The first thing you realize watching The Fabelmans is that Steven Spielberg has been telling the story of his childhood in bits and pieces throughout his career – through the domestic turmoil in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the suburban expanses of ET the Extra Terrestrial, and the many lost boys left to grow up on their own. Yet Spielberg has waited until now to tell his story directly, from the perspective of a grownup who may have experienced a turbulent adolescence, but didn’t fully comprehend the complexities of adult relationships until he aged a little himself and could see the past more clearly.
Along with great films such as Armageddon Time and Aftersun, 2022 has been a year of thorny nostalgia pieces, with directors rejecting the cozy conventions of the coming-of-age film in order to interrogate memories rather than preserve them in amber. With a crucial assist from Tony Kushner, who brought so much dimension to Spielberg’s West Side Story last year, the script for The Fabelmans is structured around a boy’s journey from his magical first trip to the movies, where he thrilled to the spectacle of The Greatest Show on Earth, to his appearance on a studio lot as a young adult. Yet the way his movie-love dovetails with family upheaval makes an important point about Spielberg’s brand of commercial film-making: blockbusters don’t have to be impersonal.
The “love letter to the movies” aspect of The Fabelmans does have serious allure, however, as Spielberg, through his young surrogate Sammy, fetishizes 8mm home-movie cameras and analog editing bays, with little strips of footage taped up on the wall. No-budget replications of his favorite westerns and war adventures gives Sammy the chance to innovate – manually poking pinspots in the film to get the flash effect of a gunshot is particularly ingenious – but the documentation of his family and school life are an early lesson in how the camera can see what the eye sometimes doesn’t. And when putting the shots together, Sammy learns how effectively he can speak through film – and, also, what can be said by leaving things out.
Michelle Williams and Paul Dano are both superb as Sammy’s parents, a mismatched pair that nonetheless accounts for his mastery of the art and science of his chosen medium. But it is Seth Rogen who’s the quiet standout as Uncle Bennie, who isn’t an uncle at all, but a charismatic figure who serves as bond and wedge as the Fabelmans move from New Jersey to the Arizona suburbs and, finally, to the northern California town where they reach their breaking point. A child might resent Bennie’s disruption, but The Fabelmans has the grace to know that the lives of adults aren’t so tidily understood. After five decades making movies, its wonders haven’t diminished for Spielberg – a late scene with David Lynch as John Ford underlines that marvelously – but there’s a mature, bittersweet resignation to this film that recalls Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman, a great sigh in the twilight of a career.
