Last month, the publicity team for Steven Spielberg’s “The Fabelmans”, a semi-autobiographical account of the filmmaker’s life from 1952 to the mid-1960s, revealed that Michelle Williams would be campaigning for awards attention as Lead Actress rather than Supporting Actress. Award politicking is minor stuff, but the ensuing hubbub online about category placement made me rethink the actual movie. In a rare moment of providence, the publicity journey of the film felt tied to the film’s own projection of itself. The question of whether Williams’ turn as the luminous, but haunted, matriarch of the film, Mitzi Schildkraut-Fabelman, was lead player in the film was a compelling query. What is this film about? And how do these characters, drawn from Spielberg’s life, fit into the tapestry?
“The Fabelmans” is a sprawling, earnest, mosaic of a movie – Sammy Fabelman (Spielberg’s proxy) comes of-age- in mid-century America and with that coming-of-age the film threads two interrelated, but separate, stories: Sammy’s maturity as boy to man and novice to artist, and the fracturing of Sammy’s family tenuously helmed by his prosaic father (Paul Dano) and his more effervescent mother. In the question of leading and supporting players, lies a compelling challenge asking us through which lens to consider the charm of “The Fabelmans,” which brings its camera close to Spielberg’s life even as via incessant sleights-of-hands it seems to find itself also demurring true intimacy. Or a particular kind of intimacy.
“The Fabelmans” is, in many ways, a tribute to the movies. Coming six decades into Spielberg’s career, one could read the sentiments and emotions of this film as a kind of artistic culmination–there are themes of journeying away from home, themes of tightknit but fractured families, and of parents and children. The film, technically confident, features some marvellous moments where its own idiosyncrasies reveal themselves as sharp bits of intertextuality between Spielberg’s own previous work, and even better as a film in an intertextual relationship with numerous films of the era represented in Sammy’s coming-of-age. This is not just a coming-of-age, though but a Künstlerroman – Sammy doesn’t just come of age. He comes of age, as an artist. By the end, his future of being a filmmaker is established with a wonderful jaunty closing scene. The film’s opening features a young Sammy attending his first movie – the 1952 Best Picture winner “The Greatest Show on Earth”. He is entranced by it so much that he recreates its train sequence. The recreation is an important act of bonding for him and his mother. They won’t tell his father, so they decide soldering their bond. And in this whispered moment of closeness, “The Fabelmans” transforms. Or, it recontextualises itself.
“The Fabelmans” is also a tribute to families – or this specific family. And, as a tribute to movies, one can also read “The Fabelmans” against the long line of films where filmmakers put their roots on display. What do we see when we get that close? Although the version of the film we see began in earnest in 2019 when Spielberg and Tony Kushner (who co-writes the script) were working on their previous film “West Side Story” (2021), the initial conceptualisation for the film began as far back as 1999 but stalled because of his own uncertainty about confronting his family troubles onscreen. And there are troubles. Mitzi has given up her artistic desires to be housewife to her intelligent husband, Burt, a man on the verge of scientific breakthroughs so intelligent IBM scoops him up. Their marriage is both bolstered and interrupted by Burt’s friend, Benny — Uncle Benny to the kids — whose presence brings joy to Mitzi in ways that fracture The Fabelmans (the family) and “The Fabelmans” (the movie).
The two parts intersect, and yet a great part of “The Fabelmans” feels as if those parts are in competition. I liked “The Fabelmans” a lot. If pushed, I may even call it my second-favourite Spielberg film of the century. But then when you consider my favourite Spielberg film of the century has been “Minority Report”, I recognise that my taste for what works and doesn’t work in his filmography are atypical. The version of the movie that is all Sammy feels vivid and is its real concern. Gabriel LaBelle, who plays Sammy after a brief childhood sequence where he is played by Mateo Zoryon Francis-DeFord, is precious and winsome and sweet. He is an affecting lynchpin for the film around him. And, yet, even as I loved the nostalgic but truth-seeking account of a life in development, or its winsome tale of family, the object of my affection in it is really Michelle Williams’ Mitzi.
“The Fabelmans” is at its very best when the precociousness of an artist coming-of-age intersects with the dynamics of family life. In close-up. Wonderful close-up. Late in the film, Sammy completes a documentary that is a set-piece for the film. A camping trip with the family, and its adjunct Benny. Burt, always the sensible one, is teaching the children science. Mitzi, in an almost transparent nightgown, dances in the woods and by the fire. The family is transfixed, not completely positively. Benny urges Sammy to film it, and in filming it – and rewatching it – an important fact of his parents’ life is revealed to Sammy. It is not in the shooting of the moment, but in the rewatching of it, that “The Fabelmans” finds its highpoint. Sammy learns that being an observer can lead to unwanted truths. In a moment of sharp emotion, Mitzi watches the “evidence” of the film in a closet. In close-up, we look at Mitzi’s face and in that moment Williams as Mitzi feels like the centre of this world.
For all the ways that the film is infatuated with the largeness of CINEMA, Spielberg knows good and well that all the secrets of the big screen are best when refracted through a close up on a face teeming with emotion. And so, the window to the best of this are those scenes that get right up into the faces. When Janusz Kamiński’s camera catches her face in the right light, Williams’ very being envelopes the screen in a way that the screenplay’s own ambivalence (Mitzi is deliberately filtered through her son’s perspective, rendering her less complex in many ways) cannot counter. The screenplay is not at fault for this. For the first time, Kushner’s deliberateness as a writer feels buoyed by Spielberg own sentimentalism in a way that it has not been in their previous collaborations. The film is sprawling, and sometimes diffuse, but so very empathic and real even when it plays like fantasy.
What works most about “The Fabelmans” is gentleness and wonder that feel vital to its sensibilities. I can understand why some critics feel that the family drama does not coincide as neatly with its coming-of-age. And for a film set in such a time of change, “The Fabelmans” is intriguingly unengaged with the image of America writ large. “The Fabelmans”, as sprawling as it is, has only eyes for the family. And it makes it even more of a fable. Williams’ performance, fragile and tender but indelible, is out of step with everyone else but it is an incongruity that feels essential. She does not fit. And yet, she is essential.
A single shot of her looking out the audience feels like the most dramatic moment in a film of so many astounding moments of spectacle. But whose story is this?
Invocation of awards in movie reviews can often border on the tacky, and yet it’s not the awards prospects as much as it is the question of positionality that I find so compelling in “The Fabelmans”. John Ford appears in the film, first through the appearance of his film “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” and then finally at the end (with a cameo performance of true precision) as a character. But although young Sammy is engaged with the Ford involved in spectacle, I was thinking about Ford the humanist. The Ford of “How Green Was My Valley” or, principally “The Grapes of Wrath” which – with its salt-of-the-earth trenchant nature and social-conscious air – is a far cry from “The Fabelmans” and yet feels so central here. In that film Jane Darwell’s matriarch, Mama Joad, seemed to eclipse the central players so much that it is her eyes shining out that memories of the film conjure first. Mama Joad’s stolidity is a far cry from the gossamer tendencies of Mitzi, and yet I think of Darwell’s turn against Williams. I’m still not sure she is the lead, but when the camera gets so close to her “The Fabelmans” feels not just up close but personal in a way that little else in the film is able to repeat.
Can a performance be so good, so indelible, so sly that it works against a film? Yes, and no. Williams throws “The Fabelmans” off balance in some ways, and when the film forgets her towards the end it feels like a gap. And yet, “The Fabelmans” is striking and thoughtful and energetic. It finds moments for sharp humour amidst the pain and the angst and the familial strife. It never feels painful, but like something incandescent. I almost expected it to end with a shot of adult Sammy making the film, a decision that might explain how even when it examines what is painful, it also feels committed to being painless. How to turn the camera on yourself? It’s an impossible task, but “The Fabelmans” does it with aplomb even when its closeness does not feel always personal.
The Fabelmans is playing in cinemas from November 23.
