In his 1984 review of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, the venerable American critic Dave Kehr memorably dismissed Steven Spielberg's rollercoaster hit as betraying "no human impulse higher than that of a 10-year-old boy trying to gross out his baby sister by dangling a dead worm in her face".
The remark was typical of the critical sentiment toward a director then seen as shamelessly, even ruinously populist, but such disdain aside – with all due respect, Dave, if there's a higher human calling, I've yet to encounter it – he did have a point.
In The Fabelmans, Spielberg's warm, witty, and wonderfully moving new film à clef, we meet that kid, spooking his little sisters with a spring-loaded skeleton, splattering them with fake blood and wrapping them in toilet-roll mummy bandages, and watching with delight as a well-placed licorice spider causes chaos at family dinner.
But we also come to understand how those instincts made him arguably American cinema's most significant popular artist of the late 20th century, and how – in reckoning with a very personal and turbulent family story – his movies came to be a mirror for the audience.
Truly, if any filmmaker has earned the right to fashion an ode to themselves at this stage in their career, it's Spielberg. From early, era-defining hits Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind through to E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Jurassic Park, and the Indiana Jones series, his films are more than simply some of the biggest and most beloved in popular cinema, they're an enduring catalogue of American audiences' desires and elations, anxieties and fears; their sense of spiritualism and sentimentality.
In putting his story on screen, Spielberg doesn't just turn his camera on himself – he turns it on us.
Both memoir and Spielbergian myth, The Fabelmans opens on an almost primal image of the artist forged in light and sound. It's 1952, and pint-sized Spielberg stand-in Sammy Fabelman (Mateo Zoryan) is about to see his very first movie, Cecil B. DeMille's circus epic The Greatest Show on Earth.
"Movies are dreams," says his cherubic, faraway mother, Mitzi (Michelle Williams), ahead of the screening with his father, Burt (Paul Dano), but the film's climactic, calamitous train crash soon becomes Sammy's nightmare – and the thing he can't look away from.
As this preternaturally gifted kid re-stages the disaster with a train set, filmed on Super 8 – his head looming grotesquely large against the model in a quintessentially Spielbergian tableau of terror and awe – movies become a form of therapy to work through his fears. (Is it any wonder he would go on to be so adept at terrifying audiences with sharks, dinosaurs and Nazis?)
It's true for both the child and the now 76-year-old Spielberg, staging glossy re-enactments that – not unlike the mecha-hybrids reanimating the android boy's life in A.I. Artificial Intelligence – become dioramas of memory, lit by Janusz Kaminski's prismatic cinematography and tinged with some distant, wistful melancholy.
Driven by Burt's electrical engineering job, Sammy's loving but restless clan are constantly on the cross-country move, in many ways reflecting the aspirational journey of the postwar Jewish family attempting to assimilate with whitebread America.
Their cultural heritage is set against a prefab suburban residence in Arizona (a dead ringer for the nuclear test town in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull) and, in the film's second half, the WASP-y enclaves of Northern California, where a now-teenage Sammy (Gabrielle LaBelle) works through his sense of displacement the only way he knows how – by shooting his life through the lens of his filmmaking.
In almost any other director's hands much of this would be indulgent, and feel like glib pop psychology, but Spielberg – a born ringmaster and entertainer – brings the audience into his embrace, reminding us of his uncanny ability to extract the personal and make it universal.
At the same time, The Fabelmans is the first instance in which we've seen Spielberg reckon with his upbringing without the analogy of, say, extraterrestrial visitation or meddling poltergeists, a late-career director examining his life in a film that he quipped – in the wake of losing both his parents, in 2017 and 2020 – amounted to "$40m of therapy."
It's only the third – after A.I. and Close Encounters – of Spielberg's 33 feature films on which the director has a screenplay credit (he co-wrote with frequent collaborator, the playwright Tony Kushner), and like those earlier works, it is fascinated with the combustible dynamic between children and emotionally fraught parents.
The Fabelmans digs deep into Spielberg's complicated relationship with his mother and father, and into the career tensions they embodied between art and science, embracing their faults and contradictions as essential to the filmmaker he would become.
Where the director had once attributed his parents' divorce to his workaholic, absentee father – played by Dano with a mixture of frustration and insecurity beneath his placid facade – The Fabelmans suggests that it's his relationship with his mother that was both more rocky, and more vital.
As beautifully played by Williams, Mitzi is troubled, flighty, a touch manic – a classical pianist who has, like so many women of her era, buried her talent in favour of home-making.
Though Spielberg is sometimes (erroneously) called to task for his depiction of women (there's even a gag about it here), his portraits of mothers are among some of the most tender in American cinema.
His treatment of Mitzi's whims – her impulsive pursuit of a tornado that looms, War of the Worlds-style on the suburban horizon – and her irrepressible emotions – a family-rupturing affair with Burt's best friend, Bennie (a funny, Peter Pan-like Seth Rogen) – is rich with empathy, with the understanding that, in his mother, there resides so much of himself.
In a career full of iconic images, Spielberg stages one of his most revealing here: the headlights of the family car illuminating Williams as she spins beside a campfire like an earth-bound angel, part Gena Rowlands, part Tinkerbell, while the director's camera – and the reaction shots from those around her – run the gamut of awe, confusion, maybe even arousal. (Has there been a more Freudian moment from the filmmaker who gave us the hot shiksa mums of E.T., Close Encounters, and A.I.?)
Spielberg once famously declared "I am the audience", and The Fabelmans is especially attuned to how his broad, crowd-pleasing skillset is anchored in a very specific, very Jewish post-WWII boomer need for acceptance – and how, paradoxically, it took a true outsider to show the majority how it sees itself.
One scene in particular – a school locker standoff between Sammy and the resident high-school jock, richly played by Sam Rechner – shows just how much Spielberg learned to negotiate bullying by holding a mirror up to his oppressors, filming them ostensibly as a way to garner popularity but also as a way of drawing out their vulnerabilities and contradictions.
The moment unlocks so much of his cinema, catching the minting of the mainstream myth-maker whose blockbusters would help to usher in a franchise superhero landscape that stands as a pale imitation of his work; spectacle minus the essential humanity – or at least, you know, a dead worm dangled effectively in the audience's face.
A very different passing of the torch occurs late in The Fabelmans, when the teenage Sammy meets his irascible hero, populist titan John Ford – played in a perfect foghorn by Spielberg's opposite number in suburban sentiment, director David Lynch – who barks some priceless advice on framing that's paid off here in one of Spielberg's most playful final shots.
"How would you like to meet the world's greatest director?" a TV executive sharing the backlot with Ford asks the wide-eyed Sammy. It could just as easily have doubled as the film's tagline.
The Fabelmans is in cinemas now.
