The Fabelmans

Front Row at the Movies by Shirrel Rhoades

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By definition, film critics love movies. And thus we love movies about the love of movies.

Perhaps the best is “Cinema Paradiso.” Another is “Hugo.” And now we have a new entry, “The Fabelmans.”

This is the story of how Steven Spielberg became a filmmaker.

A personal story.

Spielberg says he planned the movie with his sister Anne back in 1999 – they called it “I’ll Be Home” – but never made it because he was worried how his parents might take it.

“My big fear,” he said, “is that my mom and dad won’t like it and will think it’s an insult and won’t share my loving yet critical point of view about what it was like to grow up with them.”

But being cooped up during the pandemic got him thinking, “If I had to make one movie I haven’t made yet, something that I really want to do on a very personally atomic level, what would that be? And there was only one story I really wanted to tell … My life with my mom and dad.”

He wanted to explore that transition – call it coming-of-age, if you like – when a young person begins to see his mom and dad as real people rather than as simply parents. So he teamed up with Tony Kushner (winner of a Pulitzer Prize for “Angels in America”) to co-write a new script.

He would direct it, of course.

The result is “The Fabelmans.” It’s currently playing in theaters.

Chronicling Spielberg’s life from age seven to eighteen, the film deals with “his family, with his parents, conundrums with his sisters, but primarily deals with his passion for movie-making.”

The story explores “young love, parental divorce, and early formative relationships … It’s a very beautiful, beautiful personal movie.”

“It’s so close to my life and so close to my family – I prefer to make films that are more analogous. But a literal story about my family will take a lot of courage,” Spielberg said as he worked on the movie.

In “The Fabelmans” Gabriel LaBelle takes on the role of 16-year-old Sammy Fabelman – the surrogate for young Steven Spielberg. Michelle Williams is cast as Sammy’s supportive mother; Paul Dano is the computer engineer father.

Additional cast members include Seth Rogen as the father’s best friend. Judd Hirsch is boy’s great uncle. Julia Butters, Keeley Karsten, and Sophia Kopera play Sammy’s younger sisters.

Gustavo Escobar, Nicolas Cantu, Cooper Dodson, Gabriel Bateman, Stephen Smith, and Lane Factor appear as members of Sammy’s Boy Scout troop who help him make films.

David Lynch makes a cameo as director John Ford. And Crystal, a capuchin monkey, plays Bennie.

For the scenes of Sammy filming his own 8mm movies, Steven Spielberg decided to have the character recreate the exact movies he made during his childhood, “I shot a lot of films when I was a kid on 8mm. It was unique in those days. Not a lot of people were going out and shooting in 8mm. It was physical; it was a craft.”

Screenwriter Tony Kushner came up with the name “Fabelman” as a nom du cinema for the Spielberg family. “Spielberg means play-mountain; ‘spieler’ is an actor in Yiddish, and a ‘spiel’ can be speech or can be a play,” he explains. “I wanted to have some of that meaning, and I’ve always liked the German word ‘fabel,’ which means fable. And because the movie is autobiographical for Steven but it isn’t an autobiography, it’s not a documentary, so there’s a fictional element as well. So I thought that ‘Fabelman’ was a nod to that.”

Spielberg dedicated the movie to his late parents, Arnold Spielberg and Leah Adler. However, neither of his parents will see the film. His mother passed away in 2017 while his father died in 2020.

“They were actually nagging me, ‘When are you going to tell that story about our family?’ And so this was something they were actually very enthusiastic about,” Spielberg says.

“The Fabelmans” was a movie he just had to do.

Email Shirrel: srhoades@aol.com