StevenSpielberg plunges into his own childhood with the twinkly-tragic memoir TheFabelmans.
Steven Spielberg has spent his entire career channeling the heartache of his childhood into movies. He’s never really hesitated to admit as much, confessing publicly to the autobiographical elements woven through sensitive sensations like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Catch Me If You Can, and especially his now 40-year-old E.T.
Spanning from the early 1950s until the late 1960s, The Fabelmans dramatizes nearly the entire adolescence of its filmmaker — beginning, naturally, with what may be his first memory of going to the movies, a formative viewing of The Greatest Show on Earth. Terrified by the film’s images of a train violently derailing, young Sammy eventually recreates the scene with his own model locomotive, wrecking it to purge his lingering fear.
So much of The Fabelmans seems drawn from direct memories, Spielberg lingering on details too specific to be invented. The crinkle of a paper tablecloth, the gentle pulse on the neck of Sammy’s dying grandmother, the tough-love wisdom of Sammy’s uncle — these are moments out of time, immortalized in the glow of Janusz Kamiński’s typically heavenly cinematography.
The Fabelmans is touching, but it isn’t the grand heartbreaker you might want or expect. At times, it feels about as immersive as a snow globe. Spielberg has encased his memories in such a thick coating of reverence, like the mosquito trapped in amber in Jurassic Park, that we can’t exactly step inside them, only gawk in wonder from a distance. The irony is that moving closer to these real events might somehow have decreased our proximity to them.
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