Review: Filmmaker Steven Spielberg’s semi-autobiographical coming-of-age tale is both quintessentially honest and sentimental
That sheen can’t help but be tenderly reassuring: As Spielberg seems to be saying throughout this chronicle of his early years, look at what those years produced! Here, the audience he’s courted so assiduously throughout his career finally gets to peek behind the curtain at the angst, confusion and subsurface chaos that governed the childhood Spielberg has been contemplating, reinventing and mythologizing ever since.
When Burt and Mitzi take Sammy to “The Greatest Show on Earth,” he’s terrified at first ; his father patiently explains the concept of persistence of vision, literally breaking an otherwise mysterious medium down to its physiological elements. Later, Sammy will studiously try to reenact the train crash that so fascinates and repels him. Cinema becomes Sammy’s way of taming his fears and, later, exerting control over dynamics that threaten to dismantle not just his family but his sense of self.
Those dynamics mostly center on Mitzi, a temperamental, mercurial creature played by Williams as if channeling Ruth Gordon and Judy Garland; she’s an outsize figure who has obviously loomed large in Spielberg’s consciousness, for good and, if not ill, at least profound ambivalence. Mitzi is a figure of empowerment — she’s the one who gives him his first camera to manage his creeping anxieties — but also of insecurity.
As warmhearted and revelatory as “The Fabelmans” is during these early years, it loses some of its spiky specificity once Sammy gets to high school , where he experiences antisemitism overlaid with adolescent cruelty. A subplot involving a devoutly Christian girlfriend is broad and tonally generic, as if it’s been lifted from a Barry Levinson outline; the bullies who give Sammy grief feel similarly one-dimensional and reductive.
Far more effective are the re-creations of Sammy’s earliest cinematic efforts, when he learns the rudiments of staging, filming and editing, and gains confidence ordering his Boy Scout troop to play dead.
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