Many filmmakers are skittish about drawing overt connections between their work and their personal lives. You’ll never hear Paul Thomas Anderson say an unkind word about his dad, despite the complicated father-son relationships that drive Hard Eight, Boogie Nights, Magnolia, There Will Be Blood, and The Master. And then there’s Steven Spielberg. For more than 50 years, critics and fans have pored over his work, noting the recurrent themes of absent fathers, community dissolution, and familial reunification, and unlike many of his peers, Spielberg has been eager to help. Watch just a few of his interviews, and you’ll quickly learn the story of his childhood: His father was a computer engineer who moved his family around a lot, and he initiated a divorce that the young filmmaker later learned was actually due to his mother falling in love with his father’s best friend. Spielberg’s openness about these events has been a gift to armchair psychologists, who could then watch a popcorn flick like Jurassic Park, War of the Worlds, or Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and feel like they understood something about the filmmaker, the art, and the perpetual adolescence in a 20th-century American male. When the director often accused of having a Peter Pan complex makes an actual Peter Pan movie, he makes it pretty clear that he’s uninterested in running from his demons.
With The Fabelmans, a lightly fictionalized memoir of his childhood, Spielberg has literalized the story that has been etched into the background of almost every one of his films. For him, it’s “$40 million of therapy.” For us, it’s a skeleton key into his entire filmography. The Fabelmans is an origin story of a superhero, complete with Easter eggs. A scene of Mitzi Fabelman (Michelle Williams) recklessly driving toward a tornado with three of her children in the back seat calls to mind the obsessive roadway pursuit by Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss) of an alien spacecraft in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The closet where Sammy Fabelman projects his first movies will make you think of Elliott’s bedroom in E.T. In both of those films, blond, single mothers are shown to form brief, pseudo-marriages with men who are not their husbands; after his own wife leaves him, Neary hooks up with Jillian (Melinda Dillon), whose son has been abducted by aliens, while Elliott’s mother (Dee Wallace) is portrayed late in the film as a partner of Keys (Peter Coyote), the government scientist who understands Elliott far better than his absent father could. After watching The Fabelmans, we gain a better understanding of Spielberg and how he unconsciously used this motif to process a truth he couldn’t quite verbalize: that his mother left him to form a new family.
If one of the qualifications for winning Best Director is creative courage, Spielberg would win in a walk. It’s downright brave to cast off the safety and security of science fiction, which provided a harbor for him for so long; to proceed without the guardrails and signposts of genre; and to muck around in the puddles of his own life and find a narrative that feels both universal and true to his own experience. In prior films, he could lead with spectacle and let his unconscious provide the emotional truth. Here, he proceeds with intent, wrestling his real life into something just as cinematic as a shark attack, an alien landing, or a T. rex ripping someone to shreds. There are scenes in The Fabelmans that feel as awe inspiring as anything in Spielberg’s filmography: young Sammy watching a movie projected onto his cupped hands or Mitzi dancing in the headlights of their car, backed by the first notes of John Williams’s delightfully inscrutable score. In the film’s climax, Sammy’s documentary chronicling his classmates’ day at the beach becomes a way of neutralizing his antisemitic bully (or maybe Sammy just wanted to make his movie better). These scenes look and feel like nothing else Spielberg has ever done.
To be this creative and this honest at once is an amazing feat, and while The Fabelmans is not always as literal of a representation of his childhood as we might assume, it offers the kind of truth only cinema can provide. Even with the best intentions, memory is not fact, and the very process of wrangling one’s childhood into a satisfying narrative necessitates dramatic embellishments and leaps of imagination. In certain scenes, you can even feel Spielberg balancing his childhood view of events with one revised by the perspectives of adulthood. When Sammy’s father, Burt (Paul Dano), announces the divorce to the Fabelman children, he claims it was all his idea, a half-truth Spielberg believed for decades, leading him to at one point cut off contact with his father completely. But in the same scene, Mitzi admits she has fallen in love with someone else. Both the old lie and the new truth are voiced at once, with the children left to decide what really happened for themselves. In a bit of movie magic, Spielberg evokes the fog of confusion he felt as a child and didn’t understand until much later.
When Spielberg reconciled with his father as an adult, his work changed. All of a sudden, Spielberg was seeking sympathy for the father figure rather than simply finding comfort in his absence. War of the Worlds showed a family rift from the father’s point of view, with Tom Cruise’s Ray Ferrier struggling to connect with his son and only finally proving his worth by saving him from an alien threat, a profound turnaround from the benevolent aliens of Close Encounters and E.T. Minority Report portrayed a father shattered by the kidnapping of his son and estrangement from his wife. Even Lincoln is about separation and reunification. As Spielberg matured, his subjects became weightier—War of the Worlds, Minority Report, and Munich are all seen as responses to the events of 9/11—but his work never ceased to be personal, and his perspective grew more mature too. Maybe The Fabelmans should not be seen as an one-off autobiography at all, but rather another step forward in a career-long effort to be as authentic as possible in his art. At some point, the best way to do this is to simply tell your story directly.
Although many directors have made autobiographical films, it’s hard to find another who has done exactly this. Truffaut, Fellini, Tarkovsky, and Bergman all drew from their own childhoods to create some of the best films ever made. More recently, Greta Gerwig made Lady Bird, Alfonso Cuarón made
Roma, and James Gray made Armageddon Time, another story of growing up as an upper-middle-class Jewish kid in the second half of the 20th century. But none are as popular as Spielberg, and autobiographical fiction was a one-off for most of them. Spielberg has been flirting with autobiography on the biggest possible stage for his whole career, making this effort to finally lay his life bare on screen even more remarkable. The vulnerability that comes with artistic expression has somehow made him less guarded over the years, more open to direct autobiography, and more comfortable with public scrutiny.
In the film’s sparkling final moments, Sammy finds himself suddenly face-to-face with one of his heroes, the film director John Ford. According to Spielberg, there was no creative license there. “It’s word for word what he said to me,” he told Paul Thomas Anderson at a Directors Guild of America screening in November. But even in this verisimilitude, Spielberg finds a way to say something new by casting David Lynch, the director of some of the most surreal and experimental films of the last 50 years, as Ford. Who else would think to link these three directors—Spielberg, Ford, and Lynch? Who would have guessed that Spielberg was a fan of Lynch at all? More than just being a treat for cinephiles, this masterstroke of scripting and casting somehow evokes the entire breadth of the medium’s capabilities. It links experimental cinema to blockbuster filmmaking in a single creative idea. Other filmmakers might use a clip reel or a montage to express the totality of cinema, but Spielberg employs all his tools—writing, casting, acting, and directorial vision—to evoke the same majesty in a single scene that fits within the broader narrative.
A third Best Director Oscar would bring Spielberg one win closer to Ford, who owns the record, with four Best Director Oscars (incidentally, it would also tie him with Frank Capra and William Wyler, who are also great influences on his work). Sports fans often debate which records will never be broken, and Ford belongs on the list alongside Joe DiMaggio, Wayne Gretzky, and Wilt Chamberlain. Ford invented a cinematic language for mainstream filmmaking that has been upheld and expanded upon by Spielberg and his disciples. But that’s why Spielberg deserves to be one step behind him. Winning a third Oscar would be an incredible achievement for the second-best director in history, a capstone to a legendary career, and a fitting chapter in the story of Sammy Fabelman that we hope is nowhere near its end.
Noah Gittell
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