The Fabelmans

Of the half-dozen movies from the past two years in which an acclaimed filmmaker recreates their youth for a nostalgic coming-of-age tale, Steven Spielberg’s is probably the most factual and emotionally accurate, but I didn't buy a word of it. Michelle Williams and Paul Dano star as Burt and Mitzi Fabelman, an upwardly mobile Jewish couple raising four kids. The eldest and only boy, Sammy (Gabriel LaBelle), has his mother's artistic soul and his father's genius and work ethic. Sammy's passion is filmmaking, which stems from an internal need to make order out of chaos. The chaos surrounding Sammy is the fairly mild dysfunction of a typical 1950s/60s suburban family that uprooted itself a couple of times—in this case, first from New Jersey to Arizona, then to California, all to enable Burt’s career in computer technology. Those who know Spielberg's life story will recognize the autobiographical nature of this picture. The separation of the director's parents when he was young has colored and thematically underscored a great deal of his more famous and more sublime works. But taking on this subject directly has resulted in an embarrassingly hamfisted drama that's both self-aggrandizing and surprisingly inept. 

Unlike Licorice Pizza, Armageddon Time, Belfast, Empire of Light, The Souvenir, Minari, Roma, Lady Bird, etc. this is the first of this kind of movie I would disparagingly describe as an "autobiopic." The Fabelmans has all the artificial notes and hurried qualities of Hollywood's most saccharine genre, even though it only amounts to the first couple of chapters of Spielberg's biography. And, unlike a nostalgic movie about a bygone era with a protagonist who stands in for the film's director, this picture elevates the director himself to the status of a subject worthy of this level of production. The Fabelmans is meant to be a tribute to the now-septuagenarian Spielberg's parents, but it's more a celebration of him. There are two potentially good stories here. One is about a troubled marriage as seen through the eyes of a 1960s-era teenager. The other is about an emotionally detached kid who feels more alive and authentic, creating make-believe than existing in real life. But the way these narratives are forced to coexist feels oddly labored. Only in one key scene do the two storylines come together in a profound way. 

Co-writing the screenplay with his frequent collaborator Tony Kushner, Spielberg crafts some of the most artificial dialogue in the history of Oscar-bait. It's amazing, after the great work Kushner did the previous year updating the book for Spielberg's West Side Story adaptation in a way that still felt correct for the film's time period, that he'd create such horrendously anachronistic exchanges here. We get scene after scene of parents talking to their kids the way no 1960s family ever did, siblings talking to each other the way no brothers and sisters ever have, and a school bully talking to his victim like NO school bully ever ever EVER has in the history of bullying. The self-awareness of all these characters is beyond laughable. 

Visually, this is Spielberg's least dynamic film in decades. Ironically, the movie's excellent coda has Sammy getting some sage advice about how to photograph pictures so as to make them interesting because The Fabelmans lacks the cinematic craft and splendor for which its director is so renowned. My favorite of the many things Spielberg is known for is his long, complexly choreographed, yet unpretentious shots—we even see his teenage surrogate staging such a set-up for his Super-8 World War II home movie. But The Fabelmans is shot and cut like a generic Hollywood biopic. Everything feels rushed, as if the film is required to cram in a whole lot of exposition and scenes that audiences already familiar with the stories and legends of the subject come in eager to see reenacted. The picture is 151 minutes long but feels hurried, like it's trying to clock in under two hours. The only time Spielberg and his longtime editor Michael Kahn hold a shot for more than a few seconds is when they linger on Michelle Williams' face at key emotional moments. Williams and Dano give heartfelt performances when they're not speaking, but even the greatest actors in the world could never make dialogue this arch sound credible, especially when it's so inaccurate to the era in which this film takes place. It's as if Biff Tannen, from another sub-par Spielberg production, Back to the Future Part II, stopped off at the Fabelman's house on his way to give his younger self that sports almanac from the future and dropped off the complete back catalog of "O" magazine and the entire psychology section of a '90s Barnes and Noble.

Spielberg and cinematographer Janusz Kamiński take care to recreate the surface qualities of this movie with perfect verisimilitude (down to shooting the 16mm footage on 16mm film and the Super-8 footage on Super-8 film), but the substance of what they capture feels hollow and contrived. Let's take that scene of Sammy filming his WW II epic. We see how the young genius stages a tracking shot in which the kid starring as the platoon commander walks through a sea of his dead men. Sammy has the kids playing corpses at one end of the shot run behind the camera as it dollies along with the lead actor so they can play another set of corpses at the other end of the shot. This is a clever maneuver used by many a savvy low-budget director. But the kids playing the bodies are clearly not visible to the camera at the beginning of the shot, so they wouldn't need to pull this doubling tactic. The movie, by this point, has established that teenage Sammy understands composition and editing better than many professional directors, so he would obviously know this staging trick is unnecessary. This baffling, incongruous detail breaks a spell the gifted Spielberg should be able to cast in his sleep, which is indicative of the fatal flaw at the heart of this picture. It's a film about the magic of the movies that is devoid of magic itself.