‘The Fabelmans’ Review: Steven Spielberg’s Deeply Moving Childhood Memoir (2024)

Immediately joining the first ranks of artists’ memoirs, Steven Spielberg‘s The Fabelmans is both a vivid capturing of the auteur’s earliest flashes of filmmaking insight and a portrait, full of love yet unclouded by nostalgia, of the family that made him.

Brought to life by heart-grabbing performances from Michelle Williams, Paul Dano and relative newcomer Gabriel LaBelle, it brims with compassion and understanding for both of his parents, whose divorce split their tight-knit family when he was a teen.

It begins with little Sammy Fabelman (Mateo Zoryan Francis-DeFord), about to see his first movie, standing apprehensively outside the cinema. He’s scared to go inside, where he’s heard the stories are told by giant people, and his parents (Mitzi and Burt, played by Williams and Dano) try to assuage his fears. Amid their soothing assurances, Burt crouches down and tries explaining persistence of vision to the child. Understanding should quash fear, thinks an engineer who believes his fascination with how things work is shared by others, and that’s a lesson Sammy learns inadvertently, through experience: Though he’s horrified by the violent train derailment in The Greatest Show on Earth, he’s also captivated, and is soon reenacting it on a train set he gets his dad to buy. He later masters that emotional response, learning he can own the violence by capturing it, from many angles, on the 8mm camera his mother gives him on the sly.

Right away Sammy’s sisters become the eager cast of his first home-made movies. A story of horror at the dentist’s office and the adventures of toilet paper-wrapped mummies eventually give way to Westerns and war pictures starring the other members of Sammy’s Boy Scout troupe. The kid might be lifting bits of stories directly from the Hollywood movies he’s seeing, but he’s making the technique up for himself. Chiding himself that the shootout in one of his Westerns is “fake, totally fake,” he discovers that poking a tiny hole in the film will create a flash of light evoking a gunshot. Even Burt’s impressed by that.

The teenage Sammy (LaBelle) grows obsessed with cameras and editing equipment. We don’t see him read comic books, watch TV or play records (we hardly even see him in a movie theater); if he’s consuming such things, the movie might imply, they don’t matter until they’ve been digested and put into his movies.

Most of this time is spent in Phoenix, a place with a surprisingly strong hold on Mitzi. A talented pianist whose hopes for a performing career ended two or three children ago, she models the dreamy and reckless aspects of artistic creation. Following her whims and enthusiasms greedily, she’s just off-kilter enough to occasionally call to mind Gena Rowlands in A Woman Under the Influence. As in that film, her literal-minded husband is deeply devoted to her even when she baffles him.

This is the kind of marriage that tempts one to take sides even before a conflict emerges. Some may see the film starting to lean that way, but the script (by Spielberg and Tony Kushner) has too much compassion for Burt to reduce him to a family-supporting robot. Burt has friends (Seth Rogen’s Benny, called Uncle by the kids), can be generous and truly appreciates the beauty his wife and son create. But he also has a foundational belief in the midcentury American ideal of a career, and wounds his son by continuing to describe moviemaking as his “hobby.”

That poisonous word meets antivenom with a surprise visit from Mitzi’s elderly uncle Boris (Judd Hirsch), a vagabond who worked in circuses and in Hollywood. Immediately recognizing a kindred spirit — or turning the boy into one — he delivers a stirring lesson about the conflict between loyalty to family and devotion to art. (Hirsch’s gracefully brusque exit from the screen earned one of two spontaneous rounds of applause during the premiere.)

Marital drama is already brewing when a better job leads Burt to move the family to Northern California. In his new school, Sammy deals with antisemitism and more general bullying, but he meets a girl: Monica, a Jesus freak played with lovably nutty devotion by Chloe East, is fascinated to meet a Jew, and her expressions of romantic interest take the form of joint prayer sessions in which he’s supposed to invite Christ into his heart. Though he’s been taking a traumatized break from making movies, he’s drawn back by the prospect of borrowing Monica’s father’s Arriflex to document the senior class’ field day at the beach.

Sammy has already started to understand how to direct novice actors and recreate dolly shots; editing his home movies, he’s learned that the camera sees things the human eye misses. Now he learns how social meaning can be constructed through camera angles and editing. The boys who’ve humiliated him are transformed by the film Sammy screens at the prom, and not only in ways we’d expect. Afterward, a gripping and surprising exchange shows the kid how, once it leaves your hands, art will mean things to others you didn’t intend and couldn’t have predicted. None of these lessons are expressed in dialogue; the action teaches them to us as well. But the look on Sammy’s face suggests it will take years to accept or hope to understand this last piece of wisdom.

Hard lessons about love await him as well. The movie ends as Mitzi and Burt are reluctantly divorcing, with Sammy staying in California with his dad. He’s started sending letters out in hopes of a job somewhere in the industry. It’s not looking great. But Burt offers a meaningful gesture of support, which opens the door to others; the movie’s closing scenes contain Sammy’s first, tentative encounter with real show business.

It’s easily one of the best endings in Spielberg’s filmography — if anyone tries to tell you about it, shut them up — and it foreshadows a passing of the torch that will turn the industry upside down. But all that lies in the future, and The Fabelmans takes a moment to savor the uncertainty and hope between the imagining of a career and its astonishing realization.