The first thing you realize watching The Fabelmans is that Steven Spielberg has been telling the story of his childhood in bits and pieces throughout his career – through the domestic turmoil in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the suburban expanses of ET the Extra Terrestrial, and the many lost boys left to grow up on their own. Yet Spielberg has waited until now to tell his story directly, from the perspective of a grownup who may have experienced a turbulent adolescence, but didn’t fully comprehend the complexities of adult relationships until he aged a little himself and could see the past more clearly.
Along with great films such as Armageddon Time and Aftersun, 2022 has been a year of thorny nostalgia pieces, with directors rejecting the cozy conventions of the coming-of-age film in order to interrogate memories rather than preserve them in amber. With a crucial assist from Tony Kushner, who brought so much dimension to Spielberg’s West Side Story last year, the script for The Fabelmans is structured around a boy’s journey from his magical first trip to the movies, where he thrilled to the spectacle of The Greatest Show on Earth, to his appearance on a studio lot as a young adult. Yet the way his movie-love dovetails with family upheaval makes an important point about Spielberg’s brand of commercial film-making: blockbusters don’t have to be impersonal.
