Matthew J. Dinaburg

It’s his story, but it’s not history. And that should be clear from the first moments of Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans (2022). The film opens on a large crowd outside a movie theater, and the camera moves to a family in the front, re-framing on elementary schooler Sammy Fabelman (Mateo Zoryan), wide-eyed and nervous. He’s scared of going to the movies. Sammy’s father Burt (Paul Dano) crouches on his left and explains the technical brilliance of persistence of vision. Sammy doesn’t get it. Now it’s Mom’s turn. Mitzi (Michelle Williams) kneels on his right. She explains that movies are like dreams. Little Sammy acquiesces and they walk to the theater, trumpets blaring over the soundtrack – since when do trumpets blare on New York City sidewalks? 

Already, we have character introductions. Burt is blunt, technical, and understands science – a computer engineer. Mitzi is different – more creative, imaginative, and she’s an artist. The first scene grounds the family’s struggle: Little Sammy is caught in the middle of an engineer father and an artistic mother. And he understands his mother better. There is the objective reality: this was the makeup of Spielberg’s own family. And there is subjectivity as well: the trumpets, the dialogue, the staging. That’s what makes a dramatization.

The Fabelmans return from the theater discussing Hanukkah. Little Sammy, transfixed by John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), can’t think of much else besides the film’s epic train crash. He asks for a train set, and when the day comes – the family belting Hanukkah tunes in their golden suburban home – a train set is what he receives. This train is the subject of Little Sammy’s first film: a recreation of John Ford’s crash scene. It shows his precocity for filmmaking, with different angles and continuity editing, preposterously advanced for an elementary schooler. But, talent sometimes defies understanding.

Mitzi is proud of Little Sammy’s work, and Sammy makes his first bunch of movies, re-creating a dentist appointment, dressing his sisters up as mummies, jump-scaring them in closets. In big family gatherings with Uncle Benny (Seth Rogan) and Grandma Hadassah (Jeannie Berlin), life seems good. 

But, this won’t last. Burt receives a job offer from General Electric and plans to relocate the family to Phoenix without Uncle Benny, to the dismay of Mitzi. Michelle Williams’s performance shines in this moment; she stuffs Sammy and his sisters in the car and abandons a shocked Burt on the front lawn, newborn Lisa in his arms, ala Walter White and Skyler in Breaking Bad, gender roles reversed. Her drastic actions are enough to convince Burt; Uncle Benny comes with them. 

As their car approaches the new house in Phoenix, Sammy filming the arrival, we cut to an undisclosed number of years later, around ten. Enter Gabriel LaBelle as teenage Sammy Fabelman – vulnerable, intelligent, and utterly fantastic. High-schooler Sammy is well-adjusted to life in Phoenix, popular, but when he and his friends pile into the movie theater, Sammy jumps over row after row, from a long-shot to a close-up, foregrounding that he loves cinema more than socializing. He tells Burt he “wants to make movies,” to which his father replies, “I’m talking about making something real.” 

The Fabelmans loses value because people are so concerned with whether every scene really happened to the legendary director. Of course not. Stop looking up: “The Fabelmans: History vs. Hollywood?” This is the most touching and raw portrait of modern life since Barry Jenkins’ Best-Picture-winning Moonlight (2018). It humbly, considerately contemplates on themes of lost love, divorce, and bullying. This film doesn’t owe its glory to Spielberg’s later success: it isn’t about the trials Spielberg faced when making his greatest works. It’s about finding a passion that his father didn’t accept, and about being a child caught in the tornado of his parents’ divorce, about living in a world of explosive, corrosive anger.

But, there’s a humor and brevity to The Fabelmans that elevate it. Little Sammy’s first films of his sisters are hilariously charming, and Judd Hirsch as the deranged, bipolar Uncle Boris will leave you gasping for air. “Now ride the goddamn elephant!” Uncle Boris shouts. And Sammy does, writing and shooting Westerns in Phoenix, learning to direct, edit and improvise.

And it employs some genius, unprecedented devices that allow it to stand on its own. Sammy’s love of cinema makes a clear connection to Giuseppe Tornatore’s Cinema Paradiso (1988), but they work on completely different levels. Sammy uses his love of cinema to investigate the world around him, while Toto (in Cinema Paradiso) uses it to escape the bitter reality of his situation. Sammy’s endless recording is the way he engages with his surroundings, which reveal themselves to him in ways he never would have noticed with his eyes alone. He says, “I just hold the camera. It saw what it saw.” 

The power of the film – why we want to know if this all really happened to Spielberg – is because we’ve grown up with Sammy. We’ve been at school with him, in his house with him, learned about shooting and editing with him. We’ve fought his parents with him, confronted Uncle Benny with him, comforted his sisters with him, fallen in love with him. We’ve been him. We were there for it all. And we want to know whether it’s the real Steven Spielberg, or some dramatized version. It’s a great fairytale that we want to say definitively, yes! This is really what happened to America’s great hero! 

But what does it matter? Don’t feel duped that certain things weren’t accurate to history. The film is moving and affecting, and it’s laugh-out-loud funny. It hits every bar. It’s beautiful and powerful and poetic and truthful, and instead of focusing on “just how truthful,” ask: where does The Fabelmans rank among the rest of Spielberg’s work? 

Answer: Right up there with the best of ‘em.

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