For the entirety of his filmmaking life, Steven Spielberg, the great entertainer and box-office pulverizer, has been pouring himself into his movies. Whether epic-sized or relatively downsized, a Spielberg picture reveals something about him — or at least the Hollywood version — so it’s no surprise that there’s something familiar about his tender, autobiographical reverie, “The Fabelmans,” with its wide-eyed children, remote father, complex mother and insistently happy ending. You’ve seen this story before, or just glints in prequels like “The Sugarland Express,” “E.T.” and “Catch Me If You Can.”
“The Fabelmans” recounts the moral education of Sammy Fabelman — adored son, budding visionary — who in adolescence learns that life is agonizingly more complicated than he grasped as a child. To take an allegorical cue from the winking title, Sammy discovers that a sheep can be a wolf, he removes a thorn from a lion’s paw and he learns, as Aesop put it, “that injuries may be forgiven, but not forgotten.” Yet hurts can be transformed and perhaps transcended, maybe even sequelized. Sammy learns that lesson after he picks up a home movie camera; many years later, he makes this film.
Written by Spielberg and his frequent collaborator, Tony Kushner, “The Fabelmans” begins where it must: at the movies. And so, on a frigid 1952 night, Sammy (Mateo Zoryon Francis-Deford, a classic Spielberg moppet) sees his first film, “The Greatest Show on Earth,” Cecil B. DeMille’s lumbering soap about a circus. Amid a sea of rapt moviegoers, securely tucked between his mother, Mitzi (Michelle Williams), and his father, Burt (Paul Dano), Sammy is transfixed. What leaves him slack-jawed aren’t the film’s sudsy relations, scantily clad ladies or its fedora-wearing, leather-jacketed proto-Indiana Jones hero — what keeps Sammy up at night, sparking a passion that becomes a vocation, is its climactic train crash.
The wreck jolts the DeMille picture and brings it to a tidy, phony finish, and sends Sammy into the sequel business. Before long, Sammy is motoring — filming and crashing — his model trains as his mother smiles and father frets, a split in parental reactions that’s among the first glimmers of family tension. Mitzi is a classically trained pianist while Burt is an engineer, fertile terrain for a virtuoso to be. However much a good boy he is, Sammy is a goner, and his future and later discord are hinted at when Burt, like a studio suit, chides Sammy about damaging his toys and delivers a lecture about responsibility. (Wait until dad sees what the kid does with the truck in “Duel”!)
Manohla Dargis
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