Steven Spielberg’s deeply personal, semi-memoir joins a growing list of movie love letters to cinema…
Director: Steven Spielberg
Starring: Michelle Williams, Gabriel LaBelle, Paul Dano
Running time: 151 minutes
In an age where streaming is now arguably the most popular platform for watching movies, it is refreshing to watch another optimistic and critical piece about the importance of cinema for highly appraised directors. This January, Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans joins Sam Mendes’ Empire of Light and Damien Chazelle’s Babylon in exploring the significance of the film industry.
Spielberg’s ode to cinema is established as young Spielberg is reimagined as Sammy Fabelman, a kid in 1950s New Jersey who becomes absorbed by cinema when he watches Cecil B DeMille’s The Greatest Show on Earth. He is entirely stunned by the train crash scene, which he later obsessively re-enacts at home using a toy train set and an 8mm camera.
The film advances to when an older, teenage Sammy (played by Gabriel LaBelle) and his sisters must move to Arizona, then to California for their father’s work. Here, Sammy struggles at high school, getting beaten up by antisemites. Just as The Fabelmans works to analyse Spielberg’s relationship with cinema, it couples up as an ode to his Jewish parents, Leah and Arnold Spielberg. In the movie, they’re Mitzi Fabelman (Michelle Williams) and Burt Fabelman (Paul Dano).
A work of art that will leave you with a bittersweet sense of joy
Much like Spielberg’s other dramatised and fictionalised depictions of Jewish history such as Schindler’s List (1993) and Munich (2005), The Fabelmans reveals how, just like young Spielberg, Sammy experiences antisemitism. Yet, it also joyously follows a family who proudly light a menorah (seven-branched candelabrum) at their window and have a Shabbat (festive day of rest) dinner with kugel (baked dish), challah (braided loaf) and brisket.
There is a large friction at the centre of the family, however, as Mitzi is secretly in love with Burt’s employee and friend Bennie Loewy (Seth Rogen), or “Uncle” Benny. Sammy unwillingly captures proof of the affair in a special home movie of a camping trip they all shared together and chooses to later confront his mother with the footage.
Alongside the engrossing and delicately touching portrayal of family life throughout, another question that keeps you entertained is the wondering of what is real and what is changed. With such a high-profile director that is Spielberg, you genuinely want answers; did young Spielberg confront his mother’s affair so directly, and what scenes, if any, were left cut from this film and why? The Fabelmans is a work of art that will leave you with a bittersweet sense of joy.
The Fabelmans is currently showing at Broadway Cinema until Thursday 9th February
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