Steven Spielberg plunges into his own childhood with the twinkly-tragic memoir The Fabelmans.
Steven Spielberg has spent his entire career channeling the heartache of his childhood into movies. He’s never really hesitated to admit as much, confessing publicly to the autobiographical elements woven through sensitive sensations like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Catch Me If You Can, and especially his now 40-year-old E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, an all-ages, all-time smash that welcomed the world into the melancholy of his broken home via the friendship between a sad, lonely kid and a new friend from the stars. By now, all of that baggage is inextricable from the mythology of Hollywood’s most beloved hitmaker: It’s conventional wisdom that Spielberg’s talent for replicating the awe and terror of childhood comes from the way that his own has continued to weigh, more than half a century later, on his heart and mind.
With his new coming-of-age drama The Fabelmans, Spielberg drops all but the barest pretense of artificial distance between his work and those experiences. Co-written with Tony Kushner, the great playwright who’s scripted some of the director’s recent forays into the American past (including last year’s luminous West Side Story), the film tells the very lightly fictionalized tale of an idealistic kid from a Jewish family, growing up in the American Southwest, falling in love with the cinema as his parents fall out of love with each other. Every scene of the film feels plucked from the nickelodeon of Spielberg’s memories. It’s the big-screen memoir as a twinkly-tragic spectacle of therapeutic exorcism.
Spanning from the early 1950s until the late 1960s, The Fabelmans dramatizes nearly the entire adolescence of its filmmaker — beginning, naturally, with what may be his first memory of going to the movies, a formative viewing of The Greatest Show on Earth. Terrified by the film’s images of a train violently derailing, young Sammy (Mateo Zoryon Francis-DeFord) eventually recreates the scene with his own model locomotive, wrecking it to purge his lingering fear. “He’s trying to get some sort of control over it,” his mother, former pianist Mitzi (Michelle Williams), explains to his father, computer engineer Burt (The Batman‘s Paul Dano) — a line that might just about sum up the intentions of The Fabelmans itself.
Spielberg will follow Sammy and the rest of the Fabelmans family, including the boy’s two younger sisters, from New Jersey to the suburbs of Phoenix to California, and across a decade-plus of domestic conflict.
