TIFF 2022 Film Review: The Fabelmans
STEVEN SPIELBERG STUNS AGAIN WITH THE MOVING AND DEEPLY PERSONAL THE FABELMANS
The superstar team of Steven Spielberg, Tony Kushner, and Janusz Kaminski ripping another one out of the park is the least surprising development at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival. The entirety of Spielberg’s being splashed upon the big screen, The Fabelmans sidesteps the treacly sentimentality of your typical autobiography to deliver a moving form of self-therapy: the legendary director’s heart and soul, hopes and regrets, delivered through his masterful craft. The Fabelmans is Spielberg’s most personal film, and one of the year’s best. Minor spoilers ahead…
There’s a viral clip from Inside the Actors Studio that has been floating around the Internet for years. In it, interviewer James Lipton makes a canny observation of Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind when speaking with the filmmaker: “Your father was a computer scientist. Your mother was a musician. When the spaceship lands, how do [the aliens] communicate? They make music on their computers and they are able to speak to each other.” Spielberg is absolutely stunned: “You see, I would love to say I intended that and I realized that was my mother and father, but not until this moment. Thank you for that.” Whether it's in drips or pours and whether he realizes it or not, Steven Spielberg is a director who reflects himself into his stories. From E.T. to Close Encounters of the Third Kind to Catch Me If You Can, from his downsized dramas to his extravagant blockbusters, the disintegration of the nuclear family has always played a role in his filmography. The Fabelmans, Spielberg’s latest, eschews the faint pulling of these threads to deliver a knockout blow of honest, personal storytelling. The thorny, freewheeling tale of a boy who grew up behind a camera, forever transmuted by his parents’ divorce, it’s Spielberg at his most vulnerable; The Fabelmans is therapy via soundstage: an artist’s heart, soul, hopes, and regrets laid bare for the entire world to see.
The Fabelmans centers around a semi-autobiographical stand-in for Steven Spielberg himself, Sammy Fabelman (played as a boy by Mateo Zoryon Francis-DeFord, as a teenager by Gabriel LaBelle). Beginning in a manner not unlike your run-of-the-mill reminiscences on the magic of cinema, the film opens with little Sammy on a wintry 1952 evening, attending his first film: Cecil B. DeMille’s The Greatest Show on Earth. Nestled snugly between his father Burt (Paul Dano) and his mother Mitzi (Michelle Williams), Sammy isn’t taken by the movie’s dazzling circus pageantry nor Charlton Heston’s adventuring hero, but by its spectacular, climactic train crash. Before long, Sammy is demolishing his own train sets and capturing the small-scale destruction on his first film camera. It’s also the first of The Fabelmans’ many meta magic tricks, and a powerful instance of the director’s lens as self-therapy - Mitzi soon discovers that Sammy’s obsession with filming mangled locomotives has nothing to do with the spectacle, but everything to do with his own fear of such images.
“The Fabelmans is therapy via soundstage: an artist’s heart, soul, hopes, and regrets laid bare for the entire world to see.”
Much of The Fabelmans’ framework mimics countless other love letters to the movies, but Spielberg’s screenplay - co-written with longtime collaborator Tony Kushner - consistently sidesteps the treacly sentimentality of your typical auto-fiction in favor of the raw and honest. Perhaps the most revealing - and vulnerable - moment comes at the crossroads of Burt and Mitzi’s fraught marriage: Sammy, now a teenager, sits on the couch as his parents announce their divorce. But instead of capturing the sweeping emotional devastation of an imploding family, The Fabelmans reflects Sammy in the living room mirror holding a camera, dispassionately filming his own trauma through an 8mm remove. Remix, revision, and expressionism swirling together, it’s a powerful echo of Spielberg himself, as a boy whose camera acts as a shield against the agony of growing up and a metatextual sleight of hand on making art from pain.
As Sammy’s great-uncle Boris (the inimitable Judd Hirsch) recounts, Mitzi gave up her career as a talented pianist to raise the children and support Burt, whose in-demand engineering prowess keeps his family on the move. “Art is as dangerous as a lion’s mouth, it’ll bite your head off!” he growls in a fiery monologue. Equally terrifying and prophetic in his wisdom, its Boris’ words that ring throughout Sammy’s journey to adulthood, with the boy’s bourgeoning love for the movies continuously running counter to the fissures forming in his family. And it’s Michelle Williams who brings an exquisite texture to Mitzi, toggling affectingly between tenderness and despair while convincingly unraveling from growing resentment and a gnawing regret. It all comes to a head in a silent, barnburner sequence where Sammy splices a home video together from a recent camping trip, only to uncover his mother’s furtive bond with Burt’s friend Bennie (Seth Rogen); it’s here where Sammy learns that not only can film spin illusions, it can shatter them as well. It’s The Fabelmans’ most dazzling sequence: a matryoshka doll of meaning as we watch Sammy peel back and piece together the damning reel of infidelity, itself a scene achingly assembled by director of photography Janusz Kaminski and editors Sarah Broshar and Michael Kahn.
“…Spielberg’s screenplay — co-written with longtime collaborator Tony Kushner — consistently sidesteps the treacly sentimentality of your typical auto-fiction in favor of the raw and honest.”
The Fabelmans is pricklier and darker than one would expect, but that doesn’t mean Spielberg’s trademark light touch is absent. “Movies are dreams that you never forget,” says Mitzi at one point, fully supportive of her son’s passions. It’s a saccharine line exemplary of the most trope-y of tributes to filmmaking, but in context with The Fabelmans’ sharper edges, it comes across as stunningly earnest and even a little tragic. Spielberg also hasn’t been this playful in years: Sammy’s first romance with the devoutly Christian Monica Sherwood (Chloe East) is a riot, a third act revenge fantasy versus some antisemitic bullies - with the power of cinema, no less - is as purposefully hackneyed as it is satisfying, and there’s real procedural joy in Sammy finding his voice as a storyteller with his low-budget war film. And wait until you see its brilliant third act cameo, no doubt spoiled to high heaven by now, but a perfect setup for a piercing, self-effacing final shot that will undoubtedly make its way into the pantheon of great final shots.
Did all of these things happen this way? Are Burt and Mitzi one-for-one facsimiles of Spielberg’s real parents? Almost certainly not. The Fabelman’s hazily vignetted structure belies its veneer of straight autobiography, and Spielberg fully weaponizes the power of embellishment for his therapeutic memory play. As love letters to cinema go, The Fabelmans is perhaps the ultimate flex: instead of telling us about the magic of the movies, it shows us how powerful they can actually be. With every facet of his being splashed upon the screen to reach back in time and apply a cinematic balm, it’s only natural for Spielberg to take the cue from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: print the legend.
