Review: Steven Spielberg digs into his roots in 'The Fabelmans,' a brilliant love letter to family and filmmaking

It takes Judd Hirsch, who only appears for a couple of minutes, to summarize the beauty and brilliance of Steven Spielberg’s semi-autobiographical drama “The Fabelmans” — when, as bombastic old Uncle Boris meets the teen Sammy Fabelman (Gabriel LaBelle), he pinpoints the kid’s future: “Family. Art. They’ll tear you apart.”

Sammy is the stand-in for Spielberg himself, as written by Spielberg and his “Lincoln” and “West Side Story” screenwriter Tony Kushner in a deeply touching, sometimes funny, script. 

We see Sammy first as an 5-year-old (played by Mateo Zoryon Francis-DeFord) in 1952, scared about sitting in the dark to see a movie for the first time. His father, Burt (Paul Dano), a computer engineer back when that was a new thing, describes scientifically how movies are still photos flashing by at 24 frames per second, and our mind translates that into motion. His mother, Mitzi (Michelle Williams), a one-time concert pianist, gives the more soulful explanation: “Movies are dreams that you never forget.”

This Venn diagram, between technical genius and yearning artist, is where Spielberg has been his entire career — and meeting his parents, or a reasonable facsimile, explains a lot. But it doesn’t explain everything, and “The Fabelmans” shows an artist’s influences aren’t always so cut and dried.

The train wreck he sees in his first movie, Cecil B. deMille’s “The Greatest Show on Earth,” so fascinates and terrifies little Sammy that he asks for a model train set for Hanukkah — so he can re-enact the crash and demystify it. When Dad objects to damaging his toys that way, Mom has an idea: Take Dad’s 8mm Keystone camera and film the crash, so he can watch it again and again until it’s no longer scary. And thus Sammy Fabelman makes his first movie.

As Sammy gets older, he keeps making movies with his friends and his Boy Scout troop (with sequences that seem to foreshadow “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” “Saving Private Ryan” and other future classics). Meanwhile, the family moves from New Jersey to Arizona to Northern California, as Burt’s talent for computer programming becomes more in demand. But the moves reveal the strains in Burt and Mitzi’s marriage — which the teen Sammy notices when he’s going through footage of a family camping trip and finds footage of Mitzi getting oddly close to Burt’s colleague and friend Bennie (Seth Rogen). 

Filmmaking, then, becomes a refuge for Sammy, a place to hide from the hard adult emotions that grip his family. In school, it becomes a defense mechanism, against harassment by his antisemitic classmates, and a way to impress girls.

LaBelle is a terrific discovery, as his Sammy matures from a wide-eyed movie lover into a thoughtful artist. Dano, as Burt, shows the exasperation of a father who tries to support his son’s passion even when he doesn’t understand it. And Williams, giving one of the most touching performances in a career full of them, drills deep into Mitzi’s longing for artistic fulfillment and true love.

Though “The Fabelmans is deeply inspired by Spielberg’s childhood, Spielberg keeps his own emotions at arm’s length. He doesn’t need to wear his heart on his sleeve to show what shaped him in his early years, and by showing that reserve he lets us to find for ourselves the universal chords of how family can both nurture and confound one’s passion. After a half-century of rewiring the world to watch movies differently, Spielberg knows he can trust us to follow his breadcrumbs to the movie’s emotional core.

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‘The Fabelmans’

★★★★

Opens Friday, November 23, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for some strong language, thematic elements, brief violence and drug use. Running time: 151 minutes.