Spielberg delivers his own origin story in personal film

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This article was published 25/11/2022 (1436 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Steven Spielberg is sometimes criticized for being too sentimental, too sappy. But as this “portrait of the filmmaker as a young man” suggests, his need for feel-good endings is rooted not in optimism but anxiety.

Spielberg’s filmography is full of distant fathers and abandoned children. In genres ranging from fairy tales to crime capers to adventure stories to sci-fi, he has been playing out his parents’ difficult marriage and traumatic divorce, which occurred when he was in his teens.

In this tender but surprisingly tough film, we finally see Spielberg’s family directly, through the eyes of Spielberg’s stand-in character, the young Sammy Fabelman (played as a child by Mateo Zoryan Francis-DeFord and as an adolescent by Gabriel LaBelle).

This is not a biopic, though. As the title hints, it’s a family fable.

Spielberg’s approach to the relationship between strict factuality and the stretchier truth of art is suggested by one crucial scene. When slightly disreputable Great-Uncle Boris shows up (memorably played by Judd Hirsch, with lots of Yiddish) and starts relating a tall tale about joining the circus, one of Sammy’s sisters accuses him of lying. He’s not lying, their father explains: “He’s telling you a story.”

As a director, Spielberg has always been a supreme visual storyteller. Here he works on the script as well, with frequent collaborator Tony Kushner. The writing is occasionally too neat, too obvious about the connections between the nascent filmmaker’s art and life. But it takes on a clear-eyed but compassionate complexity when looking at the Fabelman family’s emotional dynamics.

Sammy’s life as a filmmaker starts in 1952, when his parents take the five-year-old to see his first movie, Cecil B. DeMille’s The Greatest Show on Earth. Father Burt (Paul Dano), a brilliant engineer, explains to the boy about “24 frames per second” and “persistence of vision,” which allow a series of images to transform into moving pictures. His mother, Mitzi (Michelle Williams), a gifted musician who gave up performing to raise a family, tells him that “movies are dreams.”

This sets up a science-vs.-art showdown that resounds through Burt and Mitzi’s marriage. Burt, whom Dano plays with quiet poignance, is devoted and dependable but a little preoccupied and stiff. Mitzi, played by Williams at her most radiant and vulnerable, is fun and imaginative but unpredictable, sometimes recklessly so.

Watching The Greatest Show on Earth, little Sammy is mesmerized but also traumatized by the movie’s spectacular train crash. Back at home, his fears cause him to repeatedly crash his model train set — at least until Mitzi has the idea of letting Sammy film the toy train disaster, which allows the boy to re-enact and thus control his anxieties.

We soon see how Sammy keeps his camera between himself and his emotions, observing but not participating, managing his world by managing its image. As he heads into adolescence and the family moves from Cleveland to Phoenix and then northern California, it’s not train crashes that worry him but his parents’ troubled relationship, and in particular the way it’s affected by ever-present family friend Benny (Seth Rogen).

When everyone goes on a family camping trip, Sammy finds his camera is picking up difficult truths about Burt and Mitzi’s marriage.

There’s an exuberant, gee-whiz joyfulness to other movie scenes, in which Sammy collaborates with his scout troop to create westerns and war movies, rigging up fake explosions and spectacular falls from cliffs. Later, when he’s seemingly the only Jewish kid in his new neighbourhood, Sammy uses film to get revenge on antisemitic high school bullies, shooting a particularly thuggish blond giant like he’s in Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia.

Spielberg’s technical craft is predictably assured — it looks like he was already pretty good as a middle-schooler — and the performances pulse with emotion. The writing sometimes falters, punching thematic points too hard or fumbling the overall tone. But there are brilliant standalone scenes, from astonishing moments with Williams and Dano to a wonderfully eccentric cameo by David Lynch as film legend John Ford.

The Fablemans works as a moving coming-of-age drama, as a detailed picture of America at mid-century, and as an expression of Spielberg’s pure love of cinema. It’s about art’s possibilities and its price, and ultimately, it’s about forgiveness, for the filmmaker’s parents and for himself.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca

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Alison Gillmor
Writer

Studying at the University of Winnipeg and later Toronto’s York University, Alison Gillmor planned to become an art historian. She ended up catching the journalism bug when she started as visual arts reviewer at the Winnipeg Free Press in 1992.

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