The Fabelmans
This film is perfectly fine but it has not stayed with me, which is the way I judge a really good film. My headline view of The Fabelmans is not because I have a condescending attitude to Spielberg’s films. In fact, the reverse: I have found many of his films deeply moving and he has succeeded in being appreciated by critics and mass audiences alike – the sweet spot for any film maker. Unfortunately, despite the obvious story-making and cinematic skills manifest in this film, it didn’t hit my sweet spot.
Spielberg appears before the film begins to explain that this film is his most personal because it is about a family very much like his own, and its youthful protagonist, Sammy Fabelman, is a nascent film maker. If you know anything about Spielberg’s biography and watch this film then the similarities are blatantly clear. It’s a coming of age story for the young film maker; and his obsession with creating movie stories gradually becomes his way of controlling the world. This is because the heart of the story is the slow disintegration of his parents’ marriage.
The Fabelmans are a professional Jewish family living in America during that golden age period of possibilities after the second world war. His father Burt (Paul Dano) is a talented, hardworking computer engineer. His steady, good-natured but unimaginative nature is a contrast to Mitzi (Michelle Williams) his vivacious, spontaneous and creative wife who gave up a potential artistic life as a concert pianist for the stability of the nuclear family. There you have it, then – Sammy as an amalgamation of both as the technically supreme storyteller.
As the universal domestic story of Mitzi and Burt’s mismatched relationship gradually unravels, we are given fascinating snapshots of technicolour American suburban life. The hook is that we not only see Sammy developing his craft whilst capturing this world but we are also able to respond to the knowing references to his future films. I’ll say no more but if you have only seen a few of his films you’ll enjoy spotting some beautiful and typical Spielbergian visual images where the domestic is imbued with a greater significance.
When Burt moves the family to LA to take on a big Silicon Valley job, the strains on the marriage reach a crisis point. For Sammy, this is a triple whammy: he is not only struggling with the usual adolescent angst but also the anti-Semitic attitudes of his homogenous WASP schoolmates. The gentle and nostalgic tone of the first half of the film then evolves into a powerful exploration of the damage of divorce on a family as well as a teen high school movie.
The only issue in the pre-LA section is Burt’s concern that Sammy is wasting too much time on his film making hobby. However, when the family moves to LA against Mitzi’s wishes, the drama accelerates. Eventually, when Sammy’s parents explain to him and his siblings that Mitzi is moving out, Spielberg conjures up a scene with real emotional heft. The film finally finds a hopeful resolution as the young adult Sammy is allowed to embark on his career and has a slightly anomalous encounter with the world’s greatest living director played by David Lynch in the final scene of the film.
And the fact that Sammy had begun to follow his dream and his family had moved forward from the family break up all made me happy. Okay, perhaps it moved too quickly from the mess of Sammy’s adolescent years to this positive ending but the narrative arc had been handled well as one would expect from Spielberg and the talented screenwriter, Tony Kushner.
So why did I find it just a perfectly fine film but one that lacked resonance? After all, the cinematography was top notch evoking the fizzy excitement of America at that time. In addition, the acting particularly by Dano and Williams was convincing – he unable to use his problem-solving skills to make his wife happy and fulfilled and she unable to accept that her life in LA had nothing more to offer (spoiler: there’s a third person in their marriage). One scene did stick with me – the aforementioned family discussion about the separation. That was not enough, though. The youthful film making montages and the nostalgic episodes from the family’s life passed by on screen in a smooth, enjoyable manner … but they didn’t stick. Still, even a merely fine Spielberg film is better than most.