Just as Spielberg's life story 'Fabelmans' finally starts rolling, it ends
“The Fabelmans” - ★ ★ ½
This should have been a real-life superhero origin movie with youthful stand-ins serving as early versions of Steven Spielberg before he evolved into a beloved super filmmaker of his generation.
Instead, the sometimes-amusing family drama “The Fabelmans” doesn't leap to cinematic life until its final 10 minutes, at which time we glimpse the beginning of the fun, inspiring movie we thought we came to see.
“The Fabelmans” begins in 1952 New Jersey where little Sammy Fabelman (bright-eyed Mateo Zoryan Francis-DeFord) suffers an anxiety attack while standing in line to see his first motion picture in a theater.
His dad, Burt (Paul Dano), a smart but dull computer developer, tries to calm him by explaining the Persistence of Vision principle behind films while his passionately artistic, gifted piano-playing mom Mitzi (Michelle Williams) says to Sammy, “Movies are dreams!”
“Dreams are scary!” Sammy screeches.
Once he settles into watching Cecil B. DeMille's epic “The Greatest Show on Earth,” Sammy witnesses the power of visual effects with the famous train collision sequence that no doubt helped win its undeserved Best Picture Oscar.
But we see those little wheels turning like reels on a vintage arc light movie projector.
A few years pass and an older Sammy (Gabriel LaBelle) has become a proficiently self-taught filmmaker armed with consumer-grade cameras and a fierce imagination, creating works of masterful juvenilia that amuse his tight-knit Jewish family and friends.
Then dad gets a better job in Arizona and later in California, and off goes his protesting family into high Christian country where Sammy catches the eyes and lips of an enthusiastic, Jesus-worshipping high school student (Chloe East) and encounters the scorn of antisemitic peers.
“The Fabelmans,” written by Tony Kushner, celebrates art in its infinite incarnations, including Mitzi's musical soul and terpsichorean expressions, an art-is-a-calling speech by grizzled Uncle Boris (Judd Hirsch) and a hilarious art lesson delivered by David Lynch in a movie-pilfering cameo.
Spielberg's sentimentalized, cinematic roman à clef works as a highly personal domestic drama with deceptions, losses, betrayals and triumphs, but it's hardly in the same orbit as Fellini's “Armacord.”
Where's the story about Spielberg for months conning his way on to the Universal lot where he observed free firsthand lessons in how to make movies? How did he ingeniously figure how to shoot his TV movie “Duel” using a single mile of the same highway?
In John Ford's “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” - referenced twice in this movie - a reporter tells James Stewart, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”
Maybe that's the problem with “The Fabelmans.” It could use a little more legend, a little less dramatized facts.
Starring: Gabriel LaBelle, Michelle Williams, Paul Dano, Seth Rogen, David Lynch, Judd Hirsch
Directed by: Steven Spielberg
Other: A Universal Pictures release in theaters. Rated PG-13 for drug use, language, violence. 151 minutes