Sammy Fabelman (Mateo Zoryan, Gabriel LaBelle) is an imaginative young boy growing up in post-WWII America.  He is the oldest child of piano teacher Mitzi (Michelle Williams) and computer engineer Burt (Paul Dano).  Because of Burt’s successes with IBM, the family finds themselves moving ever westward, first to Arizona, and finally to California.  For a boy with a penchant for making movies, this migration should be a dream come true, but the effects of never being able to settle down and establish himself, as well as the trials of growing up begin to take a toll on Sammy as he experiences the highs and lows of adolescence; first loves, first heartbreaks, and those first steps into a world of his own. 

It feels strange to say that Steven Spielberg is “joining the ranks” of his contemporaries given the widespread influence he has had on filmmaking in his decades-spanning career, but with Universal Pictures‘ release of The Fabelmans, the genre of directors reminiscing on their formative years grows larger.  Spielberg assembles a team of regulars behind the camera for this fictionalized memoir, namely screenwriter Tony Kushner, cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, composer John Williams, and the editing team Sarah Broshar and Michael Kahn.  Titans all of them in their respective fields, the film never loses its identity as a Spielberg picture, and while it stays grounded in its approach without the aid of massive sharks, extra-terrestrial beings, magnificent dinosaurs, or changing history by abolishing slavery or lifting some 1,200 lives out of Nazi camps, it still inspires magic and wonder by following a scrawny teen and making him the hero of his own story with all the grandeur contained in the frames of those other iconic works.    

While the production crew are all Spielberg staples, the core cast are all lending themselves to the director for the first time.  One of the most exciting roles to see is Dano’s turn as Burt.  The film finds him in a troublesome position much of the time as the down-to-earth and calculating father who just cannot relate to his more artistically minded son, but it finds the actor in one of his most “adult” roles to date making the film a transition point of sorts for Dano who has worked with his fair share of inspired directors in the past.  His is a difficult role to fill as the patriarch of the nuclear family given that it is Burt’s job that moves the family from state to state, and the only times he embraces Sammy’s art is when he treats it like something that can just get put together in an evening.   

Kushner’s script is far too nuanced and far too complex insofar as its character development for Burt to be the villain of the story; you would be hard-pressed to find any character here that is without some redeeming qualities, except maybe for Chad (Oakes Fegley), an insufferable bully at Sammy’s Californian high school. There is a humanity brought to everyone in this film, and while Chad’s moment of redemption never quite fits into the 150-minute runtime, there is a humbling moment that we do get to see.  It seems a little strange that his story is left so open-ended, almost as if Spielberg and Kushner are saying that some people cannot be changed, but then again most of Spielberg’s antagonists are unmovable forces that act solely in service of their own selfishness and in that sense, Chad feels at home with the rest of that bunch. 

Returning to Sammy’s home life, Williams is a force of nature in the role of his mother, Mitzi, a clinically sad woman who encourages Sammy to pursue his art. Any one of her scenes belongs on the screen above the Oscar stage for her inevitable nomination, and any of the scenes, even blindly chosen, would highlight the incredible work she does here. Mitzi is the emotional core of The Fabelmans as she encourages her children to succeed in life and follow their dreams all while stomaching her own. Much of her arc follows her close friendship with “Uncle” Bennie (Seth Rogan), an affable coworker of Burt’s who fills an honorary role in the extended family.  

One of the major points in Sammy’s tragedy is his discovery of their affair while assembling the camping trip movie at the promptings of his father. It marks the major turning point contained in all coming-of-age films where the character must accept the responsibility for this knowledge, and Sammy becomes resolved to hold the family together. After weeks of acting out, Mitzi finally confronts Sammy before a Scouting Swim Meet, lashing out at the boy and then echoing back to an earlier scene where Sammy debuted his first film to his awe-struck mother, he leads her to the closet and loads the project with a compilation reel of all the footage that did not make it into the camping movie; the footage of her and Bernie. Up until Sammy discovered this, the film plays with the audience – not quite gaslighting us – but Kaminski’s camera clearly captures these flirtatious advances and Kusher’s script refuses to allow the characters to comment on it until this eruption leaving audiences nervously waiting for the shoe to drop. It is a heartbreaking scene coming off not only the argument in the kitchen but to see Mitzi realize everything she thought was hidden from her children was not is one of the strongest in the entire film, punctuated by an equally silent shot of Sammy sitting on his bed with all of the confusion and guilt surrounding him. A relative newcomer, LaBelle harnesses a wild enthusiasm and vigor, but in sequences such as these, he plays them with remarkable restraint allowing audiences to experience everything in tandem with him. 

The Fabelmans is a film full of things to discuss, but it is impossible not to mention Sammy who is the protagonist at the center of it all. That it took this long is a testament to the script which gives everyone their moment in the spotlight, but Sammy is the narrative thread that weaves these characters together into the fabric of his life’s story. Of all of the memoiristic films in recent years, few are more akin to Giuseppe Tornatore’s seminal work Cinema Paradiso (1988) as Spielberg’s is, only this one follows a boy behind the camera instead of the projector. The filmmaking scenes can be seen as gratuitous for those not under Spielberg’s spell, but for those who have given themselves over to the power of cinema, watching Sammy work is like going through an emotional highlight reel of watching Spielberg’s genre-shaping blockbusters for the first time. These sequences though are not so esoteric that those without having experienced Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) or Saving Private Ryan (1998) can still find much to be enjoyed here, yet those who are versed in Spielberg’s work will enjoy watching these influences materialize on the screen. 

LaBelle, and in the younger years Zoryan, possess the scrappy nature found in many of Spielberg’s most beloved characters. From the start, Sammy is shown as a boy that processes his feeling through images, and when presented with his first camera – a secret gift from mother to son – the skill of understanding how to set up shots to capture and recreate a memory is already present. This skill only grows in estimation as it finds the older Sammy running through fields and scrap yards with his friends and troop members filming westerns and war films, and the simple ingenuity such as pinholes to add the effects of gunfire or rudimentary teeter totter physics being laid just out of frame to imitate the ground dispersal from an enemy bomb going off is just an absolute joy to watch play out. The subsequent scenes play out almost finding Sammy like a boy in his father’s work blazer and tie on a Sunday morning, someone acting far older than his age, as the tortured artist pours hours hunched over the editing machine, and when he is forced away from his craft, his mind is always spinning on how to make the picture better. How to make it all real. How to understand. 

After the revelation of his mother’s affair and the move to California, Sammy puts the camera away; perhaps feeling that he captured something a little too real. If there is any part of this film that begins to drag, it is in these early California scenes where The Fablemans begins to set a new stage for itself, understandable as Sammy is seeking to redefine himself in his new home, but it denies audiences the fun and enjoyment in the first half of the film. Instead of chasing the perfect shot, the film finds Sammy contending with Logan (Sam Rechner) the bully at the top of the high school food chain when compared to the yippy lapdog Chad, as well as a budding romance with Monica (Chloe East), a devout Christian who has an almost fetishized obsession with her Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, (Amen). In addition to the crumbling family unit – Mitzie, after buying a pet monkey and going to therapy, moves back to Arizona to live with Bernie – this second half of the film is all about choices for Sammy. The choice of which parent to live with. The choice of what path to follow for his education. The choice of embracing his Jewish identity in the predominately Christian school. These sequences leading up to his eventual return to filmmaking are lacking a bit of the narrative gumption as the earlier half of the film even though they introduce some very engaging topics. Thankfully the creative team that Spielberg has surrounded himself with for this film gives audiences more than enough craft to savor while Kushner takes his time setting up the pins. 

The Fabelmans is a film that is bursting with magic, yet it remains a difficult film to easily recommend despite being a relatively harmless recollection and that lies in Kushner’s slightly-too-manicured script. The very first sequence involves young Sammy visiting the cinema with his parents for the first time in his life – winkingly, Cecil B. DeMille’s The Greatest Shown on Earth (1952) – while his parents loving dote over and worry if it will be too much for his impressionable young mind. We rejoin the family right at the dangerous climax of the film where the train crashes on the tracks resulting in casualties and pandemonium as the menagerie roams free. From this moment on, the film thankfully shakes off most of its twee feelings present as the excited family anxiously huddled and wondered aloud in line at the Box Office, but it quickly begins to reveal that the script does not have a clear goal in mind. It is hardly the first coming-of-age film to have the boiled down plot be simply “boy grows up,” but the meandering nature of the script, while somehow never feeling totally aimless, makes the lack of structure in the narrative just a twinge frustrating at times from a director – and screenwriter – who have continually built upon and improved the three-act structure. 

Those few criticisms of the script, more seeking the sour in the sweet than anything, are not enough to derail the effectiveness of the film as a whole. It is a story about a family persevering in the face of crisis, and while Sammy, the hero, may not be able to save the world, he finds reprieve in the worlds he can create for his camera. He is exacting, demanding, and fierce yet not in a disagreeable way, so that while audiences may not be sure where he is heading – and Sammy himself seems lost for much of the film – we are all too happy to be along for the ride with him. With The Fabelmans, which is overflowing with the acclaimed director’s signature style and heart, Spielberg firmly squashes out any rustling whispers from the contrarians that claim his acolytes have surpassed him by proving what made his work so magnetic in the first place.