For a review of The Fabelmans (why do I keep wanting to add the word Meet in front of the title?) please scroll down to paragraph two. This first paragraph is going to be a little more personal, flagging up points of connection which may explain precisely (or even more likely, imprecisely) why Spielberg’s work usually appeals to me so much. I cannot remember seeing my first ever movie. Spielberg’s was The Greatest Show On Earth and the train crash terrified him. But if I can trust my late parents’ memories, mine was Bambi and its thunderstorm upset me so much I had to be taken screaming out of the cinema. So connection made. Our mutual passion, both born from childhood trauma! As regular Cine Outsider visitors will know Close Encounters affected me deeply. I saw the UK premiere of E.T. at the Edinburgh Film Festival and mounted my high horse after catching a BBC news programme rubbishing the film as a cynical toy advert. I wrote a long, impassioned letter in 1982 defending Spielberg and all four columns of it were printed in Starburst magazine. In it I concluded with these words… “It’s just a shame that Steven can never see E.T. for the first time.” In a Sunday Times Culture magazine interview this weekend, forty-one years later, the famed director said “I’d like to see E.T. through the eyes of someone who never saw it.” A-ha. There’s that absurd coincidence of a piece of children’s bedroom set dressing (a Snoopy poster on the wall), an identical one of which I put up on my bedroom wall hours before the night I left home to see a preview of Close Encounters. Full story here. Scroll way down to just above the third screen grab (the children’s bedroom). Spielberg the child was also aware that his mother was becoming dangerously close with his father’s best friend after catching loving gestures between them on film. What that does to a boy, one imagines, is rock his entire foundations. As a point of comparison, I was once privy to a disintegrating marriage of close friends but was not able to let the rest of my social circle know and had to toe a very fine line of deception and psychological agony. In the movie, Spielberg the teen closes his mother in a closet and lets her see the evidence of her looming unfaithfulness projected privately. Finally there’s the Holy Grail of the young film nut, a piece of kit both of us lusted after as kids… A plastic box with a light and a screen with two out-foldable arms on which you placed your reel of film and spooled it by hand through the viewer to the empty spool on the other side. This is how you learn that editing is the true craft of filmmaking. An editor was born… In fact I think the actual devices were called ‘Editors’.

Now, if I can, I’m going to imagine that Steven Spielberg was not the subject of The Fabelmans and will attempt to review it as a movie, pure and simple. To be honest, this is next to impossible.

In the 1950s, in the US, a young boy is traumatized by a scene in a movie and becomes passionate about film with his parents’ blessing. Using film as an emotional distancing technique, the youngster, Sammy, recruits his sisters and school friends in making a series of ambitious war films on Super 8mm. There are fewer more sure fire ways than averting bullies’ fists and withering scorn than by making them heroes in your own home movies. Sammy’s father is a gifted engineer and his mother, a concert pianist. It surprised Spielberg himself to suddenly be made aware, after the completion of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, that the humans communicated with the benevolent aliens with a fusing of both his father’s and mother’s skills. That’s not a coincidence but an inevitability. Sammy’s mom can be described lazily as a ‘free spirit’ but she seems to be open to the vast realms of creativity that her life presents her with. In filming his family and their outings, the young Sammy catches a moment of tender intimacy between his mother and his father’s best friend. It’s the moment of fracture which informed Sammy’s filmmaking from movie-mad teen to the directorial giant now at the grand age of seventy-six, still at the vice-like grip and mercy of his childhood experiences.

The Fabelmans move house necessitated by the father’s career, take vacations and all the while being documented by Sammy’s omnipresent camera. As his parents’ marriage falls apart, Sammy has to re-adjust his emotional core all the while by suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous family fortune. As a male teen, he has girls to reckon with as well as domestic upheaval. Anti-Semitism was also a curse of the young Sammy’s life, being picked on for his own ethnic identity, something he could do nothing to change. Those that target an individual’s otherness, again something the ‘other’ can do nothing to alter, deserve our gentle but forceful push back. But then if these jocks are physically capable of beating us to a pulp, another strategy is required to avoid injury. Then there was the dating game. I wondered in today’s climate how one might complement a girl on her attractiveness and sexual alure. The short answer in 2023 is NEVER DO THIS. The long answer I came up with was when they were dishing out sexual attractiveness to each person in turn, the conveyor belt got stuck… That or a million roses laid out on the road in front of her house. God, how difficult is it now to just say “I find you attractive.”

Moving on.

The performances of all the actors are pitch perfect but then you would expect nothing less from a director exorcising and exercising his personal demons. Gabriel LaBelle superbly and empathically plays Sammy Fabelman, the sixteen-year-old who aspires to become a filmmaker. Equally effective is his younger incarnation, Mateo Zoryan Francis-DeFord as young Sammy. I did wonder if his name could possibly be a little more ornate. Michelle Williams plays Mitzi Schildkraut-Fabelman, Sammy's supportive mother and a skilled pianist. “You don’t owe anyone your life, not even me,” she tells her son. From a mother, that’s quite an admission. She is the creative whirlwind at the centre of Sammy’s life. Buffeted by her strong personality is Paul Dano as Burt Fabelman, Sammy's father and a computer engineer. Dano excels at the weaker but loving father, a World War II veteran whose emotional integrity wishes only the best for the woman he loves (this is love at its purest and highest zenith) and is subsequently struck hard by his wife’s infidelity with his best friend Bennie. Seth Rogen plays Bennie Loewy, Burt's co-worker and best friend who becomes a surrogate uncle to Sammy. Rogen has a thankless role, the lynchpin that undoes the Fabelmans, but love is a tricky emotion to master. While he is the poison in the family dynamic, it’s difficult to pile blame on a man who simply loves a woman despite how much that woman is loved by another.

Human beings, huh?

Then there’s Judd Hirsch as Boris Schildkraut, Sammy's granduncle and a former film worker and circus lion tamer. This is the Obi Wan of the family and his wisdom informs Sammy’s worldview with gems like “Family, art… It’ll tear you in two.” Spielberg seems to have squared that circle by having many children and being rich and powerful enough to indulge his art while his family still enjoy the benefits of being raised by powerful and resource-laden parents. Having and eating cake, perhaps but that’s what power allows you to do. Finally I must acknowledge David Lynch playing John Ford who gives the teenage Sammy some worldly advice. The last shot of the film perfectly demonstrates the power of received wisdom. It’s also very funny.

The Fabelmans is an arresting drama which sheds a blinding light on the background and upbringing of a man who has shaped Hollywood for richer or poorer and his autobiographical film has been justly celebrated this year by the US Academy and BAFTA despite its less than Jurassic Park box office performance. It’s not the greatest film ever made but it is a revealing portrait of the artist as a young man (with suitable apologies and nods to James Joyce).

* https://www.npr.org/2022/12/26/1144707146/steven-spielberg-was-a-fearful-kid-who-found-solace-in-storytelling