The Fablemans is Merely Okay

 

THE FABELMANS

Directed by Steven Spielberg

Universal Pictures, 153 minutes, PG-13 (language)

★★★

 

 

 

The Fabelmans is a thinly veiled memoir and origin story of director Steven Spielberg. As we now know, it was nominated for seven Academy Awards and came away empty-handed. It will be months before I see all of the films that actually won hardware, but I can see why The Fabelmans was blanked.

 

I should confess my personal bias upfront. Many have called Spielberg a master storyteller, but I have always found him more interesting visually. With the obvious exceptions of Schindler’s List, Saving Private Ryan, Munich, and Amistad, his plotlines are too Disneyesque for my tastes. This is exactly how I felt about The Fabelmans. It’s an okay movie, but not an impactful film; in other words, it’s safe and mainstream rather than artistic or revelatory. 

 

Spielberg based the story on his parents and extended family. Like his father Arnold, Burt Fableman (Paul Dano) is an electronics whiz whose work paved the way for the computer revolution. As the movie shows, it also uprooted his family from New Jersey to Phoenix (1957) and eventually to California (1965). Spielberg’s mother Leah is reimagined as Mitzi (Michelle Williams), a former concert pianist turned homemaker. The narrative begins in 1952, when Burt and Mitzi take young, shy Sammy to his first movie, The Greatest Show on Earth. As the cliché goes, he never looks back. By the time he is an adolescent and the family is living in Phoenix, Sam (Gabriel LaBelle) is a Boy Scout/aspiring Eagle Scout earning merit badges in photography and 8mm movies based on films he has seen in theaters.

 

The Fabelmans is also about his parents’ escalating marital woes. Bennie Loewy (Seth Rogan) is both Burt’s best friend and Mitzi’s fantasy crush. The latter increases as Burt dives deeper and deeper into his work. You know what happens when fantasy, boredom, and reality bleed into each other. Mitzi begins to rekindle her concert career, slowly drifts from Burt and Sam, and emotionally craters after her mother’s death. Sam bears the double burden of having advance knowledge of his mother’s fixation on Bennie and his need to cope with anti-Semitism at his California high school, especially at the hands/punches of bullies Logan (Sam Rechner) and Chad (Oakes Fegley). He’s so out of place that his savior, Monica (Chloe East), wants him to embrace her savior, Jesus. Of course, his actual salvation came in Hollywood, though he actually met John Ford when he was 15, not as an about-to-be college dropout as depicted on the screen. (Richard Zanuck was more influential than Ford in launching Spielberg’s career.)

 

There are good things to say about The Fabelmans. Dano and Williams are strong as Burt and Mitzi. Likewise, Judd Hirsch, as Sam’s great uncle Boris Podgorny, and David Lynch in a cameo as John Ford have tasty small roles. Julia Butters is also affecting as Sam’s sister Regina/Reggie, who is based on Spielberg’s oldest sister Anne. It was also a clever touch to recreate Spielberg’s boyhood 8mm projects for the film, as they demonstrate his precocious visual imagination.

 

At several points, though, the movie goes off track like Sammy’s Lionel train. There is too much time wasted establishing family dynamics in an overly long film, thereby forcing Spielberg to truncate anti-Semitism themes. Although Sam’s “Ditch Day” film is delicious revenge, the movie’s Jew-baiting is more standard public school bullying than a serious exploration of Golden State prejudice in the mid-1960s. For what it’s worth, it also bugged me that as the movie goes on, Sam looks and acts more like Dustin Hoffman’s Benjamin Braddock in The Graduate. I also began to wonder if the movie’s title was a self-serving pun on “fable-man” with the b and the l transposed. Mainly, though, I pondered what happened to co-writer Tony Kushner’s edge; he’s usually more adventuresome. In addition, parts of The Fabelmans are as overblown as a John Williams movie score, and he happens to have scored this one.

 

I reiterate that it’s not a bad movie, but though I’ve seen just a few of the Best Picture nominees, I can easily imagine there were at least five better choices for consideration. If you want to watch a great film about a boy whose imagination was sparked by cinema and went on to become a director, the gold standard is Cinema Paradiso (1988), director Guiseppi Tornatore’s semi-autobiographical retelling. It’s a beautiful mix of sentiment, tragedy, and nostalgia.

 

Rob Weir