"The Fabelmans" Review: How Spielberg Made His Most Inspiring Film

A storied career finds a fitting conclusion... even though he'll make movies till he dies.

December 13, 2022

In 2009, 16-year-old Miley Cyrus released her autobiography Miles to Go, chronicling her familial relationships, love life, and the struggle of growing up in the spotlight. As Whitney Houston told us, the children are our future, but that does not mean anyone can gain wisdom from reading a 280-page breakdown of childhood whimsy and adolescent musing. Autobiographies should serve a purpose: impart perspective on a life overflowing with experiences, a means of reconciling the past in a way someone with little past to reconcile cannot muster. It takes time not only to live life but to understand it in a way that makes it feel like something worth reading or watching.

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In 1999, Steven Spielberg gave an interview to The New York Times Magazine and shared that he’d been conceptualizing a film about his life. Originally titled I’ll Be Home, Spielberg shelved the project for over a decade, concerned about the impact an honest accounting of his childhood would have on his parents. When he was 16, his mother, Leah, left his father, Arnold, for his best friend. He held his mother in the highest regard; blaming her for the marriage’s breakdown was unconscionable. Arnold, his father, was a devoted provider insistent on emotional distance, including refusing to tell his children the reason for the separation. Spielberg spent decades blaming his father for the divorce, and their fractured relationship colored many of his most famous films.

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At the time of the interview, Spielberg was 52, a theoretical age for growth, understanding, and perspective. Relationships have come and gone, friendships built and broken, and the many letdowns of life have whacked idealism in the face. Of course, life doesn’t work that way. We move at our speed and pace; growth, understanding, and perspective can never come early, but one could argue they're impossible to gain too late. We must find our sweet spot: the perfect time to look inside, ask the tough questions, and recognize that the truths we found so hard to accept in the past are now worth embracing. If not, the art created from false introspection will feel meaningless compared to what patience could've achieved.

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About ⅔ of the way through The Fabelmans, Sam Fabelman, Spielberg’s cinematic counterpart, sits in his room editing a film immediately after his parents announce their separation. Reggie, his younger sister, comes into his room and questions how he can work after what just occurred. Sam, who has known about his mother, Mitzi's, adultery for some time, is resigned to the situation. He knows his mother will employ the same philosophy as always, musing about pursuing happiness, charting your course, following your heart, etc. Instead of defending her, he dismisses her reasons as excuses.

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It seems a far cry from how he handles showing his mother that he knows of her affair. Although he spent weeks giving his mother the cold shoulder, the sight of her emerging from the dark closet on her knees, tears in her eyes, inspires sympathy, and he promises to protect his mother’s secrets.

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It seems contradictory, but such is the nature of conflict. The Fabelmans differs from the truth, telling a tale whose perspective is more involving than if Spielberg had made the film earlier. It’s his life, after all. The amateur movies Sam shoots should look incredible, and they do, from the WWII flick filmed in the Arizona desert to the old-school Western to the ditch day short he produces for his graduating class. The conflicts should be complex, from Sam’s moving between support of his adulterous mother to resentment at her selfishness when she leaves the family.

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The emotions born from those conflicts, carefully constructed and respectful of the truth, make The Fabelmans worth more than a typical biopic. Despite Mitzi's self-serving claims, guilt is not a “wasted emotion.” Guilt helps us recognize how our actions affect others and forces us to make changes to protect our loved ones from ourselves. At no point does Mitzi consider that leaving will make her a happier, more fulfilled person and a better mother, nor does she recognize that her lack of accountability could make her children feel inadequate.

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It makes her hard to like, but Spielberg never asks us to champion her or anyone else, only to respect the balance he strikes between recognizing faults and condemning the person entirely. The Fabelmans is a family drama in the truest sense: no theatrics of a parent stifling their child’s passions or throwing plates during the screaming matches of a deteriorating marriage. We empathize with Mitzi's silent suffering but blame her for choosing that path. We commend Burt for encouraging his son’s ambitions, but dislike how he manipulates Sam, giving him an editing machine on the condition that its first project be a gift for a grief-stricken Mitzi. The children get along, even when one criticizes the other for being selfish while their parents’ marriage crumbles. Mother and father are harmonious, albeit passionless. Memories get created more often than the dynamic that shaped them gets challenged.

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The Fabelmans feel like a genuine family, so every opinion we form about them cannot be wrong. We can chastise Mitzi for her affair or Burt for masking the unhappiness in his family with gifts and money, but everything is clear. Mitzi may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but a free spirit needs to fly. After all, she found her mate in Benny, irrespective of whether we approve of the circumstances. Burt would be too dull for some, but many who’ve had a turbulent life would appreciate the simplicity of devotion and reliability.

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Rare are the films that can see their characters make choices that conflict with our values without inspiring judgment. It takes not only a skilled filmmaker, but an extraordinary human being who’s processed his experiences to impart a message: no matter who you are, The Fabelmans is for you. Everyone can form an opinion without being wrong, having missed something, misunderstanding a point, or misconstruing an idea. A million things can be true within the four walls of a house, even if sometimes they seem to contradict one another, whether in the same year, month, day, or moment.

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Even the most harmonious upbringings come with conflict. Stories like this, one so highly publicized and about such a vaunted figure, make the truth impossible to hide. Spielberg has infamously gone soft, leaning more into sentimentality over the years, but The Fabelmans forced him to dig into the root of the struggles we’ve watched torment him in films past. Manipulation was never an option because it was never about him but about them: the real-life Fabelmans.

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Spielberg has accepted that his attachment to his mother was a product of her more-friend-than-parent approach, but for all the pleasant memories it brought, it wreaked just as much havoc on the life he grew to resent, the one he always blamed on his father. He sees her as a mother who affirms and supports but also one who drives her kids into a tornado and then excuses her actions by reciting a surface-level mantra. After all, Sam’s sisters blame her when Burt and Mitzi announce their separation, chastising her for allowing whims to dictate the family’s fate.

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Spielberg sees his father as a provider: a man of duty, devotion, and subtle compassion, but also one who couldn’t understand things laid bare before his eyes and whose struggle to be the husband and father his family deserved was as much a result of his antiquation as how his family made life difficult. The honesty got forced out of him, but it does not undermine the process Spielberg chose to unearth it, and The Fabelmans is a better film as a result.

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Every movie has things to nitpick, and The Fabelmans is no different. It’d have been nice to see it buck the trend of so many modern films and television series, always setting themselves in the past without embracing the times. Seeing The Greatest Show on Earth was a seminal moment for young Spielberg, but the shot of the film’s name on the movie theater sign indicates a cultural significance it does not possess and whose existence is known only to young film enthusiasts and Baby Boomers. John Ford is a Hollywood legend to those who absorb the art and a no-name to any who do not; more elaboration would have helped justify the final scene, the film’s worst.

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We do not require the drawn-out speech on art from Sam’s grandfather, faultless Judd Hirsch aside. We do not need the DCOM resolution to a bullying arc when Sam’s high school rival, Logan, suffers a breakdown upon seeing the ditch day film and buckling under the weight of the expectations thrust upon him.

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Regardless, The Fabelmans is a personal achievement for Spielberg that reflects not only upon him as a person but also as a filmmaker. It takes courage to put one’s life on display so plainly, but even more to do the necessary work to make doing so worthwhile. All the changes display a growth in perspective many of us never achieve, and the result is a personal film that inspires us to reflect on our lives and what conclusions we’ve drawn from living, much like Spielberg did, and occasionally thanks to unexpected sources.

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It’s who Spielberg has always been, even as we’ve watched him sift through the feelings left from a broken home: a man who is comfortable with what he feels, even if those feelings are subject to change. Watching that journey play out, from Close Encounters to E.T. to Hook to Saving Private Ryan and now to The Fabelmans, has been an exercise in visual splendor, iconic sequences, and genuine emotional weight.

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So, after decades of embracing his rumination and artistic expression, we arrive at arguably the purest family drama ever put to film by the greatest filmmaker of all time. It does not flash, bang, or flare, but it doesn’t need to: it only needs to remember, reflect, and teach, and it does those in ways audiences should never forget.