Spielberg’s self-indulgent ‘Fabelmans’ gets a pass
Steven Spielberg has made so many great films that we probably should just give him “The Fabelmans.” The director of “Jaws,” “Schindler’s List,” “Saving Private Ryan,” “Lincoln” and other classics has earned the right, at 75, to make a movie looking back on his family and origins.
This is a “wonder of me” movie that traces, in loving detail, Spielberg’s development as a filmmaker, an occurrence presented here as something akin in impact to the building of the pyramids or the invention of the wheel. No one will ever be as interested in this subject as the director himself.
Even worse, the line between Spielberg’s true history and coscreenwriter Tony Kushner’s invention seems all too clear. If a scene is dull and seemingly unimportant, it probably happened. If it’s extreme, ridiculous or too on-the-nose, it’s probably Kushner.
Still, the movie benefits from three things: Spielberg’s seeming
inability to make a bad movie, his tendency to get the most out of a scene and his directorial personality. Remarkably, even in an origin story about himself — that assumes as its entire justification his own greatness and then sets out earnestly to plumb the source of that greatness — Spielberg manages to seem open, warm and decidedly not obnoxious.
“The Fabelmans” begins well, with young Sammy going to the movies for the first time. His parents expect that “The Greatest Show on Earth” will be a jolly circus movie, but the film’s violence — in particular, the scene of a train crash and derailment — leaves the boy stunned. He asks for a train set for Hanukkah and proceeds to make his own trains crash.
His mother (played by Michelle Williams) intuits that, in staging these crashes, Sammy is trying to gain mastery over a trauma. She gets the idea that he should use his father’s 8mm movie camera to film the trains crashing, so that he can watch it as often as he likes without wrecking the train set.
The strain of his parents’ marriage is a major thread of “The Fabelmans.” Mom is artistic and intuitive, while dad (Paul Dano) is reserved and scientific. The movie tries hard to play it right down the middle and not favor either parent, but the result is a sense that we’re not getting the full story. Mom is presented as a loving free spirit, prone to spontaneous bursts of interpretive dance. But one can’t help but wonder if Mom was rather someone driven to suck the energy out of every room with her performed sensitivity.
It’s hard to say what to make of Mitzi Fabelman, because whatever Michelle Williams is doing on screen just doesn’t seem real, true or recognizable. There’s no better actress in the current American cinema, and Williams’ effort here is so heroic you can actually feel the strain.
But there’s just no way that Williams can make us believe she’s a Jewish woman from New Jersey living in the 1950s. There’s an essence that the role needed that Williams simply cannot act her way toward. She may have persuaded Spielberg that she was some idealized version of his mother — who wouldn’t want Williams to be their mommy? — but she can’t fool the audience. Dano, by contrast, is lovely as the father, a self-contained man trying to hide his panic that his wife is turning from him.
Spielberg devotes lots of screen time to his alter ego making his early films, but these scenes are dead on the screen. Who wants to watch a kid making home movies, even if we’re to understand that this is something Spielberg did? There are also too many scenes that state, rather clumsily, their precise intention. For example, Uncle Boris (Judd Hirsch), a former circus performer, shows up and lectures young Sammy (Gabriel LaBelle) about the costs of a life in the arts. It’s just pummeling the audience with a message.
In another scene, one of Sammy’s sisters pops into his room to tell him that he’s just like their mother. The problem is, if we didn’t notice this on our own, it’s because it’s not true; and if we did notice, the scene isn’t necessary. And anyway, who could possibly care about this besides Spielberg and his sister?
Fortunately, as Sammy grows up, the story drifts away from the parents, and thus becomes more interesting. The whole last hour, in which Sammy adjusts to being the only Jewish kid going to high school in Santa Clara County, is reasonably entertaining, and there are lots of good individual scenes.
So “The Fabelmans” is entertaining enough, but perhaps what’s best about it is that Spielberg got it out of his system. After this, he won’t ever need to make a film about himself or his parents again.