Directed by Steven Spielberg
Written by Steven Spielberg, Tony Kushner
Starring Michelle Williams, Paul Dano, Gabriel LaBelle
Rated PG-13
Runtime: 2 hours, 31 minutes
In theaters November 23

by Ryan Silberstein, Managing Editor, Red Herring

Every film in Steven Spilberg’s filmography is personal, as he has had the privilege of choosing his own projects for almost 50 years. So a Steven Spielberg movie is a statement of some kind. For some movies it is easy to point to the why of it all. Spielberg reacts to the world around him (War of the Worlds, Munich, The Post), he makes the kinds of movies he loved as a boy (Raiders of the Lost Ark, Jurassic Park), and he is fascinated by World War II (1941, Schindler’s List, Saving Private Ryan). The Fabelmans is his first screenplay credit since A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, and his first movie not based on preexisting material or historical events since E.T. the Extra-terrestrial 40 years ago. 

That last tidbit might need some qualification, as The Fabelmans is closely inspired by Spielberg’s childhood and adolescence. While I haven’t taken the time to fact-check anything, having been a Spielberg fan for most of my life (Jurassic Park coming out when I was 7 was where it clicked for me that there was a knowable person behind the movies I liked, and I was already obsessed with Indiana Jones…) it was easy to reconcile what I know of the man with what I was seeing on screen.

The Fabelmans follows Sammy Fabelman from childhood (Mateo Zoryon Francis-DeFord) through early adulthood (Gabriel LaBelle) as his family moves from New Jersey, to Phoenix, to California. Sammy’ s father, Burt (Paul Dano) pursues his work in computers for RCA and eventually IBM, while his mother, Mitzi (Michelle Williams) is a homemaker and piano player. As he grows up, Sammy continues to shoot, edit, and show his own movies, learning to view the world through the eyepiece, and finding truth in the footage. 

Like any autobiographical work, The Fabelmans is an act of self-mythology, of course. It is cleaned up, the edges smoothed, pulled back from reality just enough to give a veneer of truth over the facts of his life. Some of the whys behind The Fabelmans are easy to square. Why now? Spielberg’s father, Arnold, passed away in 2020. His mother, Leah, passed away in 2017. In one view, The Fablemans is a way for Spielberg to keep his parents alive, but also to explore his feelings through his chosen artform without fear of offending them or having to explain himself to them (his sisters seem to have been heavily involved in this process). After all, Spielberg may be the most famous child of divorce in America, despite being 20 at the time his parents’ marriage ended. There are parts of Fabelmans that resemble the holographic technology used by Tony Stark in Captain America: Civil War to be able to interact with the version of his parents that exist in his memories. Burt and Mitzi aren’t Arnold and Leah, but as we get to know the Fabelmans through the perspective of Steven-Sammy, they are based on his memories and home film footage. 

This is the first time Spielberg has addressed the relationship with his parents in such a literal way, but it is all over his work, especially in his early period. James Lipton basically captured one of The Fabelmans’ main thesis in 1999, discussing Close Encounters of the Third Kind on Inside the Actors Studio: “Your father was a computer engineer; your mother was a concert pianist, and when the spaceship lands, they make music together on the computer." HIs family was joined by art and science/technology, and Sammy is depicted as having a combination of intuitive understanding of film, and an ingenuity for problem solving. But Sammy never comes to that realization. Only with the passing of time has Spielberg seemed to put those pieces together. “I’d love to say I intended that…but not until this moment,” he replies to Lipton.

Much of The Fabelmans is about Sammy coming to see his parents as individual people, not just as parents. HIs relationship changes over the course of his growing up. His mother is supportive of his moviemaking, but her emotional challenges and dependency on family friend Bennie (Seth Rogen) come between them. This also leads to a rift between Sammy and Bennie, seemingly never to be repaired. Sammy and his father, however, never see eye to eye. While Mitzi is seen as mysterious, alluring, and troubled, Sammy’s view of Burt is career-driven and distant, in part because Burt minimizes Sammy’s movies as a hobby. Does Burt work hard for his own glory or to provide for his family? Sammy never seems to even ask this question, even when his father compromises and provides a new editing machine so Sammy can edit his home movies together to cheer up his mother after his grandmother’s death. Smartly, perhaps, we only get glimpses into Mitzi and Burt away from the eyes of their children. Sammy’s story is told from his perspective, leaving a lot unsaid between his parents, and a lot unrevealed in the film. 

One thing Sammy does wrestle with over the course of his adolescence is selfishness. Both his parents are shown to be selfish in different ways. But that lives in Sammy too. When his Uncle Boris (Judd Hirsch) comes to stay in his room during shiva for Mitzi’s mother, he pegs Sammy immediately. Boris himself is in the entertainment business. “This,” he points to Sammy’s camera and editing machine, “you love this more than your family.” Sammy denies this, reflexively, but he protests too much. The seeds are already sown. Later in the film, Sammy’s sister, Reggie (Julia Butters) confronts him about how similar he is to Mitzi. 

Spielberg reconciled with his father in the 90s, and in an interview in 2012, he had this to say about how he saw his parents:

It's still a mystery to me, but even though my mother was like an older sister to me, I kind of put her up on a pedestal. And my dad was much more terrestrial, much more grounded, much more salt of the earth. And for some reason, it was easier for me to blame him than it was to someone who I was already-- exalted.

This reconciliation is apparent in his work since then, and especially recently. Bridge of Spies was inspired by Arnold’s trip to Moscow with other electrical engineers in 1960, which happened during the Francis Gary Powers incident. West Side Story was dedicated to Arnold Spielberg, who passed away during production. Arnold was also involved in the Shoah Foundation that Steven founded after making Schindler’s List. If The Fabelmans has a purpose beyond being a lavish therapy session, it is about balancing the scales and reconcile exalting his mother, anger at his father, and trying to finally see them once and for all as fallible human beings with their own psychologies, feelings, and lives.

As Sammy grows up, he begins to understand the power of moviemaking, and the differences between objectivity, truth, and point of view. Most of what we see him shoot is documentary. Camping trips, senior “skip” day. And while entertaining and moving an audience with a World War II short (also a bid to get Burt to support his endeavors as more than a mere hobby) is one thing, showing people their own lives back at them has profound and devastating effects. Sammy has an innate desire to be liked by everyone, which easily squares with Speilberg’s reputation as well. 

The Fabelmans is of course incredibly well made. Both Michelle Williams and Paul Dano deliver excellent performances, and are each warm and cold in their own ways. As Sammy seems to try to figure them out, their presence yo-yos in and out of the foreground. Sometimes Mitzi is warm, other times cold and removed, and still other times she is manic, elusive, or unsure of herself entirely. As Burt, Dano is mostly doing subtle work. There’s a quiet firmness to the portrayal, his voice rarely raised, life only coming into him when he is talking about computers or electronics. Every aspect of the film is perfectly calibrated. Spielberg can’t resist cute images, like child Sammy watching the first movie he made with the light projected onto his hands. He also can’t resist making his teenage movies look a little better than they did.

The film ends with Sammy meeting an idol of his and walking off on a backlot. Given the focus on family, it seems odd that Spielberg chose to end the film this way. But it ties back to Uncle Boris. In the scene before, Burt has resigned to Sammy dropping out of college and trying to land a job in television or movie production. Now he is free to pursue his dream. Mitzi calls guilt a wasted emotion, perhaps one of the least Jewish things a Jewish mother has ever said in a movie, but in that moment, Sammy seems completely unburdened.

We, the viewers, are left to ponder what we should glean from all this. The Fablemans is certainly a deeper look into Spielberg’s psychology through his movies, but at the same time, it feels more revisionary than revelatory. A corrective for his past guilt over his parents. And perhaps it is that, a vanity project, a tribute to himself and his clan. Dismissing it as such is certainly a valid point of view. It seems pointless to argue whether or not he’s earned the right to do this or not, artists should be able to make what they want. But I also can’t deny that certain scenes deeply affected me. It spoke to the ways I view my parents, and how my relationships with them, and my view of them and their marriage, evolved over time. Like Sammy’s, it wasn’t a particularly difficult childhood, but it was mine. I struggled to figure out my own identity until I was living on my own, which is also a common experience. As a fan of the man’s work, it is easy to get caught up in all the trappings, all the specifics. In many ways, Spielberg is the reason I love movies. His films were an easy gateway to discover more and more, a path I am still following today. 

All of this makes it extremely difficult to evaluate after a single viewing less than a day after watching it. The Fablemans doesn’t soar like his best pictures, but parts of it are just as elemental. Or maybe it’s just his way of saying he loves his movies and his family equally.