reviewDirector Steven Spielberg (Jaws, Jurassic Park) once told that the original concept of his masterpiece E.T. The Extra Terrestrial (1982) contained no extraterrestrial being. The film would be about the impact of a divorce on a child and how the resulting loneliness can be compensated. You could say that Spielberg was nominated for seven Oscars The Fablemans yet are alienless ET has made. And the child in question may be called Sammy Fabelman here, but it is of course actually Steven Spielberg himself.
As Sammy in the 1952 Cecil B. DeMilles classic circus film The Greatest Show on Earth behold, his first and crushing cinema experience, the boy has found his calling. With his train set and an 8mm camera he films his first action scene and by wrapping his sisters in wet toilet paper to turn them into mummies, he produces his first horror print. When he makes a poof-poof-poof western with neighborhood friends and shows it at school, his father asks how on earth he managed to add flashing lights to the firing guns. By poking small holes in the celluloid with a needle in exactly the right places, it sounds sober. Mr. Fabelman sees all cinema as a hobby, not as a potential career move, but it is impossible to ignore his son’s artistic talents.
Sammy develops a cinematic eye, something that is often brought to the fore in surprisingly subtle ways. When the Jewish family is in a hospital room, for example, he is the only one who notices the weakly beating carotid artery of his dying grandmother. When this stops, the boy is the first in the room to know that she is no longer alive. Later, in high school, during a truant day at the beach, he portrays his class bully in such a way that he comes across as an athletic God. He will probably be happy with that, so that the teasing will finally stop, is the thought. Film as a distorted version of reality. But Sammy accidentally captures the shocking truth behind his parents’ marriage during a camping trip.
The Fablemans reminds us of the versatility of the medium, but fortunately it is so much more than an ode to cinema with Spielberg patting himself on the back. Many of his films, even when they contain roaring dinosaurs and UFOs, deal in the subtext with broken families, the lack of a father figure and complex mothers. This time he tackles such themes directly and in a deeply personal way. Michelle Williams is especially great as Sammy’s (read: Spielberg’s) mother Mitzy, a warm, loving, but also troubled woman.
The Fablemans is not an ego document, but a sensitive and magnificently acted family drama about making sacrifices in the clash between art and ‘ordinary life’. And how those two really need each other. It’s also about something very universal: the realization that your parents are also just human beings with flaws. The fact that Spielberg manages to avoid sentiment makes this one of his most mature and best films since the turn of the century.
Directed by: Steven Spielberg. Starring: Gabriel LaBelle, Michelle Williams, Paul Dano and Judd Hirsch
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