I went to a first-day, first-show of The Fabelmans at 2pm on a Thursday. It was a small screen with a capacity of approximately 100, and it was about 80 per cent occupied. The audience was made up of all ages — starting from a group in their late teens to an elderly couple who must have been in their 80s, slowly walking up the aisle on their canes. This was in Portugal, a real testament to Steven Spielberg’s universal brand of storytelling.
As the lights dimmed and the trailers played for Babylon (Damien Chazelle’s gonzo look at the early days of Hollywood), and the new Indy installment (the first time an Indiana Jones movie has been directed by someone other than Spielberg), it was hard not to think of Spielberg’s impact on modern cinema. Is there anyone who started making movies in the last 40-plus years that hasn’t been influenced by Spielberg?
The Fabelmans is a Steven Spielberg origin story, but instead of Peter Parker’s radioactive spider bite and the death of Uncle Ben, we have a young Sammy Fabelman first cinema-going experience, and the dissolution of his parents’ marriage in his teen years. The movie is simultaneously a love letter to the power of cinema and the power of family, the two defining forces in Spielberg’s life.
The movie begins with the trademark Spielberg close-up on young Sammy’s face, holding his parent’s hands on either side, as he listens to their disembodied voices above him discussing the pros and cons of taking him to the cinema. He slowly transforms from spectator to participant as his father Burt, played by Paul Dano, and his mother Mitzi, played by Michelle Williams, get down on their knees and involve him in the conversation. Burt gives him a quick primer on how the 24 frames of film per second create the persistence of vision, while Mitzi talks to him about the magical and immersive power of movies. With this, Spielberg lays out his first thesis statement — Burt is the head, Mitzi is the heart, and little Sammy in the middle is an amalgam of the two.
Spielberg poses the question: “What happens when a young person in a family starts to see his parents as human beings?” and it’s quite heart-wrenching to see the parents slowly drift apart, especially from the perspective of the children. The turning point of the movie is a bravura sequence where teenage Sammy, now played by a very winning Gabriel LaBelle, edits footage from a camping trip and realises that Mitzi is in an emotional relationship with Burt’s best friend, Bennie, played by a restrained Seth Rogen.
The screenplay by Kushner and Spielberg is not particularly subtle — the family is called the Fabelmans; and Sammy literally finds out the truth about his mother while making a movie. But that’s a feature, not a bug. Spielberg makes a conscious decision to continually foreground the themes of the movie, most notably in a scene featuring Judd Hirsch as Mitzi’s uncle Boris warning Sammy about how the twin forces of family and art will tear him apart. In the hands of a lesser filmmaker, that scene could have lapsed into parody, but Spielberg directs Hirsch to a thundering performance that sells it.
Kushner and Spielberg do this time and again, with many scenes functioning as short story versions of the movie. When Mitzi’s mother is on her deathbed, Mitzi crawls into the hospital bed with her weeping inconsolably, while Burt stares at the line on the pulse monitor, the only way he can experience the situation. The heart and the head have different approaches, while Sammy is stuck in the middle, fixated on his grandmother’s neck watching carefully as her pulse slowly comes to a stop.
The performances are uniformly great — Michelle Williams is transformative as Mitzi, taking what could have just been a free-spirited kooky mom and embodying her with a real sense of pathos and humanity. Her performance doesn’t really work without Dano providing a counterbalance with his gentle approach, showing that he knows Mitzi wants more, but that he is not the one who can make her happy.
The art direction is top-notch with its recreation of America in the '50s and '60s. Even the cameras and edit machines that Sammy uses are exact replicas of what Spielberg used in his home movies. Spielberg worked with cinematographer Janusz Kaminski to carefully recreate his childhood movies.
The Fabelmans will be an awards favourite, likely to be nominated across the board in above-the-line as well as technical categories. Spielberg already won a Golden Globe earlier this week for directing, and will certainly be collecting a number of awards for The Fabelmans in the next couple of months. Michelle Williams will have a tougher fight in the Best Actress categories going up against Cate Blanchett in Tár (2022) and Michelle Yeoh in Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022), but it’s too early to call at this stage.
Spielberg has been one of the mainstays of modern cinema, with achievements too numerous to count. If you asked 10 people to name their favourite Spielberg movie, you would get 10 different answers, and passionate arguments for each of them. That’s a testament to his range and skill as a filmmaker and storyteller. And if Steven Spielberg were to hang up his hat today, The Fabelmans would be a fitting swan song to a glorious career.
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