The opening scene of Steven Spielberg’s newest film, The Fabelmans, is one you’d probably expect to see from the “love letter to cinema” prestige picture it dresses itself as. Two parents, Burt (Paul Dano) and Mitzi Fabelman (Michelle Williams), wait in line for their son’s very first trip to the movies: 1952’s The Greatest Show on Earth. It’s here, in the dark room illuminated by the glow of the silver screen, where our protagonist is forever changed and a creative mind is born. After witnessing a scene in the film involving a train accident, young Sammy (Mateo Zoryan) asks for a model locomotive for Hanukkah. He vividly pictures the scene in his sleep, recalling every detail down to the specific angles. “I need to see them crash!” he tells his parents, unable to comprehend that feeling of pure spectacle in his gut, much to the confusion of his father. Though Mitzi, the fellow dreamer of the family, knows exactly what Sammy needs.
It’s here where Spielberg differentiates his semi-autobiographical film from the rest of the love letters and movies about the power of movies — The Fabelmans is not just a film about falling in love with cinema; crucially, it’s about being utterly consumed by it.
It feels urgent to preface this piece by acknowledging that Spielberg’s body of work and his artistic persona are deeply personal to me. As the youngest child of a lower class immigrant family, a lot of how I learned to perceive the world was through the media that I consumed. I didn’t have proper family dinners and bonding nights, but I did have a portable DVD player and a curiosity that burned through our home video collection. If you know me personally, you’d know I have crafted my identity as a writer around growing up with Spielberg. In my author’s bios and throwaway tweets, I’ve continuously and humorously referred to him as my dad.
There is, however, some truth to that joke about our parasocial bond. Spielberg’s greatest quality as a storyteller has always been his ability to capture specific emotional truth within the universal appeal of the Hollywood blockbuster. As a child of divorce himself, Spielberg’s films have all been imbued with a sense of longing to fully understand who his parents were as people, especially his distant father. Close Encounters of the Third Kind tells the story of a man leaving his family behind in pursuit of scientific obsession. E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial shows a young boy finding peace from his divorce-torn family through his special companionship with an alien creature. Even his previous film, a remake of West Side Story, was dedicated to the memories of watching the original musical with his late father.
In a way, his body of work did raise me — his blockbusters taught me to be in tune with my emotions, provided me with a positive model of masculinity to grow into, and nurtured my imagination in a way that adulthood only ever seems to disintegrate. When I touched a video camera and learned how to stitch two clips together in the sixth grade, I knew I’d be dedicating the rest of my life to the art form. As lovers of cinema, we all have our origin stories. In The Fabelmans, Steven Spielberg directly confronts the inner tension that exists at the core of every film he’s ever created. The result is the director’s most intimate and passionate film to date; a loving portrait of his own parents as real, complicated people, and a bold attempt to find inner peace and control within the chaos of his unstable childhood.
At the wise age of 75, Spielberg is at the peak of his craft. Working once again with his frequent collaborators cinematographer Janusz Kamiński, screenwriter Tony Kushner, and composer John Williams, one would expect The Fabelmans to be a technical tour de force for the filmmaker. Yes, every moment of this film’s design is thoughtfully executed, but I was shocked by how subtle the approach to this story was in comparison to his latest efforts. Coming right off of last year’s West Side Story, where every single second is meticulously polished and staged, one finds Spielberg’s vision for The Fabelmans much more grounded. Spielberg chooses only to use his signature trademarks where it counts: on the strongest emotional beats. As Mitzi fervently tells her son, “Movies are dreams!” the film’s soft lighting and color palette perfectly complement the melodramatic tone and stream-of-consciousness structure, guiding us through some of Sammy Fabelman’s most formative childhood memories.
The ensemble cast of The Fabelmans is something to behold. Paul Dano’s logical-minded portrayal of Burt is the perfect left brain to Michelle Williams’s free-spirited and playful right brain, Mitzi. Seth Rogen holds his own as family friend Uncle Benny and has a wonderful send-off at the midpoint of the film. Judd Hirsch and David Lynch give exemplary one-scene wonder performances that will go down in history. And yet, all these performances from seasoned actors revolve around Gabriel LaBelle’s under-appreciated portrayal of teenage Sammy Fabelman. LaBelle has a delightfully boyish quality and a sensitivity to him that allows him to shine as the film balances coming-of-age wonder with heavy domestic drama. Like Sammy, I learned early on in life that my parents were more than just caretakers, but also flawed, unique human beings in their own right. Within LaBelle’s big expressive eyes, I recognized a familiar pain of being split between family versus art, logic and purpose versus imagination and self-expression, father versus mother. I have no doubts the supporting cast will get their flowers this awards season, but I’m eagerly waiting to see what LaBelle does next with his career.
A “love letter to cinema” isn’t an inaccurate description of The Fabelmans, but look closer and you’ll find that Spielberg argues that dedicating your life to art is built on much more than just love. The act of filmmaking is life-affirming, but it’s also full of pain and compulsion. Sammy uses film as his main method of navigating the world, something I immediately identified with. He has a wonderfully introspective gift: the ability to capture beauty and truth from his Super 8 camera. On the other hand, it deeply inhibits his capacity for emotional availability. On set, he’s able to profoundly express a feeling of grief and vulnerability to his lead actor, but at home around his sisters, he keeps the war within his mind all to himself. In one of the film’s most heated dramatic beats, Sammy imagines himself filming his family in the middle of an argument. Whether a familial dispute or the collision of a toy locomotive, through his lens, Sammy, and by extension, Spielberg, is trying to find some sort of control over it all.
The Fabelmans is the most important film of Spielberg’s long, critically acclaimed career. Some will accuse it of self-indulgence or an exercise in narcissistic vanity, but at its core, it’s a story that the filmmaker’s been telling for decades. This time, however, there’s no hiding behind a genre twist or within the emotional safety of allegory. Most modern filmmakers have had the pleasure to establish their creative ambitions at the start of their careers. Lady Bird is an encapsulation of Greta Gerwig’s mission to capture universal truth from the specific lived experience. Get Out serves as the tutorial on how to watch all other Jordan Peele horror flicks. But 21-year-old Spielberg entered this industry as a young, developing mind. Every consecutive film he created, as instinctually impressive as most of them are, were still vital learning experiences. With his latest film, Spielberg has worked backwards, finally giving his fans a thesis statement to revisit the rest of his filmography with.
Even as the nerdy child who’s always felt a kinship with Steven Spielberg’s life story, seeing it all unfold on screen was somehow even more moving than I anticipated. Though our childhoods weren’t a one-to-one parallel, I recognized a lot of myself on that screen; all of the fear, the longing, and the joy that comes from being an obsessive little cinephile. As Sammy riffed on John Ford for his Boy Scout films, it transported me back to trying to perfect the “Jaws shot” with an office chair and my rented DSLR. We often think of Spielberg as this untouchable, inherently gifted success story, the epitome of the “American Dream.” Here, the man behind that myth disagrees. What makes Spielberg a great artist is not a natural-born instinct, but rather that he’s never lost touch with his imaginative inner child.
As an idol to all those troubled kids who cope through cinema, The Fabelmans is Spielberg’s reminder to listen to your heart and tell your story. It’s been years since I left filmmaking behind, but I’ve been comforted and inspired to know there was a point in time when young Sammy almost gave up too. One day, when I pick up a camera again, I’ll take what I’ve learned from the parallel journey I shared with my cinematic hero, and I know it will just make sense.
