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The Fabelmans Movie Review

The Fabelmans is a 2022 coming-of-age drama film directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Gabriel LaBelle, Michelle Williams and Paul Dano. It is one of the director’s worst movies.

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“You do what your heart says you have to.

‘Cause you don’t owe anyone your life. Not even me“

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Growing up in post-World War II era Arizona, young Sammy Fabelman aspires to become a filmmaker as he reaches adolescence, but soon discovers a shattering family secret and explores how the power of films can help him see the truth. This is supposedly an autobiographical story for Spielberg, and I say supposedly because the dialogue in the second half is so ludicrously cheesy and unrealistic that it makes me question how accurate to real life this movie really is.

In a year where you have truly impressive films such as ‘The Banshees of Inisherin’ and ‘Tar’, it is concerning that The Fabelmans is among the best-regarded films critically and in terms of the awards so far. This represents everything that movies should not be right now, which is an overly nostalgic, dated and clichéd story that resembled something coming from the eighties much more so than 2022.

The storytelling is so pedestrian and so predictable with very few interesting sequences to be found. There is only one scene that impressed me and that has to be the ending. David Lynch plays John Ford and he is a scene-stealer. This entire sequence was very well written and quite funny with hilarious dialogue. It elevated the movie, but it came way too late in the game unfortunately.

Other than that, the movie isn’t really solely about Spielberg’s passion for film. Yes, that is present, but nowhere near the capacity that you would think judging by the reviews. In fact, the film deals with his family and school life almost as much or maybe even more extensively than his filmmaking pursuits. Whatever the case is, none of these elements were remarkable in any shape or form.

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The worst offender has to be the teenage sections. I am not going to say that the director did not experience anti-Semitism of course, but what I am going to criticize is the dialogue here, which surely is not grounded in any reality. It contains lines such as “I hate Jews” and “Apologize for killing our lord”. Nobody in real life talks like that and at least to me this felt like the cheesiest, laziest part of the movie that was clearly meant to appeal to all those nostalgia-laden people who would be thrilled with anything honoring 80s films in any capacity. But for me this was the moment when the movie went downhill and when there was no saving it.

But even the rest of it is uninspired. The family drama fared best, but because the acting is far from great and because the parents weren’t as well developed as I would have hoped, even these moments weren’t as emotionally effective as the director clearly intended them to be. The famous rift that he had with his father is well explored, but the film felt standard in this entire story as we’ve all seen these plot beats before, and let’s face it, none of it is as relatable as he thinks it is as the movie clearly depicted that he was privileged from the start.

And this brings me to my next point – the narcissism on display here is truly disconcerting. Nowhere is that more the case than in the filmmaking sections of the movie where he portrays himself as a wunderkind basically and as somebody who managed to impress everybody even at a young age. Couple that with the fact that he was a seemingly perfect kid and we do not see any flaws at all, and you’ve got one ridiculously self-congratulatory piece that is frustratingly biased. And even he was all of those things, this doesn’t change the fact that you just shouldn’t depict yourself in this manner. It reeks of narcissism and the fact that it’s not being criticized in the majority of reviews just goes to show how Americans teach themselves that this behavior is somehow cool and expected of everybody when in reality it is anything but.

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Even the acting in The Fabelmans is unremarkable. Michelle Williams is almost always terrific, but in the case of Mitzi, she felt over-the-top and honestly unrealistic at times. Perhaps this is how his mother actually talked and behaved, but something about her performance felt fake to me and this is by far one of her weakest performances so far. Paul Dano fared even worse. He was not believable in this role whatsoever. I would have personally gone with an older, rougher actor as Dano never commanded any of his scenes unfortunately.

Gabrielle LaBelle was pretty good, but he was also far from great and a more memorable performance and more complex characterization could have made Sammy an actually good protagonist, which he clearly isn’t in this incarnation. Seth Rogen was very likable in a minor role while Jude Hirsch as this mysterious uncle who was in the movies once and gives Sammy some life lessons was ridiculously cartoony. This is the first moment when I realized that Spielberg clearly wasn’t making a grounded autobiographical drama, but some odd mixture of that with the cheesy 80s coming-of-age blockbuster and it just did not work.

The Fabelmans is technically accomplished, I will give it that. It is so well shot by Janusz Kaminski, solidly scored and featuring excellent costume and production design throughout. The period detail on display here was tremendous and it made the movie lived-in and quite charming. These technicalities elevated the script significantly. The pacing is also pretty strong as I did not feel its two and a half hours. It was engaging and never boring, but too often I was interested in criticizing what I was seeing on the screen than actually enjoying it.

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