Steven Spielberg made The Fabelmans when he thought the world would end. It was the start of 2020 and the director suspected Covid-19 meant humankind’s final curtain (it may yet be, of course).
“I was terrified this was an end-of-days, extinction-level event,” he said. Little concentrates the mind like imminent apocalypse. So he came to a decision: “If I got the chance to make one more movie, it was going to be this story.”
The tale of his own childhood and his parents’ divorce was raw in other ways, too: his father, Arnold, had died, aged 103, a few months earlier; his mother, Leah, in only 2017 (aged 97).
Small wonder he burst into tears so often on set; a set meticulously recreated from his earliest memories, suddenly swarming with dead relatives. Small wonder there’s something so strange and special and singular and suddenly unfashionable about The Fabelmans.
Paul Dano and Michelle Williams play Burt and Mitzi – versions of the Spielbergs renamed for no obvious reason. They live in Arizona with their four children, of whom the eldest (and only boy) is Sammy (AKA Steven). A grumbling granny (“You call this brisket?”) and larky friend, Bennie (Seth Rogen), are frequent fixtures round the supper table.
When they move to California, there’s trouble: Sammy is subject to antisemitism at school, and Mitzi goes into a deep funk as they’ve had to leave behind Bennie.
For its first two-thirds, The Fabelmans is unequivocally terrific: the focus on the love triangle (or square, if you add Sammy) is taut and unexpected and sensitive. The wordless sequence at the film’s centre, in which Sammy clocks his mother’s secret as he is editing footage of a camping trip, is textbook excellence: tense, kinetic, all cold sweat and silent apocalypse.
The two scenes in which he and his mother share a secret film in the closet – a horrible, superb bit of mirroring from Spielberg and co-writer Tony Kushner – are also exquisite sequences of queasy viewing and reaction.
Many have felt the film too syrupy. It can seem that way (the poster doesn’t help). But there’s real kinkiness at its core, such as the scene in which the family watch Mitzi perform a spooky, narcissistic dance in a see-through dress. And the moment Sammy imagines himself capturing on film his family’s pain as Burt and Mitzi announce their breakup (which he ends up doing, of course, with the very movie you’re watching).
Judd Hirsch’s barnstorming monologue about selling your own grandmother if it makes you a better artist fits, too – but more than that, it’s just a fabulous five minutes of showmanship and syncopation.
The final third flags a bit: the location feels too close to too many high school dramas (the lockers, the prom). The central focus is lost. But it’s still a lot of fun; laugh-out-loud funny, sometimes.
It should win. It’s a film of smarts and sophistication, whose brilliance can only strike you properly on a second viewing. It won’t win. It’s too traditional. Its primary competition is too dazzlingly fresh and original; its Tumblr-bro humour and meme-y visuals speak of what’s to come, not what happened 60 years ago.
There’s something else, too. The Fabelmans is too Jewish, even for Hollywood. Spielberg spoke earlier this week about the rise of antisemitism, and there’s no doubt that sentiment may have affected the film’s reception.
For me, it wasn’t Jewish enough. I thought they should have leaned harder into that specificity: made it more accurate, more headily ethnic. That Spielberg chose the least Jewish-looking people of all time to play his parents is a distraction, no matter how committed their kvetching. Watch footage of his real-life family and fiction struggles to compete.
The Fabelmans isn’t perfect. But it’s human, humane, funny and vulnerable. It’s expertly assembled, scripted and shot brimful of feeling. It’s not the future, but it’s a past to be praised, enjoyed and learned from. Sometimes, the oldies should get the goldies.
