Steven Spielberg's semi-autobiographical nostalgia piece is a sprawling, occasionally unwieldy, often gorgeous bit of self-analysis. It's also a heck of a flick.
Appropriate for a director whose staging accommodates both elegant understatement and virtuosic peacocking, "The Fabelmans" feeds off the tension between the dazzling fakeness of movies and the truths they can’t help but reveal. Late in the film, there’s a scene, both playful and off-handedly stunning, where Sammy is confronted with questions about why he’s made certain choices in one particular film. He doesn’t answer with the confidence of a self-possessed wunderkind.
Gabriel LaBelle as Sammy Fabelman in The Fabelmans, co-written, produced and directed by Steven Spielberg. And to be fair, there are times when "The Fabelmans" threatens to prioritize self-mythologizing over making Sammy a memorable character in his own right. Likable as LaBelle is, his Sammy plays like another sweet, liquid-eyed teen in the vein of Spielberg’s hero in "War Horse" . He’s upstaged by nearly every co-star,
and it would be reasonable to argue that the character and the movie require a bit of outside Spielberg fandom to fully come into focus. But maybe both self-mythologization and expectations of audience familiarity are permissible for the most successful director in the history of the medium. True to form, Spielberg makes "The Fabelmans" wildly entertaining even in its occasional unwieldiness; less expected, he ends on a sharp snap, rather than a soggy remembrance. This is a surprisingly unsentimental vision of cinema, observing both the redemption and the distance this particular art form can create in its wake.
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