The Fabelmans (2022 | USA | 151 minutes | Steven Spielberg)

Deploying all of the tricks in his bag to conjure nostalgia and convey awe, upstart auteur Stevie Spielberg has at long last made his very own Licorice Pizza. I kid, but loosely fictionalized filmmaker memoirs are really in the air in the last decade, aren’t they? Spielberg’s very personal story about his early life and discovery of The Power of Film was one of the more surprising and flashy world premieres at TIFF this summer. It went on to win the coveted Audience Prize in Toronto and is opening across the US just in time for the holiday family moviegoing season.

After a lifetime of creating movie magic tinged with the melancholy of broken homes, the pseudo-autobiographical Fabelmans gives the director — at age 75 — an overdue opportunity to reflect on where his incredibly successful career all started. Written with frequent collaborator and playwright Tony Kushner, the episodic film plays as a rangy series of heightened memories. Suffused with emotion and a little adventure, the film is a collection of slivers of unresolved sadness over the tremendous power of art to drive a life while tearing out one’s heart. Although it doesn’t always work for me in Spielberg’s other collaborations, Janusz Kamiński’s trademark stagey cinematography casts the whole thing in the glow of not-quite-reality and effectively conjures a sense of lightly-polished recollections. The resulting images create exactly the enjoyable and transporting viewing experience that we’ve come to take for granted from one of our greatest directors and his stable of trusted collaborators.

The film opens in the winter of 1952, with young Sam Fabelman on the chilly sidewalk in line to see his very first movie in a theater. He’s anxious: sitting the dark, the giant people looming on the screen, it all sounds terrifying. They’re waiting to see the Greatest Show on Earth and his dad (Paul Dano) eagerly attempts to comfort him with the science of framerates and how persistence of vision conjures a moving image from still frames. His mother (Michelle Williams) takes a different tack, assuring him that it’s going to be the nicest dream. It turns out that they’re both right. Returning to their house (easy to spot since, as the neighborhood’s Jewish family, it’s the only one not lit up for Christmas), scenes from the film haunt Sam’s dreams. He can’t shake the nightmares until he and his mom use his dad’s camera to stage the film’s spectacular crash using the model train he assembled over eight nights of Hanukkah. Right there you have the yin and yang that will shape one of Hollywood’s most successful careers.

Like that collision, his family is also on its own train track toward certain doom, but it will take everyone, especially Sam, a very long time to see what’s coming for them. The film slips forward in time, casting Gabriel LaBelle as a such a dead ringer for young Spielberg that you suspect that special effects were employed. A decade later, and the kid’s even more obsessed with making movies, recreating matinee hits with a home video camera, three sisters are game to be stars, and all sorts of clever hand-crafted special effects. With their father’s career in emerging technology on the rise, they — along with “Uncle” Bennie (Seth Rogen, injecting humor into the film and the family), Dad’s best friend whom Mom suspiciously can’t live without — are soon transplanted from the familiar comforts of the northeast to the dry unfamiliar opportunities spread out ahead of them in the Arizona desert.

There, with film stock funded by scorpion collecting and supported by an eager cast of boy scouts seeking merit badges, Sam’s moviemaking ambitions also expand. Life in Phoenix represents some sort of temporary idyll where we see Sam inventing new film techniques and flourishing among his friends. Spielberg even commits a boisterous Jewish family camping trip to film (probably not a film history first, though the treatment feels like a revelation). In the aftermath of family tragedy, a portentous visit from an uncle played by a wildly committed Judd Hirsch brings a warning about the addictive powers of art. It’s in this interlude that we see, through Spielberg’s moving depiction of the tactile process of film editing, the first inklings of Sam’s discovery of a family secret. More powerfully, this sequence also shows the young auteur’s recognition of his inherent ability to target his filmmaking choices to please a highly specific audience. His acute decisions and the ensuing effect of subsequent private screening of his alternative director’s cut, play as perfectly paired blows of emotional devastation.

Uprooted one more time for his father’s upward mobility, Sam and the family are unhappily dragged to Northern California, the only Jews among a forest of WASPy students as tall as giant sequoias. Here, Sam puts away his camera for the senior year traditions of being relentlessly bullied by anti-semitic jocks and seduced by a deeply catholic classmate who’s enchanted by this boy whose exotic features conjure her imagination of the Jesus that lives within her heart. It’s a fun interlude, with elements of high school angst, teen romance humor, high school politics, and the absurdities of life in California. All the while, the foundations of his parents marriage continues to degrade. He’ll eventually pick up a camera again, of course, and Spielberg juxtaposes a triumphant premiere with am oversharing-induced heartbreak and a deeply confusing and violence-tinged reconciliation of sorts.

So much of Spielberg’s oeuvre lies in the heartbreak of broken families and that current is deep in the core of The Fabelmans. As his mother, a onetime pianist turned housewife, Michelle Williams beams in from another planet. With a perpetual blonde bob and mercurial eyes, she’s illuminated by the adoring gaze of the director’s memory. Even as her rollercoaster performance runs from dreamer to morose depressive, it’s somewhere north of realistic but never not true. And in a quieter, but equally heart-twisting role, Paul Dano has aged into the perfect sad dad. He’s aware of all the ways that his stalwart scientific outlook makes him an outlier to his artistic family, yet remains tirelessly devoted to them. Among these great actors, newcomer Gabriel LaBelle joins a long line of Spielberg’s exceptional ability to cast young talents. He more than holds his own as the heart of the film and easily slides into the role as avatar of the director’s wide-eyed inevitable aspiration. Weaving together these memories, Spielberg shows us his cinematic DNA in the form of a young underdog filmmaker striving to find balance between perpetual-risk taking while unabashedly making movies that make people happy. On that front, count this one as yet another success.

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