every great artist must learn these lessons about their own medium. Mitzi, as a pianist, understands the dance of the notes - we see reading sheet music and being transported by the little dots that would be indecipherable to me. She understands which keys to hit to bring about joy or sorrow, hope or despair. Sammy’s arc, then, is about learning these things and then, in act three, truly using his tools.
Back to LaBelle; in the third act the focus of the film shifts from Mitzi to Sammy and LaBelle steps up. The family has up and moved to their third state, and Sammy is spending his senior year in an all-new high school where he’s the only Jew for miles. He ends up the victim of some significant bullying but also ends up falling in love with a hyper-Christian girl who wants to bring him to Jesus.
These characters - the two bullies and the Christian girl - really encapsulates what makes Spielberg unique. These are people from his own life, and he could have, if he wanted to, made them out to be awful, or jokes, or one-dimensional jerks. But he doesn’t; Spielberg, especially in his later years, is incapable of looking past the humanity of anyone (this, I think, is what makes his Nazis in Saving Private Ryan and Schindler’s List so effective - they’re not just unknowable monsters). In a different filmmaker’s hands this could be a time for a little score-settling (and if you think being successful makes an artist no longer interested in score-settling you’ve probably never met an artist). Even the jerkiest, most anti-semitic of the two bullies has a painful interior that Spielberg allows to show, and Monica, the Jesus girl, feels incredibly real and full. At first I thought she would just be a joke, but she becomes a person.
That humanity is the key to The Fabelmans. A man making a movie about his own family, especially one as dysfunctional as this, could be excused for having some bitterness. But there’s no bitterness here; at the same time there’s no sentimentality. Spielberg (and Kushner - I have been remiss in acknowledging one of the great living writers and his work on this film) goes for an honesty here that acknowledges the weaknesses and the strengths of everyone. This is the kind of perspective he likely could not have brought in the 70s, maybe not even in the 80s, but in his golden years he has the experience and the distance to see that his parents, in the end, were people. Just people. Of all the lessons that Sammy Fabelman learns in this movie, this might be the hardest. This is the true coming of age - not getting laid, not graduating school, not moving out. It’s when you understand that your parents are just people, given to all the frailties and stupidities and wonders and joys and kindnesses of everyone else.
The Fabelmans is not a big movie. It’s a movie that is dedicated to the emotional lives of a handful of characters. Spielberg could make a movie like this feel sweeping and epic - he could do it in his sleep - but he chooses not to do so here. He keeps the film grounded, keeping the scope small. Every now and again he breaks out a stunner of a shot - there is a shot of Paul Dano at the end of this movie after he has seen a photograph that breaks his heart that blew me away - but he’s mostly exercising incredible control. I think he knows that he can manipulate us cinematically, but that would be wrong for this one, and so he just lets the emotions and the humanity play out on their own terms. I was surprised at how ultimately understated The Fabelmans was. That does not mean it’s slight, or that it’s minor.
Steven Spielberg is not just the greatest living film director, he is the greatest film director who has or ever will live. There has never been anyone who speaks cinema as fluently and as smoothly as Spielberg; even his worst films (and he’s made a couple of stinkers) are formally miles ahead of the best films of other directors. The older I get, and the more I learn about the movies and their language, the more I am in awe of what this man has been doing since the earliest days of his career. If anyone deserved to make a movie elevating themselves to Olympus, Spielberg is that guy.
The Fablemans is not that film. It’s not falsely humble - Sammy is a great filmmaker from the first time he shoots his model train crashing into Noah’s Ark at age six or seven - but it’s also not self-aggrandizing. It’s a movie that feels like a summation, a final examination of themes that have been running through Spielberg’s films for my entire life. Mostly, it feels like a movie made by a man who has had a complicated relationship with his parents and who has had a complicated relationship with his art but who loves them more than he can ever express in words. He loves them for all the ways that they have made him happy and all the ways they have hurt him; he understands that you can’t have one without the other. It’s a deeply personal movie full of wisdom and love, the very mature kind of love that can only come when you accept something or someone for everything they are.
The last shot of The Fablemans is a fourth-wall breaking joke and it’s a metacommentary on Spielberg’s happy endings, but it’s more than that. The joke is a bow, a moment where the artist and audience acknowledge one another. And the metacommentary is less a wink than an overarching, career-spanning statement of purpose: in our real lives we cannot control things, and in our real lives there is grief and heartache and there is pain and loss and betrayal. But here, in the final frames of the movie, we can make it - for a few fleeting seconds - all alright. He’s not ignoring the hard times or the darkness, but rather he’s choosing to highlight the hope.