The Fabelmans
The Fabelmans has Spielberg's visual intelligence and a cast doing exceptional work, undermined by a runtime that no one asked him to trim.
There is a short list of filmmakers for whom a major studio will write a $40 million check to produce a two-and-a-half-hour semi-autobiographical film with no IP, no franchise attachment, and no guarantee of commercial return. Steven Spielberg is on that list, and the existence of The Fabelmans is a function of that status as much as of any creative imperative. The film it produced is an inconsistent one, marked by genuine feeling in its strongest passages and by the specific kind of self-indulgence that tends to result when no one in a position of institutional authority is willing to ask a legendary filmmaker to cut twenty minutes.
The film follows Sammy Fabelman, played as a young boy by Mateo Zoryon Francis-DeFord and as an older teenager by Gabriel LaBelle, across a childhood and adolescence in postwar New Jersey, Arizona, and California, during which he discovers filmmaking as the medium through which he processes his experience of a family that is slowly fracturing around him. His mother Mitzi (Michelle Williams) is a pianist whose relationship with the art she gave up for family life is the film's most emotionally complex thread. His father Burt (Paul Dano) is an engineer whose relationship to science and pragmatism puts him structurally at odds with the creative temperament shared by Mitzi and Sammy. Benny (Seth Rogen), a family friend whose relationship with Mitzi produces the film's central conflict, is positioned as the catalyst for everything the family cannot hold together. Judd Hirsch appears in a single scene that is the film's most alive and most quotable.
The Hirsch scene is worth dwelling on because it illustrates what the film can do when Spielberg is writing with pressure rather than permission. The scene arrives in what feels like the middle of the film, though the pacing makes precise location difficult, and it contains more concentrated dramatic and thematic energy than any comparable stretch of the surrounding material. An aging relative delivers an unvarnished account of what it means to be an artist in a family, what it costs, what it produces, and what Sammy should expect the rest of his life to look like if he pursues the thing he is already clearly going to pursue. It is the kind of scene that a tighter film would have been built around.
The pacing is the film's most persistent problem, and it is structural rather than incidental. Several scenes are redundant in ways that a more demanding editorial process would have caught: a sequence early in the film showcasing Mitzi playing piano with her fingernails clicking establishes atmosphere without advancing anything the surrounding scenes have not already communicated. A dreamlike sequence following Mitzi's mother's death, in which she receives a phone call that amounts to nothing narratively, sits in the film as an idea that was not developed enough to justify its inclusion but was not removed. These are the kinds of scenes that survive into a final cut when a filmmaker's authority over their own material outweighs the production's need for coherence.
The conflict at the film's center, Sammy's discovery through his own home movies of something about Benny and Mitzi that he cannot unknow, is handled with genuine filmmaking intelligence and represents the film's most successful formal idea. The way Spielberg stages Sammy's recognition of what he is seeing, the specific horror of a filmmaker realizing that the camera reveals things the naked eye glosses over, is emotionally precise and connects the personal story to a thematic argument about cinema's relationship to truth. It is not developed with enough consistency to anchor the film's full runtime, but it is the passage that most clearly justifies the project's existence.
Williams and Dano are both doing work that deserves a better-constructed frame. Williams's Mitzi in particular is the film's emotional center in a way the screenplay does not always honor, and the scenes in which Mitzi's own thwarted artistic life surfaces against the domestic role she has accepted are the ones where the film's most honest observations reside. The two tonal shifts late in the film, including a moment that tips into the kind of meta-commentary that belongs in a different kind of movie entirely, feel like a filmmaker who has earned the right to indulge a private joke and indulged it without calculating the cost to the film around it.
The Fabelmans will earn its awards recognition regardless of its structural problems, because the parts that work work well and the prestige categories reward the best of a film rather than the sum of it. As a complete piece of filmmaking it is less than what Spielberg is capable of, and the gap between the film's strengths and the runtime required to reach them is a problem that a shorter cut might have solved.
