Film review – The Fabelmans

My (slightly spoilery) notes on The Fabelmans

It’s like a remake of Peeping Tom only Mark grows up to be Steven Spielberg instead of a serial killer.

For his autobiographical film, Steven Spielberg has brought in heavy hitter co-writer Tony Kushner – perhaps to add some nuance and other perspectives on what are presented as anecdotes about Spielberg’s lightly-fictionalised family … showing how his young enthusiasm for movie-watching and making became a thread on which his coming of age was hung, along with a lot of drama about his parents (his siblings, not so much) which has resonated in almost all his films.  As a kid, Sammy (Mateo Zoryan DeFord) is wowed by The Greatest Show on Earth and tries to recreate its great train crash with his toy train set – his father Burt (Paul Dano), a perhaps neurodivergent computer genius, disapproves of the damage to expensive items so his mother Mitzi (Michelle Williams) encourages him to use a cine-camera to preserve the stunt (which has to be done only once).  This leads Sammy into filmmaking – Gabriel LaBelle takes over the role as a teen, and Sammy stages more and more ambitious western and war films with his Arizona boy scout troupe before a Blowup moment when he’s editing film of a family camping trip and realises his mother is in love with faux-uncle Bennie (Seth Rogen) … which precipitates a move to California, a brutal spell in a bullying-heavy high school movie, first love with a proselytising Christian (Chloe East) who has Jesus pinups along with other 1960s teen idols, and another use of editing to make a school beach break picture into an act of mythologising and revenge which stirs something strange in adonislike jock jerk Logan (Sam Rechner) and a nod and a wink bit where Sam swears never to tell about his nemesis’ weakness ‘unless I put it in a movie’.

A coda, after his parents’ divorce, begins the well-known Spielberg story as he gets a gofer gig on the Universal lot – which will lead to TV, Night Gallery, Duel and a career – and has a brief, pointed encounter with ‘the greatest film director of all time’, John Ford (David Lynch – inspired casting), who gives a very pithy pictorial lesson.  It gets in Judd Hirsch and Jeannie Berlin as satellite Fabelmans, but the most layered work comes from Dano and Williams as a mismatched couple who unwittingly hurt each other because of their oppositional positions on science and art, which we can infer shaped the sensibility which made, say, Close Encounters of the 3^rd Kind (though, oddly, this stresses Dad genres like western, war and circus and has nary a hint of Spielberg’s fantasy – outside of a toilet-paper-swathed mummy movie).  Mitzi explains that Burt is a genius but often his family don’t realise it until Bennie explains things in terms they can understand – suggesting that Bennie, who gifts Sammy a camera, is the real role model for a great populist filmmaker.

It’s long and entertaining and of course episodic, with few obvious historical markers – no JFK assassination, no Sputnik (which must have resonated with SS), so much emphasis on antisemitism that no other civil rights issues are raised – and an understated, rather appealing sense of period defined by naff pop music selections (John Williams’ score cannily quotes bits of classic film scores) and retro tech porn.  I was hoping for an MCU-like post-credits scene where Joan Crawford looms into the frame.  Bullying creep Chad is played by an actor called Oakes Fegley (Pete from the Pete’s Dragon remake) – if you were called Oakes Fegley, would you admit it?