Anyone who has followed Steven Spielberg’s films over the years can attest to how he is the kind of filmmaker who falls back on nostalgia a lot, especially in his early career. There are things he goes back to again and again, like it is his own personal catharsis, a way for him to come to terms with his past and communicate his pain through the characters he breathes life into in his movies. We see that in Dee Wallace’s single mother in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. We see that in Tom Cruise’s single father in War of the Worlds. We even see it in Richard Dreyfuss in Close Encounters of the Third Kind who, though still married in the end, leaves everything behind to go away with the aliens, abandoning his family. It’s a recurring motif in his films that is hard to miss. Even as a youth, before I learned as much as I did about the behind-the-scenes in movies, I had heard about how Spielberg liked to use single parents and abandonment as a way of dealing with his own upbringing.
Steven Spielberg is nearing eighty years old as of this writing and has shown no signs of slowing down anytime soon. He averages a film every couple of years, not including those that he produces. He is also one of the most successful filmmakers of all time; perhaps the most successful within my lifetime. When a trailer announces a new release as “a Steven Spielberg film”, it gets people’s attention because that usually means quality. Looking back over the last fifteen years, every film he has personally directed, save for two animated or children’s movies, and Ready Player One, has been an Academy Award-nominated best picture. That is quite a record and one that has not been matched by anyone, including the much-lauded Christopher Nolan.
In 2022, he directed a film about his own life, making a semi-autobiographical picture about how he fell in love with cinema, how he learned his craft making home movies and directing amateur dramas, and how he got his foot in the door in Hollywood. This can be looked at as the ultimate Steven Spielberg film, filled to the brim with nostalgia, heartbreak, family drama, and a love for the movies. To some, this was an amazing journey through the thorny past of one’s life; to others, this was just an uninteresting domestic drama involving an aspiring movie-maker. It hit people differently depending on how much interest you had in how movies are made.
Hollywood loves movies that celebrate their craft. There was no doubt this would be right up their alley and score big at the 2023 Academy Awards. I saw it initially knowing that it would get the coveted Best Picture nomination. I also saw it because I have an interest in how people got into the business and how movies are made. Had I lived in southern California, I would have gravitated towards a career in the industry myself, but it was never something my family would have supported, and moving there later was just fiscally impossible for me. When I think about it nowadays, I realize what I would not have had if I’d made myself move out there at the time. I have no regrets. But I do wonder what I could have done had I been in the right place at the right time. Who doesn’t?
The Fabelmans opens with young Sammy Fabelman (Mateo Zoryan Francis-DeFord, later played by Gabriel LaBelle), attending the movies for the first time with his parents Mitzi (Michelle Williams) and Burt (Paul Dano). The film they go to is The Greatest Show on Earth, and he becomes fascinated by the train wreck late in the film. For Hanukkah that year, he asks for a train set, and each day of presents, he gets a new piece until he has a full toy train. But when he intentionally crashes the train into a toy car, remaking the image from the movie on this toy track, he gets in trouble with his father. Mitzi, sensing what he really wants, takes their 8mm camera and allows him to film the toy train crashing so that he can experience it over and over without risking damaging the toy. This experience instills a love for filming in Sammy, and he begins filming regularly, involving his sisters in his projects.
Burt is offered a job in Phoenix, Arizona, and moves the family westward. At Mitzi’s insistence, Burt’s best friend and business partner, Bennie Loewy (Seth Rogan), goes, too. Years pass, and Sammy continues to make movies, now involving his Boy Scouts friends. He begins to figure out post-production effects and earns a badge in photography. On a family camping trip, on which Benny accompanies them, Sammy films everyone enjoying themselves. Later, though, while editing the footage together to make a film for his mother to cheer her up after her own mother passes away, he discovers something that troubles him. Caught in the footage is evidence that his mother and Benny are more than just friends. Torn by what he sees, he edits the footage out and begins to grow cold toward her. When she finally confronts him over his attitude shift towards her, he shows her the deleted footage. He decides to give up filming over this.
Burt accepts a new job in California, and the family moves again, leaving Benny behind. But the separation proves too much, and Mitzi and Burt get a divorce. Meanwhile, Sammy is struggling in his new environment, where he is in the minority as a Jew. He gets in fights, falls in love, and eventually is convinced to pick up a camera again when the senior class goes on a school-sanctioned skip day to the beach. He uses his skills to put together a home movie of the day to be shown at the school prom. There, he makes amends with one of his bullies, breaks up with his girlfriend, and learns again that the camera doesn’t lie and what he makes can change a person’s perspective on life and on themselves.
There are a lot of people out there that go to the movies and have no interest whatsoever in who made them or how they were made. This is one of the many reasons films these days have mostly forgotten the opening credits and just jump into the movie. Even when filmmakers put something at the end of the credits to entice viewers to stay and watch them, large amounts of people still get up the moment those credits begin, impatient to get out of the theater and uninterested in anything to do with the making of that film. DVDs used to have tons of behind-the-scene features, but that has mostly shifted to the higher-end formats because the people that care about higher picture quality and sound tend to be the people who take films and filmmaking seriously. People who don’t care about such things probably will not care about this story, either.
But Spielberg isn’t just telling a story about finding film and chasing a career in moviemaking. He’s also looking back at his relationship with his father and mother. His mother was the one who understood him best and encouraged his desire to make pictures. His father, while delighted that his son had a passion that he was good at, always saw it as just a hobby, something he might someday grow out of. He wanted his son to pursue a career in something that he thought mattered, something tangible, not chasing after fiction and imagination.
When his mother left the family to go back to Benny in Phoenix, he was losing the only person he had in his corner rooting for him. Benny understood that, too. We get a scene where Sammy is selling his camera, just before the move to California, because he feels that what he filmed on that camping trip has driven a wedge in his relationship with his mother. Benny is at the same camera shop picking up a better camera to give Sammy as a going-away present. Sammy initially refuses the gift but finally accepts it even though he has no intention of using it.
He probably wouldn’t have gotten back into it, either, if it weren’t for two things: his new girlfriend, Monica (Chloe East), a devout Christian who is determined to convert him to Jesus while at the same time making out with him whenever she can, and his uncle Boris (Judd Hirsch), who has worked in films and gives him one of the strangest motivational speeches I have ever heard. It’s Monica who convinces him to film the Senior Skip Day at the beach, using her father’s expensive 16mm camera, a temptation he just can’t resist. Sammy initially didn’t want to go because two fellow seniors, Sam (Logan Hall) and Chad (Oakes Fegley), antisemitic bullies, will also be there. But when he goes, he films them as they really are. This angers both boys, but for vastly different reasons. It shows Chad how much of a loser he really is and Sam sees how successful he is at everything and doesn’t believe that is who he really is. This turns out to be a powerful lesson for Sammy.
As mentioned above, this is loosely based on the real life of Steven Spielberg. He doesn’t pull punches in this representation of his life. His mother especially is a tragic figure, married to a loving husband but in love with someone else. She claims at one point that she and Benny never let things get as far as it could have gone but we’re not entirely certain if that is the truth. Seth Rogan is so often playing the buffoon in pictures that it is a little odd seeing him playing it straight, yet he has done so before and is good at it. Spielberg plays up this stereotype a little, especially after the family moves to California. Mitzi replaces him in her life with a monkey that she names Benny. This substitution doesn’t last, though. It’s easy to point the blame at her, leaving her family behind to be with her lover, but we don’t know all the details behind her decision and no film, no matter how long, would be able to paint the picture well enough to fully understand her side of the story.
This film is even more about the family dissolution than it is about Sammy’s journey into the man he would become. Because of this, by the time Mitzi is leaving, the film is just about wrapped up. But because Spielberg needs to tie up both stories, he gives us a final moment as Sammy is getting his foot in the door in Hollywood. He writes letters to all the studios looking for any kind of work in the pictures, even television. Eventually, one of them writes back, inviting him in for a meeting. This man, Bernard Fein (Greg Grunberg), remembers a time when he wrote letters just like the one he got from Sammy and offers him a job on a new sitcom called Hogan’s Heroes. Knowing that Sammy wants to get into movies more than television, Bernard also arranges for Sammy to meet one of the greatest directors of all time, John Ford, whose office is just across the hall. This scene is surreal and awkward, just as we would imagine such a meeting to be. By a stroke of genius, Spielberg cast another great director, David Lynch, in this role and he’s playing up every thing we have ever heard about what John Ford was like as a person.
The Fabelmans is not going to appeal to just anybody. If you have no interest in film history or the life of Steven Spielberg, then it will seem like a boring coming-of-age drama. But it is so much more than that. It is a compelling drama about personal tragedy, obsession, and serves as a way for Spielberg to fully face his painful upbringing and to share that pain with all of us. It’s the ultimate nostalgia trip for a director who has made a career out of reliving his own personal demons. This is amongst the best of what Spielberg has to offer, opening up old wounds so that we can share with him why he is what he is and how he got there in the first place. It’s his most personal film and a love letter to the craft of moviemaking all rolled into one.
Academy Award Nominations:
Best Picture: Kristie Macosko Krieger, Steven Spielberg, and Tony Kushner
Best Director: Steven Spielberg
Best Actress: Michelle Williams
Best Supporting Actor: Judd Hirsch
Best Original Screenplay: Steven Spielberg and Tony Kushner
Best Original Score: John Williams
Best Production Design: Rick Carter and Karen O’Hara
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Release Date: November 11, 2022
Running Time: 151 Minutes
Rated PG-13
Starring: Michelle Williams, Paul Dano, Seth Rogan, Gabriel LaBelle, and Judd Hirsch
Directed by: Steven Spielberg
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