Are we obligated to love the “personal films” made by great directors, lest we be required to turn in our cinephile cards? It seems that with Roma, Alfonso Cuaron unlocked an industry-wide permission for filmmakers to make movies about their own childhoods, an impulse that dovetailed with the pandemic’s heightened sense of our collective mortality. In 2021 we got a similarly reflective film from Kenneth Branagh, and last year James Gray, Richard Linklater and Alejandro G. Inarritu all released films that function as a way of plumbing the depths of what made them artists. (In each case these are roman a clefs, thinly veiled biographies where the characters have other names and slightly adjusted life experiences.)

By far the most anticipated of these would be the one from Steven Spielberg, The Fabelmans, which just got its Australian release last week, and even more recently cemented its status as an Oscar frontrunner with several major wins at the Golden Globes. Curiously, it may be the least successful of the six films alluded to so far. This is certainly a contrarian take. But just because it’s Spielberg and just because it has Easter eggs for fans of the medium’s most successful director, that doesn’t mean we can or should paper over its faults, which are glaring.

Spielberg has said he didn’t want to or couldn’t make The Fabelmans until after his parents had passed, presumably because his perspective and some family secrets he’s revealing would be too triggering for them as they lived out their final years. The argument could also be made that he didn’t want his parents to see what idiots Michelle Williams and Paul Dano were going to make them look like. The choices made by these two actors, particularly Williams, bear greater analysis once we’ve gotten deeper into the review.

The primarily teenage version of Spielberg is Sam Fabelman, played by Gabriel LaBelle for most of the movie, who does really look like the future E.T. and Raiders director would have looked at that age. Moulding him into the man he would become are his parents: Burt (Dano), a pioneer in the nascent field of home computing, and Mitzi (Williams), a possible concert pianist who deferred those dreams for the ill-fitting shape of a housewife. Sam is living in New Jersey with three younger sisters when his love of the cinema is stoked by a viewing of the 1952 best picture winner The Greatest Show on Earth, in which an elaborate train crash transfixed him and gave him his first inspiration for a possible career making movies.

Burt’s rapid career rise takes them to Phoenix and ultimately to Northern California. Coming along for part of that way, as long as Burt can continue getting jobs for him, is Burt’s best friend Benny (Seth Rogen), referred to as Uncle Benny by the kids. Sam comes of age in the usual ways and continues getting more impressive movie cameras, as well as more collaborators eager to help him make his films. However, a conflict between art and family is raised by his great uncle Boris (Judd Hirsch) on a visit to the family, and that comes to be the defining theme of the film.

The first problem with The Fabelmans is – why is that inherently a conflict? In what is certainly the film’s best performance, and sadly limited to a single scene, Uncle Boris gives Sam an impassioned dose of life wisdom based on his career as a circus act, from which he seems to have gleaned the knowledge that art and family will tear you in two. Spielberg puts forth examples that he believes are meant to support this, Exhibit A being Mitzi, whose theatrical personality is meant to be the artist within struggling to get out. It’s struggling because she’s married to the wrong man, not specifically because she had a family, but Uncle Boris’ words are sacrosanct and inarguable, according to the film. You can’t have both art and a family life, though the film doesn’t make a convincing case for why this is more the case for an artist than for any other dedicated professional. Burt isn’t managing it so well and he’s “just” a scientist.

A lot of the burden of the conflict lies with Williams and Dano as Sam’s parents, and their conception as characters is poor. If Nigel Tufnel turned it up to 11 in This Is Spinal Tap, Michelle Williams is turning it up to 13 here. It’s hard to watch her performance without questioning whether it was intended as a parody of a moon child who also sometimes acts like a drunken socialite. One of the first lines she says to Sam, with typical unfailing earnestness, is “Movies are dreams that you never forget!” Williams seemed to take that as a launching point and just pile on with untold quantities of pantomime, overdetermined reaction shots and other random bits of overwrought melodrama. The performance has received praise as some of the best acting of the year, but “most acting” is closer to the truth.

Dano seems to react by going under. He spends much of this movie with a fixed half-grin on his face that makes him look like a moronic simpleton. When the family is goofing around in a scene meant to indicating their harmony, with Williams bouncing off the walls and Dano resembling a ventriloquist’s dummy, it’s striking how alien these people feel – and how poor an example of directing it is by Spielberg. The Fabelmans seems like it was out of his control on a moment to moment basis.

What is it, then, that has earned The Fabelmans some of the best reviews of the year? Yes there are intentional echoes of iconic moments from later in Spielberg’s career, but even these are a bit limp. A scene where Sam and his friends take off on their bicycles is obviously supposed to create in us a Pavlovian memory of E.T. But not enough is done with it to really register, and unless you are an obsessive, you are likely to miss many of these. On the one hand, calling attention to these moments would be too self-congratulatory by half. On the other, without that wink, the references don’t distinguish themselves from the sea of sub-mediocrity that is the rest of this film.

In the final 45 minutes, when Sam lives in a waspy town in Northern California, the film finds a little something to grasp hold of by introducing the anti-semitism that the young Spielberg experienced. Sadly, there’s no nuance here either, as the bullies own their ignorance and say things like “I hate Jews” and “Why don’t you go kill Christ?” (To say nothing of the truly odd denouement of the relationship between Sam and the primary two bullies.) Spielberg did not make his name on being the most subtle artist out there, but The Fabelmans sometimes leaves you surprised that he ever became a success at all.

 

The Fabelmans is currently playing in cinemas.