Portrait of the filmmaker as a young man: Spielberg’s autobiographical drama fails to charm
“Movies are dreams that you never forget,” Mitzi Fabelman (Michelle Williams) tells her young son Sammy (Mateo Zoryon Francis-DeFord) en route to taking him to see his first film, 1952’s The Greatest Show on Earth. Had they seen The Fabelmans instead, however, perhaps Mitzi might have thought twice about her proclamation. With The Fabelmans, writer/director Steven Spielberg wants to create a nostalgic love letter to cinema, but the picture is too bogged down with the weight of Spielberg’s autobiographical angst to become something unforgettable.
Spielberg, along with his frequent screenwriter Tony Kushner (West Side Story; Lincoln; Munich) here presents us with a fictionalized version of Spielberg’s childhood and young adulthood that often feels like a therapy journal come to life. And at two and a half hours long, the picture may only continuously hold your attention if you have an intense voyeuristic interest in Spielberg’s emotionally rocky upbringing.
As a teenager, Sammy, Spielberg’s alter ego, is played by Gabriel LaBelle, who’s easily the best thing in the movie. His resemblance to the real Spielberg in the film’s last chapter is uncanny. Sammy has a passion for filmmaking, which his loving but puzzled engineer father Burt (Paul Dano) views as a fine hobby, but not a serious vocation. Mitzi, a professional pianist, is more receptive and defensive of her son’s passion, but when Sammy discovers a secret about his mother, their bond becomes strained, much to Mitzi’s dismay.
Williams, usually adept at playing wounded souls (see Manchester by the Sea and Blue Valentine) is saddled here with a melodramatic characterization that results in an affected, overwrought performance. She has just one moment that feels genuine – when she reacts to something Sammy shows her that indicates he knows a secret she’s keeping – and the camera stays on her face, not on what she’s looking at. In that brief scene, we get a glimpse of what makes Williams a brilliant actress, as we see an array of emotions flicker across her face. Williams expresses more in that one wordless scene than in any other part of the movie in which she has pages of dialogue.
Spielberg’s big themes here are art and family and the sometimes uneasy intersection between the two. Too often, though, rather than presenting us with new ideas, the picture instead feels like a way for Spielberg to process lingering resentments towards his parents that appear to have haunted him for 50+ years. Unspooling his emotional baggage via his preferred method of art may be cathartic for Spielberg, but, as his audience, we are simply left to bear witness to a navel-gazing exercise.
Spielberg spent some of his high school years in Saratoga, and the picture takes an odd tonal turn when it moves from focusing on Sammy’s family to his senior year in, as the picture tells us, “Northern California,” including a beach trip to Santa Cruz. This portion of the picture, in which Sammy meets a girl, goes to the prom, and faces down two antisemitic bullies, has a retro John Hughes movie sort of feel that plays like a separate, standalone film.
On the plus side, Seth Rogen turns in one of his best dramatic performances as Burt’s co-worker and family friend Bennie, and Judd Hirsch has a blast with a small role as Mitzi’s uncle, whose brusque manner both frightens and inspires young Sammy. And a virtuoso cameo by director David Lynch as legendary director John Ford near the film’s end is a lot of fun, but too little too late.
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The Fabelmans opens today at Bay Area theaters.
