Using filmmaking as a way to understand follows Sammy into his adolescence. Now portrayed by Gabriel Labelle, Sammy’s got a burgeoning filmography under his belt as he recruits his friends and his sisters to act in his short films. Having moved to Phoenix from New Jersey thanks to Burt’s career, the Fabelman’s are living an idyllic suburban life, with all the dissatisfaction that burbles beneath it. Mitzi is increasingly manic and restless, and Burt by himself is powerless to contain her moods. His best friend Bennie (Seth Rogen) is around all the time, just as much a companion to Mitzi as he is to Burt. Sammy’s constant filming and editing of home movies turns him into a close-watcher of this dynamic, and he soon comes to the conclusion that his mother is in love with Benny. Another move, this time to California, leaves Benny behind, sending Mitzi into a funk and Sammy into a lonely all-American high school where he’s bullied for being Jewish. Though his home life is falling apart and his friends are far away, Sammy can’t stop picking up his camera.
Sammy’s life isn’t particularly complicated. From the early moment young Sammy leans forward in his seat in the theater, his trajectory is locked in. The Fabelmans doesn’t portray Sammy as the most interesting character on screen. In repeated instances, other characters will have reactions that baffle him and Sammy’s response isn’t curiosity but continued befuddlement. The version of the Fabelmans that’s only about the magic of filmmaking wouldn’t leave these questions behind. It would be more concerned with the cinematic choices he makes, like why, in a graduation video he shoots in California, he portrays one of his bullies as a golden god. It would have a thought about the son of a WWII veteran making playful short films about the war, and would be less bemused by a teen actor having an emotional reaction during one of those shorts. It would consider the casting of a Native American friend (Lane Factor) as a sheriff in one of Sammy’s Westerns, and how that might be received by Sammy’s small community. The Fabelmans is most interested in filmmaking as a technical endeavor, and the most charitable reading would be Sammy’s dawning realization that it’s more than that, though a final scene doesn’t suggest as much.
The dissolution of Mitzi and Burt’s marriage is where Sammy is most affected, and there’s something missing from this section too. There aren’t any scenes between the parents or Benny that don’t involve Sammy, so all three characters remain distant to the viewer. Their relationship to Sammy is clear, but to themselves, it’s more opaque. This is an understandable choice for an autobiography, but it keeps nuance out of a conflict so recognizable that it’s practically a cliché. An artistic woman marries a reliable man and trades her ambitions for family, only for the unrest to find its way out in ways that destroy the marriage. There’s frequent mention of Mitzi’s life onstage as a pianist, but the film withholds those scenes for her playing in the loneliness of her home, therefore shrinking her world and putting her in a cage. Technical Burt can’t fix his wife, who spends more and more time with the emotionally available Benny. Williams, saddled with a haircut that matches Spielberg’s mom but looks silly, plays her frustrations as moony and distracted until she pulls off the occasional burst of creativity. Hers and Burt’s incompatibility is so obvious that the emotion is largely drained when the inevitable occurs, and Tony Kushner, a reliable Spielberg partner and a great writer, fails to create credible dialogue in the aftermath for the kids. Spielberg has been winding up for his whole career to tell the direct story of his parents’ divorce, and a director so capable of emotionally guiding his audience fails to do so here.
Like so many of Spielberg’s works, the capacity of The Fabelmans’ to entertain leavens its frustrations. A cavalcade of guest stars and set pieces keeps the film moving. Judd Hirsch has a couple scenes as a long-lost uncle, briefly returned to impart some wisdom to Sammy from his life in entertainment. An incredible cameo at the finale is red meat for film fans in more ways than one, followed by a rare meta moment from Spielberg. Teenagers riding their bikes through their community with optimism and abandon is one of Spielberg’s most iconic settings, and he reuses it here to solid effect. Family dinners with Jeannie Berlin as a grandma are microcosms of Jewish Americana, clearly evocative for Spielberg who was reported by Rogen to be in a constant state of tears behind the camera. Navigating high school is just as evocative but more universal, between the fear and frustration of bullies and the elation of meeting a girl who, hilariously, thinks Jews are hot. The Fabelmans moves between scenes with momentum, never feeling long despite its 151 minutes.
It's good that a director as iconic as Spielberg is able to expunge all these childhood experiences, thus revealing more of himself to his audience and potentially improving his past work in the process. The wish in the Fabelmans is that it was more introspective and critical, doing more than the straight reportage that so much of the film comes off as. The aforementioned final scene is a great anecdote, taken word for word, but is it in the movie because it’s informing what’s come before or because Spielberg couldn’t leave the encounter out whether it fits or not? This isn’t a thematically tidy or even coherent film, but whose life is? The Spielberg facsimile onscreen doesn’t seek out what things mean, and maybe the adult one doesn’t either. B