Written by Andreas Babiolakis

Warning: minor spoilers for The Fabelmans are in this review. Reader discretion is advised.

I’m the first person to be critical of Steven Spielberg when I feel like he’s indulging in his bag of safeness too much; the American legend has earned his status, but he still has a propensity to make his works schmaltzy to the point of irritation. Then again, I feel like the ticket is how genuine these emotional connections Spielberg crafts are to him. Is he trying to get us to care about these characters in a narrative, or is he sharing a bit of himself as a means of truly reaching out to those watching? One of my favourite Spielberg films is Close Encounters of the Third Kind because I feel like I’m having a conversation with the director amidst the whimsical imagery, and I feel every ounce of truth in this science fiction picture. When Spielberg goes too far, his films can feel sterile. When he works with just the right amount of wide-eyedness, he’s still one of the best directors to awaken emotions within us.

Maybe it’s my personal connection with this film (by now, it’s not a secret that I’m a sucker for motion pictures about cinephilia and/or filmmaking), but I think The Fabelmans is one of Spielberg’s finest films in years, despite how much it relies on making the kind of personal connections that the auteur usually force feeds us. Since the film is heavily based on certain circumstances from Spielberg’s youth, I feel like nearly everything on screen works this time around (outside of the very rare slip, but the film quickly moves on to the next inspirational moment). There’s also the one key factor that elevates this film from being a really good one (a four out of five) to a great one (the score I’ve provided: 4.5), and it’s what you see when you stand back and analyze the film on a meta level. As a straight forward read of the film, you too may feel like The Fabelmans is touching but maybe not quite as special as it thinks it is. For me, it took a reflection to realize what’s really magical here. Take note of how Spielberg as an established American trailblazer pieces together the film to try and have a conversation with the younger, naive version of himself: the kind of words he desperately needed to hear.

Look at the themes of the film and what Spielberg is conveying. He learns that he is able to erase blemishes of poor takes from his final motion pictures while in the editing room, and The Fabelmans connects some of the tribulations of his life within this post production process. Does that mean that we can cut out the flaws in our lives as well? Of course not, and The Fabelmans knows this. Deep down, Spielberg knew this as a budding director as well, but it’s also simpler to pretend that a solution that works in one way works in all ways. That isn’t so, and the Spielberg we know today forces his younger self to face this fact. Seeing this filmic conversation he holds with the character Sammy Fabelman (basically Steven Spielberg as a child and teenager) is quite something. He leaves in obvious clues as to what will happen not for us audience members but for Fabelman himself (this alone is why it’s important to consider what Spielberg does on a meta level here: we can view the film as predictable or as a warning that one’s past self is oblivious to, despite their best efforts to interject with this cinematic time machine).

Fabelman is enamoured with cinema ever since he is introduced to his first film: Cecil B. DeMille’s The Greatest Show on Earth. He processes this one sequence — the collision between a train and a stalled car on the tracks — again and again, initially with an expensive set his father bought him for Hanukkah. It isn’t enough, and his mother knows that their son is more interested in how the film captured such an effect (appropriately, Spielberg chooses a film that has now aged poorly for having what is clearly a model train used as a special effect to be the inspiration for younger him to get started as a filmmaker; why couldn’t he shoot this himself?). Even though it’s his father that encourages him to see his first film on the big screen, it’s his mother that understands this adoration young Sammy Fabelman now has with cinema, and it is from this point that we learn the contrast between the Fabelman parents (based on Spielberg’s actual parents Arnold Spielberg and Leah Adler). His father is inspired by technical innovation, particularly from a scientific standpoint; he also isn’t the best at facing facts within his household, especially when he already knows them to be true and irrefutable. His mother is the artist of the household, who connects to all forms of expressions and vows to hear truths. Put both sets of ideologies together (science versus art, perspectives versus poetry, narrative versus life) and you get cinema: the marriage of all forms of storytelling.

Both his parents, Burt and Mitzi, have their own lives in mind as they try to feign being a perfect household. I won’t pretend that there isn’t love there, because the Fabelman parents do love one another, but it’s clear that there is this divide between the two as they chase after their own different goals and loves. For Burt, he can’t let opportunities pass by him if he can accomplish more with his life. Mitzi cannot deny what the heart wants, because she believes in the purest connection between one’s self and their soul. Spielberg feels like he is about to intervene at many times throughout The Fabelmans, but he has enough restraint to suffer the same curse twice: witnessing his family collapsing before his very eyes. It’s likely a painful exercise for him, but he finds the best qualities of his parents throughout it all. These are still the mom and dad of Spielberg, and he can’t be ruthless with his memories of them.

The Fabelman parents are played lovingly by Paul Dano and Michelle Williams, with a pair of textured, heart wrenching performances that are due to be noticed by major academies very shortly (if not already). Then there’s rising star Gabriel LaBelle that plays Sammy Fabelman and actually fools me into feeling like a young Steven Spielberg actually is on the big screen. Seth Rogan delivers some of his best work to date in this film as family friend Bennie Loewy. Even David Lynch has a brilliantly hilarious cameo (I won’t dare spoil what it is). However, the goal for the biggest takeaway from the film goes to Judd Hirsch in a performance that lasts all of four minutes of this two-and-a-half hour affair. As an eccentric great uncle that pays the Fabelman household a visit, he puts as much as possible into this cameo as possible; it reminds me a lot of what we get from Ben Johnson in The Last Picture Show. Hirsch is hilarious, full of blunt honesty, and he even reveals some vulnerability during his brief stay. I think the idea here is that Sammy Fabelman is meant to be hugely influenced by this one particular memory he clings onto, and Hirsch nails this objective effortlessly. We could have one of the shortest Oscar winning roles in the near future.

With all of these recollections in mind, we don’t really get the life story of Steven Spielberg in The Fabelmans. Instead, we’re strictly focusing on what it took for Spielberg to become a filmmaker, but this tug-of-war between directing and life’s priorities is what we spend most of the film looking at. It all comes from Hirsch’s affective speech: art and family couldn’t co-exist in the generations of old. Even if times have changed, what does it look like when one’s family is crumbling? Can art save this? Is it even worth trying? If it can’t solve everything, can art at least preserve what once was? That final point is what Spielberg is most interested in. He knows he can’t fix his family, but he can place them in the best light (in the same way he can render the school bully an on-screen hero, much to his dismay, with the power of filmmaking). He can cut out whatever doesn’t feel necessary (and, to be fair, not much in The Fabelmans feels like excess). He can listen to a major influence and know exactly where to place the horizon in each shot (it’s actually hilarious how the film starts with the capturing of the filmmaking bug and ends on the sole piece of advice that will make Spielberg a powerhouse director, and it makes the uncharacteristically upbeat finale all the more digestible in this context).

Because of the personal touches that Spielberg has throughout The Fabelmans, I can see why this film resonated with the Toronto International Film Festival audience so much. Hell, I was teary eyed a few times throughout the film. I’m fortunate enough that I have never experienced a broken home or the splitting of one’s parents, but I can still feel every ounce of hurt from the inevitable schism that Spielberg had to watch unravel as if I had a similar upbringing. As Spielberg doesn’t take sides, it genuinely broke my heart to see two loving people know what had to be done in order for them both to be happy as individuals. We’ve seen Spielberg discuss divorce and the deterioration of families in his films before, but now he’s examining what he faced directly without any smoke and mirrors (outside of name changes and a few other artistic choices): this is the life he lived, and he’s living it again (and we experience it vicariously). Whether we live day-by-day in the shoes of teen Spielberg, or the director obviously winks at us viewers (I did chuckle at the acknowledgement of the now-broken promise Spielberg held for decades about featuring a certain someone in his films: I’ll leave that for you to discover on your own), The Fabelmans is as close as we’re ever going to get to having a cathartic heart-to-heart with the film icon. Maybe Spielberg does have better films (because, duh, it’s Steven Spielberg), but The Fabelmans certainly feels like one of his most special achievements.

Andreas Babiolakis has a Masters degree in Film and Photography Preservation and Collections Management from Toronto Metropolitan University, as well as a Bachelors degree in Cinema Studies from York University. His favourite times of year are the Criterion Collection flash sales and the annual Toronto International Film Festival.