'The Fabelmans' A Review

The Fabelmans is an autobiographical drama from Stephen Spielberg. The film opens in New Jersey with Sammy(the Spielberg stand-in) going to his first movie, The Greatest Show On Earth, with his parents Mitzi(Michelle Williams) and Burt(Paul Dano). He becomes obsessed with the train crash sequence and, after getting a train set over Hanukkah, begins to recreate it and film it launching his interest in making movies. Burt gets a new job and the family movies to Arizona and Sam's movie-making broadens. The story then splits focus alternating between Sam's burgeoning artistic ambition and his parents marital issues.

Gabriel LaBelle who plays the older Sammy(the bulk of the runtime)brings a gracious, open, naturalism to his performance. He grounds and centers the film, no small feet for the younger actor. Although his totally unnecessary and bafflingly obvious colored contacts are supremely distracting. Michelle Williams gives an odd, broad, caricature-like performance that strains credulity almost immediately. She is the film's defacto co-lead and that focus is bizarre from the standpoint of the script as well as her performance. It's reminiscent of her over-the-top relatively thin turn as Marilyn Monroe in My Week With Marilyn. Whether it is the script, direction, or her conception of the character it doesn't work and it is grating to watch. A mid-Atlantic mentally unstable wannabe starlet is what comes across. Dano doesn't have much to do and his performance is so reserved it doesn't have much of an impact. There are some great supporting cast members- Judd Hirsch(who functions exclusively to provide exposition and make some subtext text), Seth Rogan(who doesn't have much to do), Julia Butters(Sammy's sister, doesn't have enough to do), Sam Rechner(a conflicted bully), and Chloe East(Sammy's Jesus freak girlfriend)- but the story itself lacks focus and the supporting characters come and go seemingly with little purpose.

The film looks and sounds great, there is no argument that Spielberg is a master craftsman the big issue is it's too long and lacks focus. There seems to be a lack of understanding from Spielberg about what his story is actually about. Is it about movies(the first act is), is it about his mother's undiagnosed mental illness/his parents divorce/family dysfunction/emotional abuse(the second act), or antisemitism(kind of the third act?). Thematically it's scatter shot and various aspects of it don't really come together, it plays more as a series of loosely connected vignettes rather than a narrative which may be realistic as to what actually happened but it fails to get at what Herzog calls the ecstatic truth. For example Mitzi is clearly suffering from some form of mental illness and we see her repeatedly being emotionally abusive to Sammy, once physically abusive, and yet there seems to be no awareness on the part of the filmmaking that this is what is happening, there is such a lack of point of view it implies this behavior is normal and begs the question does Spielberg even know what his parents were doing, has he ever been to therapy, does he even understand the effect of the memories he's recreating. The result is that we are simply watching sequences of trauma with little awareness and no insight.

Perhaps this will have some appeal in the 55 and over demographic, but although well made and mostly well acted, for all the effort The Fabelmans simply relays events but lacks perspective on those events.

Currently in theaters, coming soon to VOD.

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