The Fabelmans First Draft

Complete first draft for In Review Online's best of 2022 feature.

For an oeuvre so relentlessly dedicated to (and associated with) a commercial cinema, full of thrills and cheers, Steven Spielberg’s fantastical and earthly worlds have always carried an undercurrent of pain. His latest film, The Fabelmans, a semi-autobiographical portrait of the artist as a young man, foregrounds this searing emotion across the two or three forces that have defined his mammoth shadow on the American film industry: his awe at the power of the moving image, his parents’ divorce, and his Jewish heritage. It’s certainly no mistake that The Fabelmans possesses only Spielberg’s fourth writing credit (shared with Tony Kushner), as his first three entries all rank among his most evidently personal and feed into their successor’s DNA: Close Encounters of the Third Kind, about a man who forsakes his family for a spectacular adventure; Poltergeist, concerning the spectral histories menacing a suburban home; and A.I. Artificial Intelligence, which brazenly mixes science-fiction fabulism with Oedipal reveries. A similar level of daring animates The Fabelmans, necessarily transforming what could be a nostalgic evocation of movie magic into something far knottier. Even something as simple as the trick that his stand-in Sammy Fabelman (an uncannily vivid Gabriel LaBelle) uses to simulate a grenade explosion is thrown into doubt by the discerning viewer, a question of whether the veteran director added a little something extra despite the air of amateurism. The opening scene, a recreation of Spielberg’s first experience in a movie theater — equal parts wonder and terror, more real than real — is followed by a scene of Sammy in bed, trying to calm himself with the dull thrum and green glow of an oscilloscope; much later, that sound and image will accompany the last moments of his grandmother, in sync with the pulse he can see in her veins immediately before she dies. Such privileged images and dramatically ironic touches help structure The Fabelmans, which could come across as neat were its gaze not so sprawling, were Spielberg not willing to dive down rabbit holes into his past (real or imagined). Case in point: two exhortations by near-mythic figures — in a film already dominated by Michelle Williams’s deliberately stylized performance as Sammy’s mercurial, otherworldly mother Mitzi — speak both in unison and at cross-purposes. Sammy’s lion tamer great-uncle Boris (Judd Hirsch) stresses that the artist will be torn in two by art and family; John Ford (brilliantly embodied by David Lynch, in one of the greatest bits of stunt casting of the century) begins his abbreviated conversation with the budding director by exclaiming that the movie business will tear him in two. Two old hands, one justly described “the greatest film director who ever lived” (an appellation that movingly rings true for both the signifier and the signified) and the other a possibly real, possibly fictional perennial outsider; together they reach towards the balance of art and commerce that has provided Spielberg with some of his greatest successes and most vehement criticism. Boris’s warning becomes a test that gets applied to practically every scene to follow; Ford’s bitter reflection is left unaddressed but hangs in the air, even managing to render the jubilant ending and its sublime meta-joke with a slight foreboding, maybe even regret. Second-guessing and the unknown lie everywhere in The Fabelmans, so many little threads and insinuations that are ultimately unanswered. Burt Fabelman, as embodied by Paul Dano with ultimate poise, generosity, and sad fatalism as a counterbalance to Williams’s vivaciousness, is perhaps the most poignant figure of all. Sammy bases his greatest triumph, Escape to Nowhere, on his father’s war stories, something which the elder doesn’t comment on, instead choosing to throw himself headlong into his electronics and computers. In a relative paucity of screentime, Spielberg sketches out a storyline that comes within striking distance of The Magnificent Ambersons, capturing a genius ushering in the future which will have consequences both positive and negative. Sammy (and Spielberg) of course is no George Amberson Minafer, and there’s very little comeuppance that he deserves. But, despite the fact that Burt, not Mitzi, gets to bestow the final blessing on the genius in the making, it’s hard not to recall that his invention will one day help birth the systemic degradation of the industry his son has worked so hard to maintain. It is to The Fabelmans’s credit that such considerations are both text and subtext, that its ideas about creativity and the march of time are so hammered home amid an exhilarating and touching experience, that the most sobering and tragic ramifications appear only in hindsight, when looked upon from a distant vantage point. If that isn’t movie magic, what is?