A Steven Spielberg Film
The Fabelmans is full of striking images. It is, in a sense, a film about striking images. Perhaps the most striking of all, to me, comes somewhat far into the movie - it is maybe even a spoiler to talk about it. But I'm not sure how much you can "spoil" The Fabelmans: the story it is telling is part of the DNA of modern Hollywood storytelling, since it is the story of Steven Spielberg's childhood and adolescence, and there is no living human being who more has done more to define or embody "modern Hollywood storytelling", largely by expressing his childhood and adolescence in transmuted forms onscreen for almost 50 years now. But it is maybe a spoiler, just so you know. Anyway, in the image I have in mind, a character named Mitzi Fabelman, played by Michelle Williams, is sitting on the ground in a closet, in a medium shot, watching 8mm film of herself being projected. It is not flattering footage, and she is obviously shocked and sad and embarrassed. We have already seen the footage in question, so we know what she's looking at, but I don't think this would have stopped the vast majority of filmmakers from cutting in a reverse of what she's looking at, just for redundancy's sake (Hollywood filmmaking is, as we know, proudly and efficiently redundant). Spielberg and his editors, Sarah Broshar and Michael Kahn, do not do this: they hold, as we watch her watching herself for a long, terrible minute.
Spielberg loves shots of people looking at things, of course, especially things that are brighter than their surrounding environment, like a film projector shining on the wall of a closet; it's one of this most obvious, parodied tricks as a director. But he goes back to it because it works, and it works here. It works so well that it feels almost like the apotheosis of the form: like Spielberg is with this image exhausting the possibilities of the shot of someone looking at something. Mitzi Fabelman sees herself as a piece of art, beautiful and sad, full of emotions that have been condensed and pinned down to several inches of flat wall, and this becomes the most emotionally gutting thing to happen in all of the indulgent 151 minutes that make up The Fabelmans. The overwhelming emotion of looking at a thing, and watching someone looking at a thing: that's Spielberg's entire career, and this moment is defined within the film as something like his origin story, with his mother (for Mitzi is the barely-veiled analogue of Leah Spielberg) serving as his first audience and the first victim of his unparalleled skill at emotional manipulation.
The Fabelmans has been described as Spielberg's story about his parents' marital struggles, which provided the fuel for so many stories about broken homes and emotionally unavailable father figures and/or loving mother figures who just can't keep it all together; or as the story of how the young Spielberg learned to make movies as a high school AV nerd; both of these are strictly accurate. But I don't think either of them is what the film actually is. This is, to me, a film about seeing the world in terms of images: about being so attuned to the visual language of cinema that you do not look around you and see a 360-degree world of the physical, but an ever-changing landscape of two-dimensional frames. Sammy Fabelman, the director's alter-ego played as a saucer-eyed five-year-old by Mateo Zoryon Francis-DeFord and as a teenager by Gabriel LaBelle, is presented as someone who intuitively thinks in terms of imagery and the emotional impact of images; he is also presented as someone who is so good at thinking of emotions in terms of a thing that can be carefully guided and manipulated by moving pictures that he has lost sight of the fact that they are also actual things that happen inside of the minds of other people. Insofar as Spielberg (receiving only his fifth-ever professional screenwriting credit with this project,* co-written by Tony Kushner) is looking to lay bare the darkness within him - which isn't really what the film is doing - this is where he does it, by presenting Sammy as a kind of genius filmmaking robot, whose instinct for image-making comes at a certain, unmistakable cost to his ability to function correctly within the rest of society. Maybe this is why he'll grow up to make so many wonderful films about aliens: he can look at us humans, observe us closely, and tell beautiful stories about is, but he's always just slightly outside of us.
None of this would be of much or any intrinsic interest if it weren't by and about the single most influential living filmmaker, which I take to be an objectively true claim; it's also probably not of much interest if you don't hold the opinion that Spielberg is one of the best living composers of motion picture images, as I do.† Certainly, The Fabelmans is not looking to do anything that will endear itself to the people already suspicious of Spielberg's filmography: the whole point of the thing, in essence, is to sit at the knee of one of the great masters of the form and have him explain to us "I think this is why movies do what they do", and you think that what Spielberg movies do, in particular, is to be mawkish and manipulative sentimentalist claptrap, then there's no obvious reason to want that lesson. But it is, at least, presented with an absolute minimum of egotism, having been designed around Sammy/Steven's own discovery of the power of the image and the ability to create that power for oneself, such that we are not so much being told by the wise old Spielberg what he knows, as we are learning alongside the enthusiastic young Spielberg what works. Also, it helps make the film even more humble, or as humble as an autobiography can ever be, that the very last sequence of the film is built around the admission "anyway, everything that I know is still only a fragment of what John Ford knew, that All-Father of American cinema", culminating in a chipper visual joke that suggests that the 75-year-old Spielberg knows he still has more to do before he really can stand up to an all-time master of the medium like Ford.
And so we get a film that is obsessed with The Power of Images, maybe too cute, maybe trite, but in the cute and trite manner of one of the most artful mega-populists in the medium's history. It starts with a prologue in 1952, during which the Fabelmans go to see the notoriously awful The Greatest Show on Earth, and we get to watch Sammy watching his first movie, here seen as a kind of religious act. The first act is focused primarily on how the particular image of a train crash - a reedy special effect presented in all its low-fi glory within The Fabelmans - become a kind of totem to the boy, who eventually re-enacted it on his father's 8mm film camera, and the way that Spielberg the adult films the child's POV of toy trains roaring into terrifying close-up pretty much says all that the film will leisurely repeat for the rest of its length: being someone who inherently and intuitively can see the cinematic within the real, the visceral and emotional within the artificial, and understanding how angles and editing can transform reality in a greater-than-reality, all while positioning himself in the grand tradition that began with the Lumière brothers in 1896, understanding that incredible cinematic potential of trains.
This all takes place against the backdrop of the Fabelmans' journey from New Jersey to Arizona to California, the same journey taken by the Spielbergs in the same years, during which time Mitzi grows frustrated with the dull, unimaginative coolness of her scientific whiz-kid husband Arnold (Paul Dano), who treats his son's passion for motion pictures with a mild kindness that comes across as far more condescending than outright disrespect ever could. And this all does work very well as a story, both a domestic drama about a marriage and the coming-of-age of a nervous teen who can only relate to others when he's conceiving of them as visual subjects, notwithstanding what I said up there. The acting is marvelous - Spielberg is usually good for a couple of great performances per film, but The Fabelmans might very well have the largest number of genuinely terrific performances in anything he's ever made, give or take Schindler's List - with even a figure as prone to easy shtick as Seth Rogen contributing what is undoubtedly the best work of his onscreen career. It's a lovely depiction of the inherent messiness in being part of a family where everyone has something going on and nobody can line those things up in the same direction, and it feels very much like Spielberg is using this to apologise to his late parents, years after the fact, for not understanding that they both had complicated needs beyond what he could perceive as a teenager. The film isn't exactly "loving" or "warm" - rather, it is very understanding, recognising that people make the choices they need to make, and sometimes those choices hurt them and those around them, but that doesn't mean they could have been made differently.
And this is all against the backdrop of a re-creation of the suburbs of the 1950s and 1960s as precise as could be, sketched out in dogged realistic detail by production designer Rick Carter, set decorator Karen O'Hara, and costume designer Mark Bridges. It is nostalgic in that the specificity of everything we see could only possibly come from direct experience and vivid memories, both in terms of the setting and the idiosyncratic behavior of the Fabelmans themselves, but (astonishingly for this director), never sentimental in its nostalgia, at least outside of its unaccountable love for The Greatest Show on Earth. It's more that the film needs everything to be exactly real and right so that there can be a world for Sammy Fabelman to respond to. Spielberg isn't treating this like he wants to live in that world once again, as for example we get from Tarantino's Once Upon a Time ...in Hollywood; if anything, he seems to view this all with a certain clinical detachment that renders this immaculately-made world as the raw material for a movie rather than the movie itself, and Janusz Kamiński's cinematography (his best work for the director since Munich) pointedly abandons the dusky glow that has become his favorite trick in recent years for something cooler and softer, casting everything with the fuzziness of memory but not the dreaminess of necessarily good memories. Just memories in general.
The end of all this is Spielberg's finest film in many years, and maybe the finest film about interpersonal dynamics that he's ever made; using the Magic of the Movies to wrest grandiose emotions out of simple domestic interiors rather than elaborate fantasies and daydreams, and relying on reality rather than imagination to fire his visual creativity. It is, I think, awfully close to a masterpiece, give or take some slow patches in its second half, a career-summing statement of purpose from one of the living filmmakers who has most earned the right to create such a thing. In a very literal way, this is the movie that Steven Spielberg was born to make.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
*The others are his professional debut, the 1968 short film Amblin', 1977's Close Encounters of the Third Kind, 1982's Poltergeist, and 2001's A.I. Artificial Intelligence. There are a few story credits in there as well.
†In fact, in my grumpier moods I come awfully close to holding the opinion that he's the only living U.S.-born director who still knows how to compose motion picture images, but there's no reason to be that inflammatory in the main body of the review.
Spielberg loves shots of people looking at things, of course, especially things that are brighter than their surrounding environment, like a film projector shining on the wall of a closet; it's one of this most obvious, parodied tricks as a director. But he goes back to it because it works, and it works here. It works so well that it feels almost like the apotheosis of the form: like Spielberg is with this image exhausting the possibilities of the shot of someone looking at something. Mitzi Fabelman sees herself as a piece of art, beautiful and sad, full of emotions that have been condensed and pinned down to several inches of flat wall, and this becomes the most emotionally gutting thing to happen in all of the indulgent 151 minutes that make up The Fabelmans. The overwhelming emotion of looking at a thing, and watching someone looking at a thing: that's Spielberg's entire career, and this moment is defined within the film as something like his origin story, with his mother (for Mitzi is the barely-veiled analogue of Leah Spielberg) serving as his first audience and the first victim of his unparalleled skill at emotional manipulation.
The Fabelmans has been described as Spielberg's story about his parents' marital struggles, which provided the fuel for so many stories about broken homes and emotionally unavailable father figures and/or loving mother figures who just can't keep it all together; or as the story of how the young Spielberg learned to make movies as a high school AV nerd; both of these are strictly accurate. But I don't think either of them is what the film actually is. This is, to me, a film about seeing the world in terms of images: about being so attuned to the visual language of cinema that you do not look around you and see a 360-degree world of the physical, but an ever-changing landscape of two-dimensional frames. Sammy Fabelman, the director's alter-ego played as a saucer-eyed five-year-old by Mateo Zoryon Francis-DeFord and as a teenager by Gabriel LaBelle, is presented as someone who intuitively thinks in terms of imagery and the emotional impact of images; he is also presented as someone who is so good at thinking of emotions in terms of a thing that can be carefully guided and manipulated by moving pictures that he has lost sight of the fact that they are also actual things that happen inside of the minds of other people. Insofar as Spielberg (receiving only his fifth-ever professional screenwriting credit with this project,* co-written by Tony Kushner) is looking to lay bare the darkness within him - which isn't really what the film is doing - this is where he does it, by presenting Sammy as a kind of genius filmmaking robot, whose instinct for image-making comes at a certain, unmistakable cost to his ability to function correctly within the rest of society. Maybe this is why he'll grow up to make so many wonderful films about aliens: he can look at us humans, observe us closely, and tell beautiful stories about is, but he's always just slightly outside of us.
None of this would be of much or any intrinsic interest if it weren't by and about the single most influential living filmmaker, which I take to be an objectively true claim; it's also probably not of much interest if you don't hold the opinion that Spielberg is one of the best living composers of motion picture images, as I do.† Certainly, The Fabelmans is not looking to do anything that will endear itself to the people already suspicious of Spielberg's filmography: the whole point of the thing, in essence, is to sit at the knee of one of the great masters of the form and have him explain to us "I think this is why movies do what they do", and you think that what Spielberg movies do, in particular, is to be mawkish and manipulative sentimentalist claptrap, then there's no obvious reason to want that lesson. But it is, at least, presented with an absolute minimum of egotism, having been designed around Sammy/Steven's own discovery of the power of the image and the ability to create that power for oneself, such that we are not so much being told by the wise old Spielberg what he knows, as we are learning alongside the enthusiastic young Spielberg what works. Also, it helps make the film even more humble, or as humble as an autobiography can ever be, that the very last sequence of the film is built around the admission "anyway, everything that I know is still only a fragment of what John Ford knew, that All-Father of American cinema", culminating in a chipper visual joke that suggests that the 75-year-old Spielberg knows he still has more to do before he really can stand up to an all-time master of the medium like Ford.
And so we get a film that is obsessed with The Power of Images, maybe too cute, maybe trite, but in the cute and trite manner of one of the most artful mega-populists in the medium's history. It starts with a prologue in 1952, during which the Fabelmans go to see the notoriously awful The Greatest Show on Earth, and we get to watch Sammy watching his first movie, here seen as a kind of religious act. The first act is focused primarily on how the particular image of a train crash - a reedy special effect presented in all its low-fi glory within The Fabelmans - become a kind of totem to the boy, who eventually re-enacted it on his father's 8mm film camera, and the way that Spielberg the adult films the child's POV of toy trains roaring into terrifying close-up pretty much says all that the film will leisurely repeat for the rest of its length: being someone who inherently and intuitively can see the cinematic within the real, the visceral and emotional within the artificial, and understanding how angles and editing can transform reality in a greater-than-reality, all while positioning himself in the grand tradition that began with the Lumière brothers in 1896, understanding that incredible cinematic potential of trains.
This all takes place against the backdrop of the Fabelmans' journey from New Jersey to Arizona to California, the same journey taken by the Spielbergs in the same years, during which time Mitzi grows frustrated with the dull, unimaginative coolness of her scientific whiz-kid husband Arnold (Paul Dano), who treats his son's passion for motion pictures with a mild kindness that comes across as far more condescending than outright disrespect ever could. And this all does work very well as a story, both a domestic drama about a marriage and the coming-of-age of a nervous teen who can only relate to others when he's conceiving of them as visual subjects, notwithstanding what I said up there. The acting is marvelous - Spielberg is usually good for a couple of great performances per film, but The Fabelmans might very well have the largest number of genuinely terrific performances in anything he's ever made, give or take Schindler's List - with even a figure as prone to easy shtick as Seth Rogen contributing what is undoubtedly the best work of his onscreen career. It's a lovely depiction of the inherent messiness in being part of a family where everyone has something going on and nobody can line those things up in the same direction, and it feels very much like Spielberg is using this to apologise to his late parents, years after the fact, for not understanding that they both had complicated needs beyond what he could perceive as a teenager. The film isn't exactly "loving" or "warm" - rather, it is very understanding, recognising that people make the choices they need to make, and sometimes those choices hurt them and those around them, but that doesn't mean they could have been made differently.
And this is all against the backdrop of a re-creation of the suburbs of the 1950s and 1960s as precise as could be, sketched out in dogged realistic detail by production designer Rick Carter, set decorator Karen O'Hara, and costume designer Mark Bridges. It is nostalgic in that the specificity of everything we see could only possibly come from direct experience and vivid memories, both in terms of the setting and the idiosyncratic behavior of the Fabelmans themselves, but (astonishingly for this director), never sentimental in its nostalgia, at least outside of its unaccountable love for The Greatest Show on Earth. It's more that the film needs everything to be exactly real and right so that there can be a world for Sammy Fabelman to respond to. Spielberg isn't treating this like he wants to live in that world once again, as for example we get from Tarantino's Once Upon a Time ...in Hollywood; if anything, he seems to view this all with a certain clinical detachment that renders this immaculately-made world as the raw material for a movie rather than the movie itself, and Janusz Kamiński's cinematography (his best work for the director since Munich) pointedly abandons the dusky glow that has become his favorite trick in recent years for something cooler and softer, casting everything with the fuzziness of memory but not the dreaminess of necessarily good memories. Just memories in general.
The end of all this is Spielberg's finest film in many years, and maybe the finest film about interpersonal dynamics that he's ever made; using the Magic of the Movies to wrest grandiose emotions out of simple domestic interiors rather than elaborate fantasies and daydreams, and relying on reality rather than imagination to fire his visual creativity. It is, I think, awfully close to a masterpiece, give or take some slow patches in its second half, a career-summing statement of purpose from one of the living filmmakers who has most earned the right to create such a thing. In a very literal way, this is the movie that Steven Spielberg was born to make.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
*The others are his professional debut, the 1968 short film Amblin', 1977's Close Encounters of the Third Kind, 1982's Poltergeist, and 2001's A.I. Artificial Intelligence. There are a few story credits in there as well.
†In fact, in my grumpier moods I come awfully close to holding the opinion that he's the only living U.S.-born director who still knows how to compose motion picture images, but there's no reason to be that inflammatory in the main body of the review.
