Imagine you’re sitting down with a long-time neighbour for tea, maybe someone several years your senior. As you sink deeper in your cup, he tells you about his youth, about how he got to where he is, about his wacky family and their complicated history. He even wanders off at one point to crack open a photo album to give you a better look at decades lived before you were born.
Now imagine your neighbour is Steven Spielberg.
That’s exactly how I felt as I was watching The Fabelmans. It felt almost too intimate to be watching in cinemas with a crowd of strangers. How distasteful of us to be munching on popcorn as Steven Spielberg offers us a glimpse into his most private moments.
I didn’t actually know how much of the film was going to based on Spielberg’s life. I had heard it described as “loosely autobiographical”, but I did have this nagging question throughout the whole watching experience of how voyeuristic I was being. From a quick skim through Wikipedia, it seems like the only element changed were people’s names.
Halfway through the movie, I had to make the conscious decision to stop thinking about how much of the story was lifted directly from Spielberg’s memory. That uncomfortable feeling of seeing something I shouldn’t be seeing was getting in the way of my enjoyment of the story as fiction.
Like every other Spielberg movie I have seen to date (which admittedly is only five excluding this one), Fabelmans unfurls like a children's storybook. The score, the lighting, the manic pixie dream mom with her head thrown back in endless folly. Even the ending shot of an emboldened Sam Fabelman skipping into the sunset lends to the fantastical nature of the movie, missing only a curly-script 'And he lived happily ever after!' splaying across the screen.
As with any good children's story, this movie contained a clear moral. If the quiet smile on Sammy's (the fictional Steven) face each time he screened his movie didn't give it away, the monologue by Great-Uncle Boris certainly would. "Family," he proclaims, bringing an arm across his chest, "Art," another arm goes up, forming an X. "It will tear you in two." Of all the dialogue in this movie, this monologue shines in its intensity. And delivering the monologue is a mesmerising Judd Hirsch, eccentrically an artiste even in his grief.
In terms of performances, Michelle Williams is a standout among a fantastic ensemble. It isn’t easy playing a woman as complex and prone to outbursts of manic emotion as Mitzi Fabelman, but she does so with a delicate balance of grounded heaviness and delightful whimsy.
Another standout moment for me was a scene maybe three quarters of the way through, a silent scene filmed on 8mm film—the only time footage captured by in-canon Sam Fabelman is used as part of the movie we watch. We see the moment the Fabelman family moves into their fancy new house in California, afforded by Mr. Fabelman's swanky IBM salary. Mr. Fabelman tells Sammy to film him sweeping Mitzi Fabelman off her feet and over the threshold. We watch with painful, slow-motion clarity as the dazzling smile slides off her face, before—
—Cut to: the Fabelmans are getting a divorce.
Something about this choice in directing, so different than anything else in the movie, had me gasping aloud. It's a stark step away from Spielberg's usual storytelling methods, straying away from the fanciful fairytale to a heavier reality, the metaphorical drop of the guillotine. Here lies Samuel Fabelman's innocence, may it rest in peace.
Spielberg has apparently said in an interview that this movie is meant to explore the moment in a young person’s life where the veil of innocence is torn down. ‘At what point do you start seeing your parents as people?’ he poses. And although there are many points in the movie that serves to answer the question, nothing does it quite as masterfully as this one scene change.
There were several tongue-in-cheek moments where the characters would borderline break the fourth wall. For instance, Sam Fabelman swearing to keep bully Logan’s breakdown a secret, before cheekily saying, “Unless I make a movie about it!” Personally I enjoyed these minor ba-dum-tss moments; I can always appreciate a storyteller that can poke fun at themselves.
Ultimately, I don’t think this movie is anything to write home about. It was especially made harder by how intimate every shot felt. But I enjoyed the few hours I had getting to understand Spielberg a little better, and I left our teatime feeling nostalgic and fond of a family I had never met before—a sentiment I’m sure Steven would hope for as he wrote this ode to his loved ones.