As Steven Spielberg is my all-time favorite film director, it would seem natural that his newest movie, The Fabelmans, which is a thinly-veiled autobiographical account of his childhood and teenage years, would almost automatically become one of my favorite films.  But while it certainly has merit and offers insight into his psyche, I do not love this movie.  At his best, Steven Spielberg presents bigger-than-life moments of wonder and grandeur (and, yes, darkness).  This movie hints at the man who would provide those moments, but he isn’t there yet; besides, this film is not intended to be bigger than life; it is life.  And that is its biggest obstacle.

Steven Spielberg’s film follows Sam Fabelman (Mateo Zoryan, later Gabriel LaBelle) from his first moviegoing experience at age seven to his first studio interview at age eighteen, from New Jersey to Arizona to California.  Along the way Sam falls in love with filmmaking, learns a devastating family secret, experiences discrimination and bullying in high school, finds his first girlfriend and gradually becomes his own person.  Eventually he even meets John Ford.  It’s quite a journey.

Filmed with all the love he can infuse into the story and its telling, The Fabelmans is Spielberg’s story.  But a better title might have been that of Budd Schulberg’s book, What Makes Sammy Run, because it’s all about Sam (and some about his parents Mitzi (Michelle Williams) and Burt (Paul Dano), but very little about the family as a whole).  Sam has three sisters who get little attention at all, and that’s a shame.  What does shine through is Sam’s appreciation for cinema, his studies of it, his own 8mm and eventually 16mm experiences in making films in high school and college, and his aspirations to follow filmmaking as a career path.  All that works really well.

But little of that is new.  Mr. Spielberg has given countless interviews detailing his love of cinema from an early age and how his family situation features in his movies.  This film fills in some blanks and deeper insights, but offers nothing significantly new.  Of course it is new to people unaware of his past, so that may not be a liability to a lot of viewers.  However I found the treatment of Sam’s family situation a little heavy-handed and a lot less interesting than Sam’s own career path.  Maybe that’s because I’m just not a people person.  Maybe it’s because Mitzi seems “off” in certain ways, indicating some mental illness, and I found this more troubling than illuminating.  In any case, this seems like a case where the truth gets in the way of telling a story, or at least dilutes that story to the point of distraction.

As a coming-of-age story The Fabelmans has much merit; we see Sam grow and adapt and change and mature.  As the story of a man embracing his vocation it is even better.  But as a family drama it focuses too much on Sam and too little on the family.  It triumphs most as an introductory lesson about the power of film, how images and the way they are edited can be used to create and manipulate emotion, whether the creator and / or editor intends them to or not.  As Sam learns about this power the film most powerfully reflects the maturation of its own creator.  ☆ ☆ ☆.  29 December 2022.