More than once during his fabled career, Steven Spielberg has been dismissed as a technician masquerading as an artist; as the most popular of American filmmakers, the logic goes, he must also be the most impersonal. It's a judgment that doesn't quite explain the intensely personal connection a lot of us feel to his movies. Or does it? More than any other director, Spielberg confounds the notion that the personal and the popular, or the technician and the artist, are fundamentally at odds. The intensity of feeling you experienced on your first (or third) close encounter with a Spielberg classic — maybe you levitated out of your seat at "Raiders of the Lost Ark" or had your nerves shredded by "Jaws" — was likely so pure that it felt like yours and yours alone, never mind that millions of moviegoers around the world felt the same way.
And so it's worth considering exactly what it means to describe "The Fabelmans," Spielberg's piercing, rollicking and altogether marvelous ramble through his early years, as his most personal work. That assessment may be correct, if we assume "personal" to be synonymous with "autobiographical," and also if we overlook the snippets of family history that he's woven almost subliminally throughout his earlier films. Fire up "1941" and "Saving Private Ryan" and you'll catch stray glimpses of his father's World War II stories. "E.T." and "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" endure not only as wondrous alien-visitation fantasies but as portraits of families in disarray, something that emerged directly from the pain of his parents' divorce.
But "The Fabelmans" — movingly dedicated to Spielberg's parents, Arnold and Leah — is his first picture to put that particular divorce front and center, along with various other intimate, semifictionalized details culled from his postwar upbringing. He's grafted those details onto a young alter ego named Sammy Fabelman, first seen as a young boy played by Mateo Zoryon Francis-DeFord. Spielberg, sharing a writing credit for the first time with his regular collaborator Tony Kushner ("West Side Story," "Lincoln"), rummages through a treasure chest of old anecdotes and memories, stringing together road trips and sporting events, summer vacations and Hanukkah gatherings. There's a death in the family, a couple of bullies, a memorable first kiss and even a prom-night climax.
