There are few names as synonymous with the very definition of cinema like that of Steven Spielberg, who has become an institution unto himself, having spent over half a century crafting many wonderful films over a wide range of genres, often being at the forefront of pioneering new ways of filmmaking. He is also well-regarded as one of the most popular contemporary storytellers, his entire career being defined by his very simple intention of just telling stories that he feels are worth the audience’s time. There isn’t any need to emphasize his importance in cinema, since even those that are cynical of much of his work will readily admit to his importance, at least in terms of creating mainstream productions that have placed him at the heart of every discussion around the magic of film, to which he has seemingly devoted his entire life. I’ve previously spoken about how one of the more recent inevitabilities when it comes to cinema is that most established directors will make something that is very personal to them, usually taking the form of semi-autobiographical accounts of their formative years, whether it focuses on their childhood or the journey they took to become artists. Spielberg is one of the more recent directors to follow this trend, working with Tony Kushner to construct The Fabelmans, a decade-spanning examination of his journey towards becoming arguably the most famous director of his generation, focusing specifically on his early childhood up to the precipice of his adult years, in which he experienced a number of challenges that changed the way he viewed the world. A film that has been celebrated for its earnest humour and genuine heartfulness, it is not difficult to understand why The Fabelmans has been so appreciated by a wide number of viewers – but there is something missing that prevents it from being as effective as it intended to be, with many of Spielberg’s more polarizing traits being foundational to this story, which in turns creates a situation where we are kept at a distance, which is not a quality that a film aiming to be an accessible, endearing experience should ever possess, let alone have as its primary narrative and conceptual trait.

From the start, it’s important to note that The Fabelmans is not an incompetently made film – Spielberg is a master of his craft, and regardless of the story, his works are rarely ever anything less than polished and well-made. However, this is actually the reason this particular film feels so distant – it is overly engineered to a fault, every intricate detail having some deep justification that sometimes causes the film to feel slightly too professional, almost as if Spielberg is not actually willing to give us any direct insights into his own life (which doesn’t help when you realize that it was Kushner that was responsible for most of the writing, meaning that he was essentially tasked with putting together an account of someone else’s childhood, a risky choice), but rather skirt around the edges of a childhood that resembles his own experiences, without actually having much to say about it. Spielberg’s status as the consummate professional has actually proven to be his downfall in numerous instances, since it can make his films feel overly manufactured, as if they are being made along the lines of consumer request and expectation, rather than actually being artistically resonant. This is a passable quirk when it comes to some of his more ambitious works in the science fiction and historical genres, since those are often required to follow a formula to be successful (and where the director’s name alone acts as a certification of quality), but it can feel quite soulless when we are dealing with a film that looks at the director’s own childhood, which is one instance where one would argue a more loosely-structured, meaningful approach that didn’t depend on high-concept storytelling would have been preferable. At this point, one has to wonder whether the idea of intimate, small-scale filmmaking is a foreign concept to Spielberg or something that he simply doesn’t regard as worthwhile, perhaps growing too enormously ambitious to make something more simple – so it is hardly a surprise that some of his best recent films have been those that do aim to deliver on a more straightforward premise, making the unneeded density of The Fabelmans all the more inexplicable.

There are many touching moments in The Fabelmans, and any indication here that this is a bad film is misguided, since this is a work that is average at worst, which is often the case for some of Spielberg’s more middling films. The best parts of the film come in the moments where he is reflecting on his upbringing in a way that actually feels meaningful – it is defined almost entirely as a coming-of-age story, drawing inspiration from a long lineage of similar examinations of the early lives of some cherished creative minds, all centring on the foundation laid by James Joyce in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which uses the structure of a narrative to tell what is clearly a thinly-veiled exploration of someone’s early life, whether it be their entire journey or just a few chapters in their formative years. In theory, The Fabelmans should be a near-perfect film, since Spielberg not only has mastered his craft in a way that even his most passionate detractors will acknowledge, but it is unlikely that anyone can fumble a story about their own childhood, especially not someone who has been working for decades in the industry. The problem here is that the film has a slight crisis of identity – it wants to explore Spielberg’s early life, with the character of Sammy Fabelman acting as the director’s surrogate in the film, but it filters it all through the perspective of his domestic life, which is not an inherently poor choice at all (in fact, it is a good approach), but rather becomes slightly too heavy-handed in drawing attention to other characters within the dynamic – some members of the family persist throughout the film, while others appear in a scene or two and then are entirely excised from the narrative, serving a limited function, which can be jarring to those expecting more from certain scenes. The intention is clear – show the trials and tribulations of an ordinary family that some may consider dysfunctional, and contrast this with the young protagonist’s journey to self-realization as an artist – but it just becomes too fragmented to ever actually stick the landing in any substantial way. It is a very episodic film, and it struggles to flow in a fluid way, often being quite jagged and feeling too dependent on the brief vignettes into the life of this family, but which don’t quite work together in a cohesive manner, which is only detrimental to the development of the protagonist, who ultimately becomes the least-developed character, an odd choice for a film so intent on being a touching, coming-of-age parable.

Perhaps the most open-minded way to view this aspect of The Fabelmans is as if Spielberg was recreating the home movies he shot when he was a teenager – the film looks and feels like it was plucked directly from the 1960s, and it is clear that it was intending to convey this sense of nostalgia for a bygone era, coupled with the very clear fascination around the development of the director into someone who not only adores cinema, but found it becoming his entire raison d’etre, his life’s purpose and the only future he saw for himself. The term “love letter to cinema” has become overused to the point of becoming a cliche, but it certainly is applicable with a film like this, which is working as hard as it possibly can to balance both sides of the narrative, with only partially successful results. Spielberg has adored cinema from a young age, and the film is quite touching in those moments where we gradually see the young protagonist become more enamoured with the art form, transitioning into a director himself, and ultimately seeing the prospect of making films as his only ambition, which we obviously know resulted in a very successful and lucrative career, which removes the suspense of determining whether the character is going to succeed or not, and instead allows us to focus on his growing admiration for the moving picture. It’s often quite inspiring in how it portrays the steadily rising passion felt by the main character as he realizes the world that awaits him behind the silver screen, and we almost wish the film had shifted more attention to these aspects, since they’re by far the most interesting components of the film. It is understandable why The Fabelmans took the approach of using Spielberg’s recollections of his family as the framing device for the film, showing it as the impetus for his growth into a filmmaker, but it does often feel like a more meaningful approach would have been to emphasize the artistic aspects as well – it seems almost bizarre that a film like this would have its best scenes at the very end, which seems less like a satisfying conclusion, and more like the more effective moments were tossed towards the back of the film, leaving far too much blank space that the film struggles to fill with meaningful content.

The Fabelmans positions itself as a character-based film, an examination of the lives of a family and various other peripheral characters that weave their way into their lives, each one leaving an impression. The ensemble of the film is quite unstable – some performances are astonishing, while others aren’t all that effective, which creates a sense of jagged inconsistency that ultimately becomes something of a problem throughout the film. Primarily, the biggest issue here is that The Fabelmans is one of the rare instances where nearly all of the great work is done by the supporting cast, while those in the more central roles are not nearly as effective as we were led to believe. The film’s de facto lead is Gabriel LaBelle, a newcomer who had the unenviable task of playing the protagonist in his teenage and early adult years – and while this is undeniably the opportunity of a lifetime that would have been a great introduction for any promising young actor, LaBelle seems to be struggling. He has a great sense of expressivity (which is likely the reason he was cast), but these are only effective in those moments where he is in quiet contemplation, where his emotions are reflected in his eyes and on his face, rather than verbally. In both the comedic and more dramatic moments, he falters and it feels disingenuous, as if we can see the cogs moving in his mind. The same can be said for Michelle Williams, who has a similar problem with handling the material, but doesn’t have the benefit of the excuse of being a newcomer. Her performance as Mitzi Fabelman is truly bewildering – she is constructed as some eccentric pixie of a woman, someone who possessed an enormous joie de vivre, which led to erratic behaviour that became a concern for the rest of her family. Williams struggles to command the screen, and takes a potentially brilliant and effective character and relies too heavily on her peculiarities that they become grating and often an annoyance to an otherwise sedate film. The only major performances that seem to be tempered perfectly are those given by Paul Dano, whose heartbreaking portrayal of the family’s patriarch is far and away the best in the film, and Seth Rogen, who proves that he can handle more dramatic fare. The brief appearances by veterans David Lynch (who steals every moment he is on screen, and at least helps the film end on a high note) and Judd Hirsch prove that there were still exceptional performances embedded in the film – but with less than 10 minutes combined screentime shared between them, it’s clear their characters were nothing more than brief deviations in an otherwise meandering film, one that would have benefitted from a more concise approach to portraying its characters.

Emotion is an important aspect of any work of art, and a good film will make sure to calibrate them to reflect an experience – we’ve seen entire genres built out of the desire to make audiences feel something valuable. However, the moment a film loses its composure and begins to fall apart is when it uses emotion as a crutch for the story, since this is often indicative of an impoverished storyline or mediocre writing, which is unfortunately the most significant problem with The Fabelmans, serving to be the aspect that is most detrimental to the impact made by this film. Of the many critiques that Spielberg receives, one of the most common is that he often struggles to temper the emotions that populate his films – they can often be overly sentimental, to the point where they can feel sickly sweet, and his constant desire to capture the sense of childlike wonder has backfired just as many times as it has succeeded, even in some of his greatest works. For those who enjoy the sentimentality that has come to be associated with Spielberg, The Fabelmans is likely going to be just as effective and moving – but for viewers that yearn for something more challenging and complex, this film simply struggles to reach any point where it feels all that convincing, with the exception of a few moments. The duo of Spielberg and Kushner feels like it should work well in theory (their partnerships on Lincoln and West Side Story yielded positive results – although one could attribute this to them working from pre-existing material, rather than constructing an entirely original screenplay, which was the case here), but they both seem to be far too reliant on the sentimental aspects of the story, to the point where it becomes overly saccharine and often quite hackneyed, with the big moments ringing as inauthentic, which is unlikely to have been the intention at all. We find the most profound and truthful emotions coming when the film isn’t putting the most laborious effort into forcing us to confront major ideas, but rather hidden in those intimate glances or minuscule details that would be otherwise lost in any other scenario, but which possess a striking beauty that I wish the film managed to explore more thoroughly, rather than shifting to another moment of intense emotion that feels almost misplaced in some instances throughout the film.

In theory, The Fabelmans should have been a resounding success – it’s arguably the most famous director of his generation telling the story of his journey to becoming an artist, starting with his first-ever visit to the cinema, and ending with his entry into the industry that beguiled him from a young age. It has an iron-clad premise on paper that one could imagine would take a lot of work to be fully botched – and even with my major hesitations, it’s difficult to proclaim it as a failure, with a more appropriate perspective being that it is a film that exists as a bundle of missed opportunities, which at least implies that there was at least some degree of complexity in how Spielberg was intending to put this film together. It doesn’t disqualify it from having several exceptional moments, and you can tell that it was constructed by someone who sincerely believed in the power of cinema and its ability to open one’s eyes to broader aspects of our world. It just feels slightly cobbled together in a way that doesn’t come across as particularly convincing in some moments, and the lack of a truly charismatic lead, and the over-dependency on far too many themes, makes the film slightly underwhelming, and its difficult to not be disappointed with the final product, since there is something so deeply compelling about the idea of a filmmaker of as impossibly high a stature as Spielberg waxing poetic on his past, reflecting on his journey to become a filmmaker – this film contains the scenes that most of us didn’t know about, the missing early chapters to which previous biographers didn’t have any access – and the fact that it exists is already intriguing enough as it is, meaning that all that was needed was a careful control of emotion and enough effort to draw us into this world. In all honesty, it never feels like The Fabelmans achieves that, at least not in any way significant enough to overcome some of its tonal and narrative shortcomings, which prove to be massively disappointing in the overall construction of the film. It has its moments of poignancy, and its certainly not a bad film – but considering the calibre of talent involved on both sides of the camera, and the potential that lingered beneath the surface of the film, it’s an unwelcome surprise to discover that The Fabelmans is one of the more underwhelming films of the year, and one that could have been so much better with the right approach and attention to detail, rather than this jagged, overlong and often unexpectedly melodramatic account of a story that deserved slightly more work to achieve greatness.