Review: The Fabelmans

Image courtesy of Universal Pictures.

Young Sam Fabelman (Gabriel LaBelle) discovers early on in his obsession with watching and making movies that the camera can be yielded as a weapon to humiliate enemies, it can impress the WASPish girls with whom he attends school, and it can help him discover who he is and who he wants to be - but in one of the most heartbreaking moments in a film full of them, it can also lead to the discovery of devastating truths.

Sam, of course, is a stand-in for a young Steven Spielberg, whose parents' divorce is - for lack of a less tacky phrase - the stuff of legend that fueled the creation of one of the director's most beloved classics, "E.T. the Extra Terrestrial," but also pops up elsewhere in his filmography ("Close Encounters of the Third Kind").

But in his latest film - which is his best at least since "Munich" - Spielberg tackles the subject matter head on. It's not surprising how sad the film often is, but what caught me off guard is how funny it is as well, whether it's the mishegoss of the Fabelman family foibles or a final scene in which a very famous director portraying another legendary filmmaker that's possibly the biggest laugh-out-loud moment of the year.

Although autobiographical, there's a telling moment early in the picture in which Sam sits transfixed in a theater as he watches John Ford's classic "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance." There's a famous line from that movie that goes, "This is the west, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend." Naturally, the Fabelmans - ahem, the Spielbergs - made their way from New Jersey to Arizona and then further west to California by the film's end. Whether the inclusion of a clip from Ford's film aims to suggest that some of this story is dramatized for effect, well, you decide.

Regardless, the film is a very personal one for Spielberg, that remains clear. In the film, a young Sam (Mateo Zoryon Francis DeFord) discovers the magic of movies when his parents - in a scene pulled directly from Spielberg's bio - take him to see "The Greatest Show on Earth." Sam is fascinated and horrified by a train crash in the picture; asks his father, Burt (Paul Dano in a very solid performance), to buy him a train set for Hanukkah; and then proceeds to crash it over and over again while filming it from various angles for the purpose of creating suspense.

His mother, Mitzi (an excellent Michelle Williams), a free spirit who once wanted to be a piano player but never got her shot, recognizes a fellow artist and is impressed by her son's endeavors. She realizes that his filming the train crash is a means of controlling his anxiety over the experience of seeing the crash on a big screen in a theater. As Sam continues to grow into a teenager, he continually tries to maintain that level of control through filming - for example, he tells an endearingly dopey actor portraying a soldier about how he should feel seeing his fellow comrades dead on the battlefield, but it's clear that Sam is channeling something more personal.

A visit from a distant uncle (Judd Hirsch in a brief, scene-stealing performance) who once performed in the circus and then the movies proves to be revelatory for Sam. The uncle recognizes Sam's need to create art and that while he may love his family dearly, he has just as much passion for his filmmaking. Art is all-encompassing, the uncle tells him, and therefore it's also lonely.

One day while editing a film that Sam shot while camping with his family and Benny (Seth Rogen), whom the family calls "uncle," although he's really just a close family friend, he makes a shocking discovery in the background of a frame. The confrontations that ensue lead to the Fabelman family structure beginning to unravel.

Each of the three places where the Fabelmans live for Burt's work - he's an engineer of some sort and considered a genius - play their own role for Sam and his family. New Jersey is the place that seems most like home, while Mitzi takes to the deserts of Arizona, although it's in that state where the fated camping trip takes place. California proves the most challenging for Sam, as it's where he temporarily gives up his filmmaking and has to deal with anti-semitic bullies, although a romance with a devout, Jesus-loving girl results in some of the film's funniest moments.

One of the elements that makes "The Fabelmans" so special is that's so specific. Yes, it's technically the origin story for a director who was among the most consequential of the past 50 years, but it, thankfully, doesn't get to the point where Spielberg has become a Hollywood success, but instead leaving us with the aforementioned hilarious run-in with an iconic director he idolizes.

It's also specific in its little touches - Sam and his mother discussing the merits of burnt toast after some fraught moments, Burt's surprise at being hugged after purchasing his son a camera, a moment of solidarity between Sam and his younger sister after a harrowing family discussion, and even a moment in a hallway in which a bully displays some frailty - which make it feel like so personal a work.

Spielberg has made a number of very good movies in recent years - "Lincoln," "Bridge of Spies," and "West Side Story," to name a few - but "The Fabelmans" is one of his best of the 21st century and one of his all-around most moving and, surprisingly, funniest. It's also one of the year's very best.