The Fabelmans

A cinematic memoir about a young Steven Spielberg discovering his power behind a camera reveals some home truths.

It’s not untrue, but it goes to the heart of a director’s ability to make myths. Confronted by the high school jock, Logan Hall (Sam Rechner) over his portrayal on screen as a golden god – Logan feels unworthy of the role, even if it got his girl back – Sammy tells him he only turns the camera on and films what’s already there. Mitzi is married to Burt (Paul Dano), a pioneer in the new world of computers whose best friend is the fun-loving Uncle Bennie (Seth Rogen). In doing so he starts to connect with the power of the camera to move an audience. About a third of the way in, while you’re quietly pondering why this film has Oscar buzz, it finds a pulse with a brilliant and intensifying performance from Michelle Williams as Sammy’s selfish and artistic mother, Mitzi. They are all well-crafted examples of good old-fashioned story telling.

A version of this story about film editors Michael Kahn and Sarah Broshar first appeared in the Below-the-Line issue of TheWrap's awards magazine.

Gabriel LaBelle, Michelle Williams, Paul Dano, Keeley Karsten, Julia Butters and Sophia Kopera in The Fabelmans/Universal Pictures/Amblin Entertainment.

That part of the memory is what sticks out in that scene, and I kind of tried to do those things. You know, the use of white or the imbalance of people in the scene sometimes is because it’s what you remember, and that was something. The other grandmother was a bit more sedate and a little more tasteful. I thought that was kind of fun, you know, the Eastern European sense of jewelry and getting yourself together. She’s wearing that blue dress with the white collar and kind of stands out in the group of scouts. So I remember when Michelle came to set wearing that, and Steven just tilted his head and pointed at it, and I knew that I had struck a chord with him of memory and fondness. He’s standing in the back of his dad’s car, like, handing out costumes to all his buddies, and, you know, they’re all getting into their khakis and grays and jeans and stuff, and Steven sort of stands out in this home movie because he is wearing, like, a red plaid shirt and probably white pants. We would double-check with Steven on certain things and different badges and his knowledge of the Boy Scouts because he was very involved in the Boy Scouts for many, many years. I was just trying to be very specific, but I think mostly it was trying to illustrate the combination of his work, the progression of his work, and also the dynamics in the family. It’s very sandy-looking and [there’s not a lot of] color, and you understand what’s in front of the camera and what’s behind the camera because Steven’s character stands out in that red plaid shirt and white trousers. The father is a very straight businessman, with a necktie and a dress shirt, whereas I tried to make Benny a little more fun because that’s the dynamic in that family and what drew Mitzi to him. You could hear a glow in his voice as he discussed the close relationship he developed with Spielberg throughout the course of the film while costuming his family on screen.

It's in large part due to the performances at the movie's core — especially those of Michelle Williams and Paul Dano. As the meek, but empathetic Burt Fabelman, ...

Rather than simply use his imagination to fill in the blanks of Burt's life, Dano decided to actually put himself in the shoes of the lovable engineer. "I can say it was an absolute pleasure and joy, but it was a heavy cloak to bear," Dano said. "I love playing people who have either been alive or who are alive," Dano said. In fact, Dano even went so far as to learn how to build a radio. [Paul Dano, who, while playing The Riddler](https://www.looper.com/1143312/how-paul-dano-got-in-character-to-play-the-riddler/) in "The Batman," developed insomnia because he wrapped his head in plastic and gave himself headaches every day (via [IndieWire](https://www.indiewire.com/2022/02/paul-dano-sleepless-the-batman-terrifying-riddler-1234700777/)). At turns effusively compassionate and quietly furious, Dano is a perfect counterpart to Williams, who nails her flashier and instantly indelible performance as Mitzi Schildkraut-Fabelman.

Gabriel LaBelle is terrific as the Spielberg surrogate Sammy Fabelman, with Michelle Williams proving why she is one of the best as Mitzi, Sammy's mother. Paul ...

What is evident throughout this film is that it is a story being told by a master of his craft. The final ten minutes of this film are an inspiring and breathtaking conclusion. The film is an incredibly intimate and personal exploration of the family dynamics that lead to Spielberg becoming a filmmaker.

Set in the 1960s, Sammy Fabelman (a well-cast Gabriel LaBelle) directs Super 8 train-crash movies in his bedroom and makes war films using his friends as actors ...

The family setup is an odd one. The move to California sends Sammy way down the pecking order at school but when he makes a movie of his class friends at the beach the camera seeks out powerful and unintended truths. In doing so he starts to connect with the power of the camera to move an audience.

The Fabelmans gives a sense of the fraught family dynamics and childhood experiences that shaped the director's talent for spectacle, terror and delight in ...

(Has there been a more Freudian moment from the filmmaker who gave us the hot shiksa mums of E.T., Close Encounters, and A.I.?) a TV executive sharing the backlot with Ford asks the wide-eyed Sammy. "How would you like to meet the world's greatest director?" (Is it any wonder he would go on to be so adept at terrifying audiences with sharks, dinosaurs and Nazis?) It's only the third – after A.I. Artificial Intelligence – become dioramas of memory, lit by Janusz Kaminski's prismatic cinematography and tinged with some distant, wistful melancholy. From early, era-defining hits Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind through to E.T. Where the director had once attributed his parents' divorce to his workaholic, absentee father – played by Dano with a mixture of frustration and insecurity beneath his placid facade – The Fabelmans suggests that it's his relationship with his mother that was both more rocky, and more vital. DeMille's circus epic The Greatest Show on Earth. At the same time, The Fabelmans is the first instance in which we've seen Spielberg reckon with his upbringing without the analogy of, say, extraterrestrial visitation or meddling poltergeists, a late-career director examining his life in a film that he quipped – in the wake of losing both his parents, in 2017 and 2020 – amounted to " Both memoir and Spielbergian myth, The Fabelmans opens on an almost primal image of the artist forged in light and sound. But we also come to understand how those instincts made him arguably American cinema's most significant popular artist of the late 20th century, and how – in reckoning with a very personal and turbulent family story – his movies came to be a mirror for the audience.

Screenwriter Tony Kushner collaborated with Steven Spielberg to tell a story that was deeply personal for both of them.

“It was important that I continue to fight for anything that I thought was really important, but there was a certain perimeter that I wouldn’t cross,” Kushner said. In 2005, screenwriter Tony Kushner was sitting with Steven Spielberg on the set of their first film together, “Munich.” It was the night shooting began, and Kushner casually asked Spielberg when he realized that he wanted to be a filmmaker. “It was clear that he wasn’t going to live a lot longer, and I think that made Steven think that it was possibly time to give this serious consideration.” When the COVID lockdown delayed the release of “West Side Story” for a year, Spielberg and Kushner began having more formal conversations over Zoom, during which the screenwriter collected the raw data for a film. “His mother had died about two years before we started filming ‘West Side Story,’ and his father was 102 and going into a pretty steep decline,” Kushner said. “I said ‘That’s an absolutely astonishing story, and someday you have to make a movie about it,'” Kushner said. [Craft Considerations](https://www.indiewire.com/t/craft-considerations/) is a video platform for filmmakers to discuss how they applied their craft to a recent work we believe is worthy of awards consideration.