This is how The Fabelmans starts and it's a good indication of how it progresses. There are two strains. The first which (thankfully) takes up most of the screen time, is what plays as a frank if ficitonalised memoir of Steven Spielberg's upbringing in a family that steadily grew unstuck and unstable. Young Sammy Fabelman goes through childhood and adolescence hooked on the moving image, making tiny 8mm backyard epics with friends, family and anyone he can rope in. He learns to strive for the real and stumbles on to the notion of coaching performances out of actors and so on, learning with increasingly encouraging feedback that he is good at making movies. The second strain is that we are asked to indulge a fair amount of schmaltz because we know it's really about Steven Spielberg and he turned out somewhat ok.
Meanwhile his parents are drifting apart as his mother's mental health takes a submarine dive while his father pretends not to notice. A new school means new bullies and the anti-semitism only worsens as the perps get older but not wiser. Family and life stuff and it's told with real charm. Then again, this film is given a family name. The mother has a serious arc, the father a constant presence but Sammy has three sisters and we hardly get a peep out of them. I grew up with brothers and sisters and never heard the end of them. If it's really The Fabelmans rather than Sammy and his parents, couldn't we have had more of a sense of the others?
Is this a vanity project? To some degree yes, of course it is. This is one of cinema's Olympians and you just have to give that surrender to temptation a pass, unless you're Elem Klimov with Come and See or Andre Tarkovsky with Ivan's Childhood (you dig the gig, it's rare). Even Fellini's determinedly earthy Amarcord or Roma let his stand-in character come off well. What Spielberg is striving for here, though, is a point beyond even the gravest of his fiction features like Schindler's List, something to suggest his future career was taken as a means of imposing order on a universe that kept crumbling around him. He gets an early lesson in the power of editing to reshape reality, not just glue the best bits together and its use as an emotional movement in the narrative is impressive.
There is, as you might expect in a Hollywood telling of an origins story, a lot of meta here. At its best, Sammy giving us the Spielberg wonder face as he is overcome by the effect of his own creativity (genuinely observational rather than vain) or the cosmos-as-details of the death scene where the Spielberg capacity to comment on the human as a machine to express transparency rather than sardonic commentary (more of a Kubrick thing). The scene where Sammy is confronted by a bully confused into impotent fury by Sammy's positive portrayal in a school film (and Sammy's straw-grabbing defence that suggests it was right for the movie) is probably made of years of experience that the director has endured over the decades.
But then the extended theme of the high school girlfriend failing to reconcile her twin desire to bed him and/or convert him to Christianity just does not work well, ending in a formless moment that reminds us of the epic running time. Aspects of Sammy's mother's struggle with mental illness come across as novelistic quirks (mainly the monkey). The sisters are moved out of the picture (on to a photograph) and it's finally just Sammy and his dad and the path to stardom. Again, Sammy would appear to have always been all the Fabelman you'll ever need.
We get some good casting, here. Michelle Williams was supposedly cast after Spielberg saw her in Blue Valentine which you can understand. If you cast Williams for crisis then well begun is half done. Go-to weirdo Paul Dano plays the dad but sensitively downbeat under Spielberg's direction. Seth Rogan curbs his comic persona enough to claim some characterisation. A lot rests on Gabriel LaBelle's shoulders as the bearer of Spielberg's own stand-in, Sammy. It is very difficult to separate his performance from our familiarity with the real life Steven Spielberg but his one for one resemblance with the director and assured and rangy turn give us no obstacles in following him.
Overlong with its strongest moments undercut by schmaltz, The Fabelmans is a consummate Spielberg film. It just happens to be about himself. Motivation? Well, I can see anyone wanting to tell the story of their parents when it involves some confrontation and offers some lessons. As a literary tradition, the bildungsroman of itself bats nary an eyelid but on film because of the immediacy and associations with life writ large, scored with orchestras (hello, John Williamson) we approach with caution: are they going to overinflate themselves or surprise us with humility? In recent times Paul Thomas Anderson gave us a less than flattering youth memoir with Licorice Pizza (I'm aware of the life/period warping) and the self-consciously out there David Lynch narrated his childhood to youth memoir The Art Life with a quiet and pithy sincerity. Spielberg doing it was never going to feel like it was made in a shed and it is longer than it needs to be but I can say that this person who dislikes most of the director's movies, sat very happily through almost all of this one.
The final scene is getting spoiled all over the online world but I won't join that. I will, however, say that it's from a purportedly real anecdote of when a movie god to-be met a movie god in situ who is played by a movie god from the underground. It's a pure delight.
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