Editor’s Note: This review originally ran as part of our coverage on-site at the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival. Read through our full slate of reviews from TIFF 2022, as well as our official preview, and revisit our complete archives of this year and past festivals.
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In a way, Steven Spielberg has always made semi-autobiographical films, even if they were about alien abductions or Nazi-fighting archaeologists. The man has lived a life immersed in cinema ever since he saw his first film as a child. As such, his expressions of selfhood, like many filmmakers before him, have always taken a particularly specific cinematic form no matter the genre, using the language of film and its conventions and history to discuss his life in the way that Marco Polo uses fictional cities to describe Venice to Kublai Khan and his court in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. So it’s with both excitement and trepidation that I regarded the prospect of The Fabelmans, a genuinely semi-autobiographical film about his childhood without any of the genre insulation, replaced by some specific detail. One can imagine the lengthy complaints about watching Spielberg become Spielberg, about the lack of drama inherent in movies about fulfilled dreams, where one already knows the ending. But The Fabelmans is about as lovely a picture as one can hope for in 2022 or any other year, a sweet yet sad and self-effacing yet clear-eyed tale of coming of age, in which one discovers that the figures known to a child as Mom and Dad were people before their offspring was made flesh from hopes and dreams and that they remain so even throughout their lives.
On a winter night in ’52, Burt (Paul Dano) and Mitzi (Michelle Williams) Fabelman take their young son, Sammy (Mateo Zoryna Francis-Deford), to a screening of Cecil B. De Mille’s The Greatest Show on Earth. It’s the first time the kid’s ever been to a movie, and he’s terrified by the prospect – giant people on a screen! – and his father, both an engineer and inventor, explains to him the technology that makes pictures possible with genuine wonder in his voice. His mother, a pianist and music teacher, chooses a more abstract and metaphorical route: cinema is the stuff that dreams are made of, dreams you’ll want to be in and live in and, maybe, work in. And, sure enough, Sammy is hypnotized by what he sees on screen, with the infamous train crash in the middle of De Mille’s film provoking an intoxicating blend of genuine danger and thrill within him: He’s transfixed by it, to the point that he requests a remote-control train set as his Hannukah gift that year (after jokingly telling his parents that he wants Christmas lights as his gift). One night, he crashes his new Lionel train, each car given to him on a different night, mirroring what he saw in the film, and the violence of it knocks him back into the garage’s wall, collapsing some of the shelves. His father’s a little frustrated with him – they’re precious objects, not Tinker Toys – but his mother recognizes what’s going on and helps him make an 8mm film of the trains crashing. She says it’ll be the last time he’ll ever crash them, but he can watch the film over and over again, provided he keeps it their secret. It’s then that Sammy realizes that he can make movies and enlists his sisters and friends in realizing his projects, his work becoming a source of pride (and some consternation, say, when he uses up all the toilet paper making a mummy movie) for the household.
Spielberg captures the joys of these early moments lovingly and tenderly that’s both steeped in his nostalgia for his childhood but also the magic of realizing that the images one could see on the screen could be made by anyone, provided they had the commitment and energy (and money) required to bring them to life. It’s also here when the first hints of darkness creep into the frame: one day, his father announces that the family will be moving to Arizona, where he’s taken a job with IBM working on computers. His mother’s distraught at this news, in enough shambles about having to leave behind her friends and family that she very nearly drives her children into a tornado’s path, but there’s some consolation – Benny (Seth Rogan), his and long-time best friend and employee, will be moving to Arizona alongside them – and Mitzi is ecstatic at that little bit of news. See, they’ve grown pretty close over the years: he makes her laugh, appreciates her piano-playing, and satisfies her emotionally in a way that her more closed-off yet kind and stable husband can’t. But things don’t come to a head in the household until Sammy’s a teenager (Gabriel LaBelle), a well-liked Eagle Scout with many pals, each of whom view his little film shoots as a great way to have a good time (and earn merit badges). He saves all of his money to buy film and camera equipment for these projects, with Mom and Dad helping in the best ways that they can, both of them wowed by his inventiveness and industry when it comes to making backyard films on 16mm with a bunch of kids. An end-of-summer camping trip, however, unwittingly becomes the last few days of his childhood: his grandmother passes soon after, and his dad asks him to make a little movie of the footage Sammy shot on the trip. In the process of doing that, he discovers how deep the connection between Mitzi and Benny is and begins a process that will change his life – and his parents’ lives – irreversibly.
I can say that, without a doubt, this is the best film produced by the triumvirate that has collaborated on most of Spielberg’s prestige work over the last decade. Tony Kushner’s screenplay, co-written with the director, is often compassionate but unsparing, never losing sight of the essential humanity, good and bad, of the characters. Janusz Kaminski’s cinematography – of which I’m on record as not being a huge fan of in recent years – is stellar, evoking a sort of studio-lot Malick in the way that some of its details recall the hyper-focus of shots in The Tree of Life (it’s also more colorful than much of the DP’s output, which is a major bonus. Spielberg’s direction is always fantastic, but he’s never been so comparatively self-indulgent, pursuing the little details that he can point to, cite, and find wonder in regardless of audience desire or expectations. He reshot all of his childhood movies, despite having them preserved, as a way of both being able to be a “better” filmmaker than he was as a kid and reliving the experience in some way. The Fabelmans, like all of his films, is deeply referential: folks talk about directors like Tarantino creating works in which one cinematic allusion is stacked on top of the other until it becomes something new, and that’s often true of Spielberg as well. But unlike, say, his attempts at grappling with his own effect on culture in something like Ready Player One, Spielberg’s building a memorial to the filmmakers that influenced him, both classic and contemporary, while also providing a more sensitive understanding of his past output.
Take, for instance, the scene in which Mitzi, amid panic about the move, becomes an impromptu tornado chaser with her children. On one level, it’s a direct allusion to similar scenes of chaos on the New Jersey streets in War of the Worlds (the key difference being that Tom Cruise is driving away from the danger rather than towards it), but on another, it also recalls the Coen Brothers’ A Serious Man, which ends on a tornado being a kind of expression of God’s continual heaping of misery onto the characters. That film also documents the collapse of a middle-class Jewish-American family and the son’s growing alienation from his “weak” father. Given Spielberg’s working relationship over the years with the Coens, it feels intentional. The difference between those two films comes down at the line delineating tragedy and farce, with The Fabelmans being the former and A Serious Man defining the latter, and just as the Coens’ film was perfectly cast for its purposes, so is The Fabelmans. The revelation here is LaBelle, who, given his character’s drive and energy, recalls aspects of Cooper Hoffman’s work in Licorice Pizza, but an added heaping of teen angst, for reasons often very justified (aside from the obvious, there’s an amount of antisemitism at school, though it doesn’t emerge until later on in the film), yet his expressions of his frustration at home take on the believable petulant tenor of a child suffering through a traumatic period in his family life (take notes, Aronofsky!).
But, as expected, the known quantities in the cast do amazing work. Dano is amazingly empathetic in his quiet way, full of a deep peace and kindness that other characters can mistake for lifelessness, and Williams is effervescent, striking notes of Judy Holliday-like brassiness and wit assisted her oversized accent without straying too far into caricature. Rogen’s basically the ideal actor for playing a charming schlub who one can see is vaguely worth breaking up a marriage for but who one also remains a healthy skepticism for, and Judd Hirsch, who shows up for a single scene as Sammy’s batshit uncle, a former circus trainer who takes to yelling at the kid, whose room he’s colonized, in his boxers about art and passion. There’s also a genuinely lovingly-crafted tribute to a modern filmmaker in here, one who makes an in-film appearance as a figure of note from cinematic history, and it is wonderful to watch unfold (you can find that information elsewhere because it does exist, but I ain’t spoiling nothin’). It’s just incredible work by all involved, and I wouldn’t be stunned if each of the major players walks home with a statuette involved walks home with a statuette next year – not that it really matters, but I think any discussion of this movie will inevitably tilt towards that, especially once more folks get to check it out.
I can already sense some of the frustrations that folks will have with this film – the self-indulgence, some sort of nebulous criticism of the family dynamics as it appears on screen here, the pacing/runtime, and whatever the hivemind decides is a flaw worthy of a Sophocles play when it comes out – but as a latter-day reflection piece, steeped in a deep love of joys, process and all, of the medium and a genuine sense of affection and disappointment, The Fabelmans stands out as an example of how to do this kind of ambitious autobiographical filmmaking for an audience larger than one. A friend, also attending the festival, pointed out to me that it feels like Spielberg made a movie about confronting his own death (much in the way that I considered The Irishman as Scorsese’s attempt to do the same), but I don’t fully see it as that as much as I respect their opinion. Rather, it feels like a time capsule, oriented less around mere idolatry of The Young Steven Spielberg Adventures and more about attempting to preserve, in amber, the figures that shaped him, to archive the sadly ephemeral nature of our closest relationships in a way that everyone could understand. Like one of his most important (if not iconic) protagonists, Spielberg has taken the tools available to him – memory, talent, money, skill – and channeled them into something that is later easily understood and felt but appears somewhat odd and discomfiting in the moment itself. But once one gets his intentions, one can understand why he looked at The Fabelmans and their quiet lives whose importance is foregrounded by their humanity – their passions, their attempts to try and be sturdy forces for one another in a chaotic world, the love they imparted to their children – rather than by the loud one their son would later live, and said “This is important. This means something.”