Light and Dark: Film Review of The Fablemans
Attribution: Jorge Simonet, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
By Geoff Carter
Steven Spielberg’s semi-autobiographical film The Fabelmans is—like much of his work—simultaneously totally enjoyable and disturbingly inevitable. It is Spielberg’s peculiar gift that he is able to mythologize the ordinary, to turn the everyday into the epic, and the personal into the universal. Of course, these ambitions are part of every artist’s vision, but Spielberg has a special talent for crossing and blurring these lines, particularly in his depictions of domestic life.
The Taylor family in ET, the Abagnales in Catch Me if You Can, and the Nearys in Close Encounters of the Third Kind exist in kind of a controlled but joyful chaos. These are families that seem superficially happy, but who, in point of fact, struggle to deal with sometimes vast internal rifts. Roy Neary is compelled to leave his family to follow his vision. Frank Abagnale and the Taylor children are suffering through tortorous parental separations. Spielberg has told dozens of variations of this storyline from The Sugarland Express to Lincoln. It is a motif which reaches its most comprehensive realization in The Fabelmans.
In any semi-autobiographical work, the audience is tempted to speculate as to which elements of the story are true and which are fictionalized. In this film, the father Burt (Paul Dano), like Spielberg’s father, is an electrical engineer who moved his family to follow his career. The mother Mitzi Fabelman (Michelle Williams) was a former concert pianist who gave up her budding career for her family. Leah Spielberg, Steven’s mother, was also a talented musician who—like Mitzi Fabelman—also had an affair.
On the surface, the parents seem to get along fine, but it soon becomes apparent that Mitzi feels unfulfilled in her artistic ambitions. When they take young Sammy (Mateo Zoryan Francis-DeFord) to see his first film, The Greatest Show on Earth, the boy is enthralled with the train crash sequence, which had been shot in miniatures. After he receives a train set for Hannukah, Sammy—in an effort to recreate the film sequence—deliberately crashes the model train, incurring the wrath of his father who berates him for destroying a nicely engineered toy.
Mitzi, however, understands what Sammy wants and conspires with him to stage another crash but this time record it on film so he can watch it over and over again without damaging the toy. In this nearly accidental intersection between technology and art, film becomes the embodiment of the divide between Mom and Dad Fabelman—art grounded in technology. At one point, later in the film, upon seeing an innovation in the film, Burt exclaims, “Now you’re thinking like an engineer,” which is, unfortunately, the last thing Sammy wants to hear. Burt admires Sammy’s “hobby” but refuses to acknowledge the boy’s desire to make movies for a living.
Mitzi, on the other hand, encourages her son’s ambitions. She herself seems to be constantly pushing against the constraining envelope of stuffy suburban life—always seeming to want more. Her relationship with Bennie Loewy (Seth Rogen) whom the children call Uncle Bennie contains a dimension of playfulness and joy that seem to be absent from Burt’s relationship with Mitzi and the kids. During a family camping trip, while Burt is trying to demonstrate how to start a fire, Uncle Bennie and Mitzi are off playing, bending a sapling to simulate a carnival ride.
It happens that Sammy is filming the entire trip, but later, as he edits the footage, Sammy discovers Bennie and Mitzi’s relationship is not quite as innocent as it seems. Editing the footage from the film, Sammy tries to keep the secret to himself but cannot contain his contempt for his mother. When Mitzi finally confronts him, he shows her the unedited version. She tries to explain her feelings for her father and Bennie but cannot stem Sammy’s fears that the family will dissolve.
It is at about this time that Mitzi’s long-lost Uncle Boris (Judd Hirsch) suddenly visits the family. Having been a circus performer his entire life, he takes it upon himself to instruct Sammy about the risks and rewards of being an artist. He tells the boy explicitly that devotion to his art will result in the alienation of family and that this conflict will always exist.
When Burt moves the family from Arizona to California, he does not bring along Bennie as an employee, and, as a result, Mitzi’s dissatisfaction increases to the point where she cannot maintain the illusion of her happiness. In one sequence, Sammy comes home to find his mother has inexplicably brought home a pet monkey—perhaps a desperate attempt to allay her dissatisfaction with her separation from Bennie.
The teenage Sammy (Gabriel LaBelle) has a hard time adjusting to his new school. Constantly bullied by antisemitic jocks, he accuses his father of overlooking the needs of his family for his career. The rift finally comes to a head during a dinner in which Sammy has invited a new girlfriend Monica (Chloe East), a girl who is creepily infatuated with Jesus. No longer able to hide their anger, the parents lash out at each other, precipitating the long-dreaded split.
Monica persuades Sammy to film the school’s Senior Ditch Day, in which he edits the footage in such a way to present one of his tormentors in such a flattering light that the bully is disarmed, telling Sammy he could never live up to the image presented in the film.
While The Fabelmans does not traverse much new territory in Spielberg’s vision of art and the family, it does explore how experience and commitment cross that sometimes narrow line between life and art. In a typical Spielberg-like manner, the director scatters hints of his future film moments throughout the movie. While shooting a film with his Boy Scout troop in Arizona, the friends gather on their bikes in a scene reminiscent of the bike chase in ET. Later, feeling the pain of his parents’ split and being bullied at school, Sammy raises his hand in front of a window; the resulting shadow resembles the iconic image of loneliness from ET. The war film he shoots provides a moment foreshadowing Captain Miller’s anguish in Saving Private Ryan. In the last sequence in which Sammy meets the irascible director John Ford (David Lynch), the line between life and art is punctuated by the film’s final shot—a nice sight gag.
The Fabelmans is a predictable but intensely satisfying movie. While the thematics of family heartbreak is hardly new, the backdrop of real-life authenticity lends them a sense of grounded reality. The audience knows that—in some version—this really happened.
The film is marked by some wonderful acting. As Mitzi, Michelle Williams is beautifully radiant and—in some instances—heartbreakingly fragile. Her small rebellions like her insistence on using disposable tableware (who wants to waste time doing dishes?) are simultaneously desperate and touching. In his very short appearance as Uncle Boris, Judd Hirsch delivers an intricately calibrated performance of a rough and uncompromised—and nearly feral—loner devoted to his art. While Burt could easily be unlikable, Paul Dano plays him with a patience and forgiveness that lifts him beyond his narrow vision of reality.
The Fabelmans is, like most Steven Spielberg films, more deeply layer than it might appear. While creating an absorbing entertainment, this director has created a self-aware (but not self-conscious) twenty-first century portrait of the artist as a young man. The subtleties of character and theme transcend what in other hands might have been a simple bildungsroman—a growing-up story. Instead, he investigates of which came first: life or art.
And the answer is—of course—unkowable.