Spielberg Goes Easy on Himself in The Fabelmans

There are two poor compositions in The Fabelmans — the first ever of Steven Spielberg’s career. In an awkwardly focused father–son portrait, Burt (Paul Dano) explains how the home movie of young Sammy (Gabriel LaBelle) was made to please his mother; it’s also dramaturgically ill-conceived, splitting the family story’s equilibrium. In the second, Burt frowns at a photograph Sammy hands him that brings back sad memories, his dejection framed by a looming ceiling that diminishes him while obscuring the boy.

I know better than to question Spielberg’s visual precision, but these scenes feel either emotionally inert or their meanings are muted. In both shots, the stagnant father–son relationship hides a terror that the film’s family drama only presumes to reveal.

The Fabelmans — a warm, fuzzy quasi-memoir — sentimentalizes things Spielberg never before dared confront but for which he had previously found perfect, powerful, mythic analogies: the meek father and brash, immodest mother of The Sugarland Express; the isolated father of Close Encounters; the guilt-ridden father of Hook; the keys-bearing surrogate father and frantic mother of E.T.; the family at-sea in Poltergeist; the unknowable father, unfaithful mother, and wayward son of Catch Me If You Can. We already know Spielberg better than he knows himself.

Now serving with a new light hand in The Fabelmans — without his usual dynamic swing and volleys — Spielberg leaves explication of his family story to be translated in a collaboration with Tony Kushner, the playwright whose most affecting domestic drama was the race-and-ethnicity centered Caroline, or Change, the musical Spielberg should have filmed instead of remaking West Side Story. But a soft-touch Spielberg is not Spielberg in full artistic mode. That’s why The Fabelmans seems to hedge its dramatic risks, as if muting the heartache and thousand natural shocks that marriage and adulthood are heir to, then trading that guilty consciousness for facile teasing about Spielberg’s career and professional legend. As the Fabelmans move from New Jersey to Arizona to California, the first half is generous, but cynicism sneaks in; they’re almost Hollywood sitcom figures.

Yet there are also two great images in The Fabelmans. The first occurs when Spielberg idealizes his initial exposure to movies. Little Sammy (played by Mateo Zoryon Francis-DeFord) dreads his parents taking him to see Cecil B. DeMille’s Greatest Show on Earth (1952), but his fear turns to excitement at DeMille’s climactic train wreck. Sammy gets inspired to make 8mm versions of the spectacle, using the Lionel train gifts he receives at Hanukkah. This Eight Trains of Hanukkah montage intermixes Jewish culture with the quick-change visual wit that distinguishes Spielberg’s craft. It’s the film’s most ethnic sequence, and it has a spiritual climax when the flickering toy-train images are projected onto the palms of Sammy’s hands. His wide, blue-eyed fascination perfectly recalls the Mecha David in A.I. Behold: the miracle of cinema art and technology.

That awesome image is nearly matched in its surreality when the mother Mitzi (Michelle Williams) drives Sammy and his three sisters to witness an actual tornado. Mitzi’s recklessness is not necessarily an inherited trait; instead, she explains that Sammy has started making movies because “he needs to control things.” But the tornado excursion shows us something else: Sammy is enthralled when ordinary objects — a train of supermarket shopping carts — are loosed from their commonplace function and take on an otherworldly life of their own. Think of Spielberg producing Twister (1996). Then remember how mundane Americana seemed enchanted in Close Encounters.

At age 75, Spielberg explains the influence of his mother Mitzi’s mania (she combined concert-pianist training with free-spirited, risky quirks) as the source of his own playful, thrill-seeking vision. The Fabelmans shows Spielberg’s reluctance to criticize that gift. The title accepts his reputation as a “magical” storyteller, but his artistry is more than that. The failure to acknowledge his father’s computer-scientist influence — unable to resolve his filial allegiance — makes the film ultimately superficial and disappointing.

The Sammy figure is torn between ambivalent feelings about his father and mother — and an intrusive “Uncle” Bennie (Seth Rogen) — but Kushner’s script favors the mother over the father. This is not a deeper understanding of Spielberg’s artistry; it comes across as mere feminist preference. The camera dotes on Mitzi, with Williams sometimes staring so hard she almost looks into the camera. Her Peter Pan pixie appearance deranges the complex parental guilt dramatized in Hook, yet the Oedipal issues are dodged.

Is this why Kushner, author of the gay, communist classic Angels in America, resorts to ethnic politics in the film’s second half? As the harridan mother gets crazier, young Sammy retreats into filmmaking and competing with the bigoted WASP world, but in juvenile terms that never come to grips with the ethnic insights that obviously sustained him; nor does he explore how exactly he acquired those social skills and professional advantages. Sammy’s awareness of his mother’s infidelity, his father’s complaisance, and how both were relieved by his creative Boy Scout merit-badge projects and fantasies requires a separate article.

The Fabelmans is consistent with Spielberg’s sympathetic eye for human foible that we know from The Color Purple, Empire of the Sun, Always, Schindler’s List, Amistad, Minority Report, Catch Me If You Can, The Terminal, War of the Worlds, and Munich. But it seems that Kushner has led him toward a self-deluding facetiousness that’s distressingly similar to Noah Baumbach’s in The Squid and the Whale: looking back at family dysfunction and winking, cutely. It suppresses issues about family life, American habit, and art-making that demand more rigorous personal scrutiny. The Fabelmans makes nice — the very aspect of Spielberg’s films and art that his enemies have always misjudged and denigrated. But since Spielberg is not a minor social climber angling for attention, it’s unseemly that he should peddle his own legend and then misrepresent it.