Nostalgia for the Light
The Fabelmans is Steven Spielberg's best movie in years
The Fabelman begins with a boy about to see his first movie and ends with that same boy, now a young man, well on his way to making movies of his own. In the intervening dozen-odd years, he kisses a girl for the first time, gets bullied, moves across the country, observes (and occasionally participates in) the ups and down of his parents’ marriage, and graduates from high school — which is to say that he comes of age as so many others have before him. With one key difference: None of Sam Fabelman’s silver-screen predecessors were based on Steven Spielberg, this film’s co-writer/director, whose own upbringing inspired the story.
Gabriel LaBelle and Mateo Zoryon Francis-DeFord play Sam, but the movie belongs to Michelle Williams. She plays his mother Mitzi, a gifted pianist and artist at heart who loves her children dearly but can’t help feeling stifled and occasionally even trapped by her circumstances. It’s a characteristically powerful performance from Williams, and one that’s clearly being positioned to win the actress her long-overdue Academy Award (she should have won for Manchester by the Sea); one thing it isn’t is a lead performance, however, and the decision to campaign it as such will prove either brilliant or foolhardy come Oscar night. (I suspect the latter — have they seen Cate Blanchett in TÁR?)
The Fabelmans combines two genres for which I have little love — movies about the power of movies and thinly veiled autobiographies — and combines them into something more affecting than I’ve come to expect. In hindsight that isn’t especially surprising, given that it’s Spielberg, but it is nice to finally receive a love letter to cinema that I didn’t want to return to sender.